Belehai Mykhailo and Liubomyra

Mykhailo and Liubomyra Belehai and their daughter Volodymyra lived in the village of Zhuriv in Stanislav region (current Ivano-Frankivsk region). The Jewish family of Shreiier lived nearby. Eliezer Shreiier was the owner of a grocery store. Families made friends.

When the Nazis occupied the region in July 1941, the Jews were resettled to the town of Bukachivtsi, which is not far from the city of Rohatyn. The Belehai family knew nothing about the fate of their neighbors until the summer of 1943, when they unexpectedly saw Eliezer in their yard with two sons: 13-year-old Itskhak and 7-year-old Israel. They managed to escape from the Rohatyn ghetto on the eve of its liquidation – on June 6. Several mass shootings were carried out there as early as March-April 1943. On March 2, the occupiers executed typhus patients in the Jewish hospital along with doctors, and on April 24, during a shooting campaign, 40 Jewish children were killed. More than 3 thousand victims from the city of Rohatyn and its surroundings, including the settlements of Burshtyn, Khodoriv, and Bukachivtsi, are buried in mass graves to the north of the city center.

Eliezer asked Mykhailo for shelter. The Belehai family hesitated, but after a guest's horrifying story about the execution of his wife and father in September 1942, on Yom Kippur (Judgment Day), they allowed them to hide in the barn and took care of them until the end of the Nazi occupation.

Mykhailo and Liubomyra had to hide the presence of strangers in the house even from their 6-year-old daughter, because she was too young to keep secrets. At the end of the winter of 1944, the Ukrainian family's food supplies were almost exhausted, and it became more difficult to feed everyone every day. Then Eliezer's eldest son Itskhak decided to sometimes leave the shelter and steal food from the villagers. During one of these forays, the locals caught the boy, but he was lucky enough to escape and return to Belehai.

After that incident, Mykhailo had to arrange a more reliable shelter for the Jews – a hole disguised by garbage in the backyard. There the family of Shreiier spent the last months before the arrival of the Red Army in July 1944.

In 1949, Eliezer and his sons emigrated to Israel. After visiting Ukraine in 2003, Israel Shreiier found the daughter of his saviors, Volodymyra. In the same year, Yad Vashem recognized Mykhailo and Liubomyra Belehai as Righteous Among the Nations.