People

A self taught artist, Chaim held two exhibitions in Bialystock in 1936 and was described as “self taught and from a working family”. The exhibitions were of lino cuts of the streets during that year. In 1937, he married Jaffa Waynick and they lived at Jurowiecka 5. In 1939, Chaim was sent to fight on the Polish front against the Germans. Believing that Chaim had been killed, Jaffa returned to Kovno, and two years later remarried a man and had a son whom she named Chaim in remembrance. Chaim Chalef had survived and been captured by the Germans and sent to a prisoner of war camp in Lublin and then onto Auschwitz. In the camp, Chaim met another woman from Lublin whom he fell in love with and had a child by the name of Benjamin. Both Benjamin and his mother were killed. Using his art, he carved small wooden portraits for the SS guards to send back to their girlfriends in exchange for bread and favours, leading to his escape into the forests to join the partisan’s resistance army. He was part of Yudith Nowogrodzky’s group dispatch. He made his way back to Bialystock in 1942 to agitate the Jews of Bialystock to leave the ghetto and escape. 

In 1945 when the war ended, Chaim went to Lublin to check with the Red Cross records. He was miraculously reunited with his first wife Jaffa. They moved to a Displaced Person's camp in Rome where Chaim worked as an art teacher at the organization for Jewish Refugees for three years. In December 1945, Jaffa gave birth to their son Avraham Chalef (Abe Chalef 1945 – 2008). In 1948, after waiting three years for the correct papers, Jaffa, Chaim and Abe Chalef migrated to Melbourne, Australia where they lived in East Brunswick and then Elwood. In the early seventies, Chaim and Jaffa moved to Jerusalem to be closer to Abe who had moved to Israel. Chaim is buried in Jerusalem.