Dovid Leitner

David Leitner was born in Santiago de Chile in 1948, and the second of five brothers. My parents lived in Europe before the War and become engaged shortly before the outbreak of WW2. My father miraculously escaped from Czechoslovakia to Poland and arrived in London in April 1939, where he worked throughout the war in relief operations to help other Jewish people in Europe. My mother escaped two days after Kristallnacht with her mother and sisters to Santiago de Chile. After the war my father travelled to Chile, got married and later moved back to England in 1955, owing to the lack of Jewish education for his children.

I was educated in Manchester, attended Grammar School and took a degree at Manchester, then graduated in Manchester Yeshiva and Ponevez in Israel. After my marriage in 1972, a became a teacher in the local Jewish school.