During these terrible days, media outlets around the world reported on the heroic defense of Kibbutz Nir-Am. The residents of this settlement were among the first to encounter Hamas militants who invaded Israeli territory on October 7, 2023. Thanks to the bravery of the residents, led by a 25-year-old woman named Inbal Rabin-Liberman, none of the attacking terrorists managed to enter the kibbutz.
Among the founders of Kibbutz Nir-Am were people who raised worthy successors. Having been under fire from Gaza for many years, former partisans and underground fighters prepared their children and grandchildren to defend their homeland. One such person was Zina Pripas, who, along with her husband, Yakov Lerner, became one of the founders of Kibbutz Nir-Am. Back in 1948, she survived the bombing of the kibbutz, and before that – long months of work in the Zionist underground in the Soviet Union. In memory of this heroic woman and in honor of her brave descendants, we repeat our story.
In a memorandum about the investigation and liquidation of the Zionist underground in the Ukrainian SSR, sent in March 1948 to the Minister of State Security of the USSR, Abakumov, and the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Khrushchev, there was mention of the implementation of the intelligence case "Tramplin" by the security officers.
The security officers reported on their successes in Chernivtsi and Chisinau, where they discovered and eliminated an illegal center for transferring Zionists from the USSR to Romania. Everything would have been fine if not for one unfortunate detail: the Soviet special services failed to catch one of the creators of the underground, 29-year-old Zina Pripas. This young woman, who had led the Zionist youth organization "Gordonia" before the war, successfully hid from the MGB for several years and managed to escape from Soviet intelligence to Israel. Here is her story.
Zina Pripas was born on October 5, 1919, to Hava Gaisiner and Moshe Pripas in the Jewish agricultural colony of Kapresti, near the Moldovan town of Soroki. Besides Zina, the family had two sons, Immanuel and Naaman (Naum), and an older daughter, Shulamit. Around Kapresti were many Moldovan villages, from which peasants would bring goods for sale.
Among them was water, which was transported in barrels on horses and sold by the bucket, as in the Jewish colony itself all the water was "salty," mineralized – suitable only for cleaning and washing. Zina's parents lived comfortably, although they did not amass great wealth. However, working as an accountant, Moshe Pripas managed to obtain for the family an unprecedented wonder in Kapresti – a generator that produced electricity for the house.
The Gaisiner and Pripas families were known to everyone in Kapresti. Not only as genuine Jews, but also as fanatical Zionists who hoped for the revival of an independent Jewish state in Palestine. Without Zina's uncles, the branch of the settlement organization Hechalutz and the kibbutz-hachshara, where people were prepared for agricultural work in Eretz-Israel in the early 1920s, would hardly have appeared in Kapresti.
From early childhood, Zina Pripas was immersed in an atmosphere of love for the Jewish people and their homeland. Grandfather Yosef, grandmother Malka, and her parents taught the children Hebrew, which became the family's spoken language. Having been introduced to lashon kodesh from a very young age, Zina was nevertheless taught to highly value the culture of neighboring peoples. The Pripas family library contained books in Hebrew, Russian, Romanian, and Yiddish.
In the morning, the girl studied at the Romanian state school as required by law, and then attended classes at the "reformist" Talmud Torah. This was a private educational institution for which Zina's parents paid money. From the age of six, children were taught Hebrew, and Zina's teacher was Mordechai (Mordkhe) Goldenberg, a writer, journalist, and public figure well-known in Bessarabia, who instilled in children a love for the Land of Israel.
Zina's uncle, Leizer Gaisiner, the creator of the Jewish loan and savings association in Kapresti, was the chairman of the city's Zionist organization. Another uncle, Shimon Gaisiner, was the "commissioner" of the Jewish National Fund, an organization founded at the fifth Zionist Congress in Basel in 1901 to purchase land in Palestine.
Emissaries from Palestine often stayed at Moshe and Hava's home. They described the distant country in the East so vividly to the children, telling of its several seas, mountains, and real desert, that the young generation of Pripases had no doubts: as soon as they grew up, they would immediately "ascend" to Eretz-Israel.
Zina Pripas began preparing for aliyah from an early age. On the holiday of Tu BiShvat, children gathered at grandfather Yosef's house. There they prepared special bags with fruits from Eretz-Israel, which they distributed throughout Kapresti. Upon receiving such a festive souvenir, people usually paid a contribution toward the revival of the Land of Israel. However, the children collected donations not only during holidays. They made sure that every home had a so-called "blue collection box," where anyone willing could drop coins for the noble cause – building their own country.
