act, the only one open to them. Since the vote total which Dr. Zipper received in Boiberke was the largest ever received there, it reflected badly on the Commissioner's competence in controling his own political domain.
In the summer of 1914, I again visited the town of my birth. No sooner was I ready for my return to the United States, when the war broke out. Although I was a citizen of the United States, I found myself pinned down like a butterfly on a collectors board, unable to take one step that would lead me closer to securety. With the Russian army drawing nearer to Boiberke every day the future looked grim indeed.
Remaining in Boiberke all through the first month of the war, I saw hundreds of wagons with Jewish families and some of their belongings passing through or rather, fleeing through the town on their way to Bohemia, Hungary, or Upper Austria including Vienna. They had ample reason for their flight as the Russians, under the command of the Czar's Uncle, Nicholas Nicholewitch, were arresting Jews right and left. Soon most of the Jewish inhabitans of Boiberke had fled. Only at the last moment before the Russian army entered Boiberke, did I receive permission to leave the town. When I reached the United States, I began to realize that the Jews in the United States would be called on to help them to rebuild the Jewish institutions and Jewish life which the Russians destroyed.
Several months before the United States entered War War I in April, 1917, a group of Boiberker Landsleit of the Maskilim (enlightened men) type, met to discuss the best method of honoring one of the most renowned intellectuals of Boiberke, Chaim Aaron Hafner, a Yiddish as well as a Hebrew scholar. At the suggestion of his closest friend, Joseph Margoshes, who at the time occupied a prominent position in the field of Yiddish journalism, it was decided that a fitting tribute to Hafner would be to organize a society in his name to consist of intellectual landsleit, who originated from Boiberke and other places in Galicia.
The first president 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