Early Life
Yaakov Banai (Tunkel) was born on March 20, 1920 in Baranovichi, Poland. He was the third child of four children. His father was Shraga (Feivel) Tunkel and his mother Brakha née Sokolovsky. The family owned a barber shop and his father served as the head of the town's volunteer fire department. His father was the first cousin of Yosef Tunkel, the Yiddish humorist known as Der Tunkeler. Both of his parents and two of his siblings perished in the Holocaust.
As a youth, Banai was a member of Betar, the Revisionist Zionist youth movement and was a founding member of the Irgun in Poland and leader of the Eastern Poland branch of the party. He graduated from the state Gymnasium high school in 1938 and studied law for one year at Vilnius University (1939–1940). In 1941, following the Soviet invasion and shortly before the German invasion of Lithuania, Banai obtained a Sugihara visa and made his way to Israel via Turkey with other members of the Betar.
Read more about this topic: Yaakov Banai
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“In early times, before the floods swept across the world, there was life, albeit odd, as one can see from the fossils of mammoth bones, and there was the regime of Prince Metternich.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“Each dream finds at last its form; there is a drink for every thirst, and love for every heart. And there is no better way to spend your life than in the unceasing preoccupation of an idea—of an ideal.”
—Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)