Another vivid childhood memory was Elul, the last month of the Jewish summer. Gathering with her peers early in the morning, Zina would lead a "kvutza" – a group of boys and girls – to the cemetery to ask for a coin or two from people visiting their departed loved ones during this month. Fundraising for building Palestine was also organized during Purim. Children dressed up in carnival costumes and put on performances for the town residents. Improvised tickets were sold for these shows, with proceeds going to the same "blue collection box" of the Jewish National Fund.
In high school, Zina became one of the founders of the Kapresti branch of the Zionist youth movement "Gordonia." The movement sought to involve youth from all layers of Jewish society and shape their character in the spirit of Aaron Gordon's teachings, the ideologist of the halutzian movement in Zionism, after whom it was named. Members of "Gordonia" advocated for agricultural development of Palestine and disapproved of the partisan division among Zionists in Eretz-Israel.
Zina went through all stages in the organization: from scout-"tzofim" to senior members-"bogrim." When the district conference of "Gordonia" was held in the city, Zina Pripas's large house, with six rooms and two large balconies, was transformed into a kind of dormitory for delegates. This was not surprising, as it served as the headquarters of Kapresti's "Gordonia."
The young people engaged in sports, founded a Jewish choir in Kapresti, motivated participants to read new books and give presentations. Among other things, the "Gordonists" mastered manual labor skills useful for pioneer-halutzim, often instead of receiving formal education in gymnasiums.
On the eve of World War II, many participants of "Gordonia" from Kapresti left for Palestine. In 1937, Zina's older sister, Shulamit, departed; even earlier, in 1935, her brother Immanuel repatriated, flatly refusing to go to university – all for the sake of manual labor in the Jewish country.
Zina also planned to leave, but her energy and organizational abilities were still needed locally. After Immanuel's departure, she became responsible for organizing "Gordonia" summer camps and courses for "madrichim" (youth leaders) in her district.
In 1938, Zina Pripas became one of the leaders of the Central Committee of the organization in Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. In 1940, at a Zionist congress, she was elected a member of the Bucharest Central Committee of "Gordonia."
Despite most family members being Zionists, some of them, like Herzl and Boma, sons of Uncle Leizer, believed in communism. Herzl, better known by the pseudonym Hertz Rivkin, was a very popular Jewish Soviet writer – and became the only Bessarabian writer repressed in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee case. He did not live to see liberation…
However, Zina Pripas did not share her cousins' enthusiasm for the communist system. After the Red Army occupied Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina in July 1940, and Kapresti became part of the newly created Kotyuzhansky district of the Moldavian SSR, the remaining members of the Pripas family began seriously considering departure. But under the conditions of the suddenly descended iron curtain, the plan proved unattainable.
Kapresti's "Gordonia" no longer gathered – it was dangerous. A significant portion of activists was already abroad, and Zina received orders to lay low. Soon, the trouble that came from the East was replaced by another calamity – the Nazi one.
After Germany and Romania, which joined it, attacked the USSR, the Pripas family evacuated. When the Romanian offensive began, Zina wasn't home. She had to escape alone, knowing nothing about the fate of her family and loved ones.
As she later learned, her parents and brother Naum had to leave Kapresti on foot, at the very last moment, and without luggage. Together with a crowd of refugees, the Pripas family walked to the rear under constant bombing by Nazi aircraft. Miraculously finding space in a freight car, her parents and brother traveled for a long time in terrible crowding and unsanitary conditions to the east of the USSR.
Zina's father died right on the journey. After burying her husband, Hava Pripas and Naum first ended up in North Ossetia, and then in the Bukhara region of the Uzbek SSR. Soon Naum was drafted into the Red Army and fought at the front against the Nazis.
In Central Asia, Zina also found herself. She didn't like to remember this terrible time. In Uzbekistan, working hard on a collective farm, refugees were essentially starving, with sugar beets often being the only available food. The only thought that helped the girl persevere was about how she would leave with her family for Palestine, where Immanuel and Shulamit were waiting, along with numerous relatives and friends from "Gordonia."
After spending the terrible war years in Uzbekistan, Zina Pripas, together with her mother and the demobilized Naum, moved from evacuation to Chernivtsi. There, the young woman found work as an accountant in one of the artels. Gradually, her old friends and comrades from the Zionist movement began to arrive in the city.
One day, returning from Chernivtsi, Zina found a letter in her mailbox. The return address was: Bucharest, Labyrinth Street, House No. 39. As it turned out, it was from her cousin Shuvia (familiarly called Shunya) Sklyar and old friend Moshe Zaltzman, who had left for Palestine before the war but had somehow returned to Bucharest.
The reason for their return from Eretz Israel soon became clear to Zina. Shunya and Moshe informed Zina Pripas through messengers that they were acting as emissaries of the Zionist center. Their primary task was to find trusted and brave people who could undertake the evacuation of the Jewish population to Palestine. Zina Pripas, who had proven herself through years of active work in "Gordonia," agreed to the proposal without hesitation and joined the underground work.
