resident of the society was Israel Greenblatt and the secretary was Levy Haber. Among the members were the following: Joseph Margoshes, Louis Haber, Michael Halver, Otto (or Obadiah) Panzer and his younger brother Choone, Bezalel Shell, Shayeh Herbst, Abraham Shticker, Simche Baer, Abraham Zlatkes, Moishe Fischer and his youngster Max, Pincus Fischer and his brother Abraham.
At the first meetings were held in private homes and business places. Later they were held in the then well-known wine and mead tavern of Kalman Rosenbluth on Attorney Street on the lower East Side of New York.
The meetings were always conducted on a high level. The members discussed subjects of current importance and engaged in a play of words of Biblical interest. In this dialogue Aaron Hafner would most of the time propound the subject and the first to answer was Obadiah Panzer. On other occasions, Panzer would put the questions and Hafner would give the answer. Chaim Hafner's society was at the time the only one of its kind in the Galician quarters in New York.
Obadiah Panzer was by trade a printer, a vocation which he learned from Abraham Fruchter in his printing shop in Boiberke. This was one of several trades which were considered of a higher social standing in those days. Watchmaking was another trade which in those days was held in high regard. As soon as h knew the printing trade, Panzer left for a larger city in Galicia, but several weeks before Purim in 1897, he returned to Boiberke and organized a dozen youngsters into Purim players. They performed the Biblical play Joseph and His Brethren. He took the role of Joseph and his younger brother took the role of Benjamin. On Purim eve they went from house to house of our town and performed to the delight of old and young. We youngsters would follow them for hours on end.
A year later, in 1918, while the cannons of war were still belching flame, our town folks in New York, members of the Progressive Boiberker Young Men's and members of the Boiberker Sick and Benevolent Society, as well as two or three members of the Boiberker Women's Aid Society, and several none affiliated individuals, gathered to organize the Boiberker Relief Committee in New York.
Some months after the armistice, one of our Boiberker, my good friend Julius Engelberg, went to Europe on a business trip and also paid a visit to Boiberke. Upon his return he reported that it was urgent to send help, as the need is great. We sent some money and undertook in addition to raise $5000. This money was handed to two Boiberker, Samuel Haber and Benjamin Helfer, who were to visit Boiberke. On their stop in Vienna, they met a fellow Boiberker Hersh Gross. He informed them that there was a large group of Boiberker halutzim in Vienna on their way to Palestine. They had ship tickets from Trieste to Palestine but they were lacking the rail fare from Vienna to Trieste. Gross urged that they take off some money from the $5000 which they carried with them for Relief in Boiberke and assist these young halutzim, men and women, to reach Palestine where they could be useful in the rebuilding the Jewish National homeland.
And indeed, Palestine did gain immeasurably. In later years, we learned how wise had been the decision to assist the first large group of Boiberker halutzim.
Of the original large group, Dr. Michael Zohari, became a full professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a member of the Israel Acadmy; Feivel or Dr. Shrage Schleder-Kallay became the inspector of the State of Israel School System; Abraham Zuch was for 38 years librarian at the Tel Aviv Municipal Library; Lonick, or Arieh Alweil, became an outstanding artist and art teacher in the Herzliah Gymnasium in Tel-Aviv; Chaim Schein-Zohari is already on pension from the government public school system; Moshe Wind, who came several months before the first large group, was a supervisor of building the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, and for the past few years the supervisor of building the Yad Vashem Memorial Institute in Jerusalem.
Mordechai Galler, the son of the late Rav 