Efraim Franz Kritzler

The Central British Fund (CBF) put together a large team of people to look after the Boys.

The Boys were teenage and child-Holocaust survivors, who were brought to the UK after the war for rest and rehabilitation.

The British government offered 1,000 visas to bring the Boys to the UK but the caveat was that the CBF were responsible for their care and would pay all the expenses.

Kritzler was born in 1921. He arrived in the UK as a refugee from Vienna in 1939. He helped educate children who were brought to the UK from Germany on the Kindertransport as part of the Bachad movement.

Kritzler helped to look after all of the Boys in the care of Bachad, in particular part of the third group of the Boys brought to the UK in 1946 at the Millisle hostel in Northern Ireland.

Kritzler relocated to a smaller training farm in St. Asaph, in North Wales.

In 1949, Kritzler helped to found Kibbutz Lavi.

On Kristallnacht Efraim and his brother Zev had gone to their synagogue after it was firebombed by the Nazis. They took the wooden spindles off the Torah scrolls, folded the parchment and took them home. When the boys eventually went from London to Israel, the Torah scrolls were reconstituted at Kibbutz Lavi, where they are in use to this day.

Kritzler died at Kibbutz Lavi in 2015.