Among the members of the organization were Zina's old comrades: Moisey Yashikman, Meer Yassky, Moisey Bernstein, and some others. Well aware that even in territories recently annexed to the USSR, there were a huge number of MGB agents, the underground members decided to focus primarily on relatively legal possibilities in their activities. Despite the propaganda of the new socialist society, the Soviet Union was plagued by rampant bribery. Through bribed bureaucrats, Pripas and her comrades organized the option of Romanian citizenship using fake documents obtained from Bucharest. Through this clever method, Zionists born in Eastern Ukraine became "native residents" of Chernivtsi on paper, and Chernivtsi residents were allowed by current law to repatriate to Romania. In Bucharest, they were met by emissaries who directed the lucky ones to Palestine.
This method of transfer was not the only one: obtaining fake documents and arranging agreements with officials responsible for repatriation was not always possible. For such cases, there was a backup option – illegal border crossing; for these purposes, a network of transfer points was specially created.
In the spring of 1946, an emissary Zeylik Vaisman was sent from Bucharest to organize such a point and to help the Chernivtsi underground workers. With the help of former members of "Gordonia," as well as local guides and drivers, among whom was even the chauffeur of the USSR State Planning Commission's representative, the group illegally transported people to Romania. According to MGB data, from July to October 1946 alone, members of "Gordonia" managed to illegally evacuate about 30 Zionists to Romania.
On the Romanian side, in the southern Bukovinian city of Seret, the fugitives were picked up by a contact named Ertsik. He also passed money and further instructions to the underground workers through guides.
Meanwhile, the Chernivtsi UMGB was not idle. In December 1946, the security officers conducted the first arrests. Among those caught by MGB officers were Moisey Yashikman and Meer Yassky. Just a month and a half to two months before the wave of arrests began, Zeylik Vaisman left for Romania. Contact with the Bucharest center was temporarily lost. Zina Pripas, who remained in charge in Chernivtsi, was forced to observe maximum secrecy.
One of Zina's most important tasks was to rescue her arrested comrades. Money received from Bucharest was put to use. Those who remained free tried to bribe everyone: from lawyers to prosecutors and court officials. But given the political nature of the case, none of this, alas, worked out.
Maintaining contact with Shunya Sklyar, with whose parents she lived, as well as with the head of the Bucharest Central Committee of "Gordonia," Buma Golergant, Pripas began working on organizing a new transit and transfer center.
All this time, Zina risked being arrested by the MGB that was on her heels. In March 1947, a foreign MGB agent "Philip" was sent to Chernivtsi. Having obtained the contact details of Dvoira Belyanovich, who was responsible for the safe house, the officers decided to conduct an operational game. "Philip" played the role of that long-awaited contact from Bucharest who was supposedly going to organize new routes for transferring people across the border. The girl believed the provocateur and, suspecting nothing, revealed part of the underground network on both sides of the border.
Through this and other intelligence operations, as well as an MGB agent raid from Chernivtsi to Chisinau in December 1947, almost the entire leadership of the Chisinau "Gordonia" was identified.
Not satisfied with their successes, the Chekist leadership sent an operative from the 2nd Directorate of the MGB of the Ukrainian SSR to the Chernivtsi Regional UMGB. He immediately began extracting additional testimony from the arrested Belyanovich. As a result of his pressure, MGB officers managed to discover two safe houses and detain other underground participants – more than 15 people.
At the highest level, it was decided that Zina, before she was exposed, needed to be urgently rescued. On February 16, 1948, two peasants came to Zina Pripas's apartment with a note. The note, written in Moshe Zaltzman's handwriting, said: "These people will lead you to Gordon in Eretz-Israel." There was no time to think. Zina quickly changed clothes, packed a small bag, and set off. Shunya Sklyar's parents were also leaving the USSR with her.
They had to flee so hastily that the Sklyars didn't have time to warn their son Amnoim, who was at work at the time, and Joseph Sklyar left a significant amount of money in his savings account. Zina managed to briefly speak with her mother, but she refused to go without Naum.
Illegally crossing the USSR border was frightening, but the desire to reach Eretz-Israel proved stronger. The peasant guides promised Zina that after a few hours of travel, the fugitives would reach the Romanian town of Rădăuți. However, due to bad weather, they lost their way. Instead of a few hours, the journey to freedom took four days. Through snow, in terrible frost, dodging gusty winds, the people walked without water or food. Zina remembered that in her document bag she had a small package of sugar cubes that her mother had given her for the journey. Sugar cubes and melted snow were their food and drink.
Completely exhausted, the travelers finally reached Romania. In Bucharest, Zina met with her cousin and other comrades who provided her with fake documents. Before fleeing, the girl had promised her mother that she would definitely write to her from Bucharest. She did so, not realizing that her letter would be intercepted by Department "V" of the MGB, which was responsible for examining correspondence coming from abroad.
Now the authorities knew for certain that Zinaida Moiseyevna Pripas, an accountant at a local cooperative in Chernivtsi who had not shown up for work, was indeed the elusive head of the underground organization.
Colonel Stolbunsky, the representative of the USSR MGB in Bucharest, was urgently informed about Zina Pripas's whereabouts. The search for Zina began throughout Romania, which was flooded with Soviet troops. However, once again, the brave girl managed to escape capture and leave the country just days before her arrest.
First, she arrived in Hungary, where people spoke a completely incomprehensible language. In the local "achshara" (training farm) where the fugitive was given temporary shelter, there were many photographs. One of them was a photograph of Hannah Senesh, whom Zina, of course, had never heard. Later, she recalled that when she asked who was depicted there, people reacted with indignation. They calmed down only when they learned that the girl was from the USSR, where news from Eretz-Israel hardly ever reached.
After Hungary came Czechoslovakia and Germany. In Germany, Zina nearly had a mishap: becoming nervous while crossing the border, she completely forgot the name indicated in her fake documents. Pretending to have a severe cough, she turned away from the border guards and discreetly looked at the passport in her bag. She managed to successfully cross the border.
Zina Pripas arrived in Eretz-Israel by sea on the night of May 1, 1948. The ship was not allowed to enter the port of Haifa. They had to wait until evening, when a boat with several strong young men moored alongside and joyfully shouted to those gathered on deck: "Haifa is ours!" "When was Haifa not ours?" Zina wondered, but soon everything became clear: the British had left the city.
Two weeks after the girl's arrival, Israel declared its independence. Zina found herself in Kibbutz Hanita near Nahariya, which she had planned to reach even before the war. However, after a week, she changed her mind and went to Tel Aviv, where at a school on Dizengoff Street, she signed up to defend Kibbutz Nir-Am, founded by comrades from the Bessarabian "Gordonia" in 1943. The kibbutz was located right at the modern border with Gaza and was under siege at that time.
The girl flew south on a Dakota transport plane with an old friend. In Nir-Am, people lived in specially equipped bunkers; soon, fierce battles began for the kibbutz. During the very first artillery bombardment, two local girls were killed. However, after the war in Europe, Zina was no longer afraid of anything and endured the bombings with composure.
Zina Pripas recalled that once, while preparing food, she miraculously survived. A shell fell right at the entrance to the bunker, destroying everything around, but she didn't have even a scratch. There, under gunfire, she met her future husband, Yakov Lerner, whom she married on February 11, 1949. In 1950, Yakov and Zina had a daughter, Miri, and six years later, a son, Moshe.
For a long time, the frustrated MGB officers tried to uncover the transit center created by Zina Pripas. After her escape, her war veteran brother Naum, as well as Shuni Sklyar's brother who remained in the Soviet Union, Amnoim Sklyar, an electrical engineer at Kharkov's "Maslozhirtrest," immediately fell under MGB surveillance. The young men who came to study in Kharkov began to be spied on by their own friend from Chernivtsi, who was also an MGB agent with the codename "Cherna." The authorities only calmed down after Stalin's death.
In 1954, Zina's mother was allowed to leave for Israel. Naum was the last family member to immigrate, along with his wife. For most of her life in Israel, Zina worked in accounting. First at the regional council "Sha'ar HaNegev," and then, until very old age, at a cutlery factory in Nir-Am. For many years, she was involved in community work and participated in amateur performances. An extremely gifted person, very modest and kind-hearted, Zina Pripas had a strong character and an incredible ability to overcome difficulties.
When Zina was once asked how she and her friends survived several wars, evacuation, underground activities, and the challenges in the new country, she passionately replied: "We believed in our path, we all believed in it!" This brave woman passed away on March 30, 2008. We will always remember the Jewish heroine from Kapreshty.
09.03.2022
Bibliography and Sources:
Materials of reporting to the MGB of the USSR on the line of Jewish bourgeois nationalists and Zionists, 1950-1952. - SBU State Archive, Kiev, f.1, d.258.
Copies of special reports, memoranda and submissions, 7.07-15.07.1948, 7.07-15.07.1948. - SBU State Archive, Kiev, f.16, №639/655.
Control and observation case of the MGB of Chernivtsi region, 24.01.1952-25.05.1953. - SBU State Archive, Kiev, f.2, №2219.
Case №0631: copies of special reports, memoranda and submissions. Vol.9, 26.03-7.04.1948. - SBU State Archive, Kiev, f.16, d.0631.
Zinaida Pripas
1919 – 2008
