Aron Bell, who had been a teenage member of a daring brigade of Jewish partisans that during WWII attacked German troops in Belorussia and rescued some 1,200 Jews from near-certain death, died on Sept. 22 at his home in Palm Beach, FL. He was 98.

The Bielski partisans, run by three of Mr. Bell’s older brothers, formed after the arrest and murder of the siblings’ parents in December 1941. On its website, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington calls the Bielski partisans “one of the most significant Jewish resistance efforts against Nazi Germany during World War II.”

For Mr. Bell, who changed his name from Bielski when he arrived in the U.S., the perilous life he lived hiding in the vast Nalibok Forest meant freedom from living in a ghetto or from being imprisoned in a concentration camp. He carried a rifle, but his brothers would not let him fight on the front lines. Instead, he served as a scout finding sources of food and as a courier who carried warnings about German plans to Jews living in the nearby Novogrudok ghetto.

According to The New York Times, Mr. Bell returned several times to Belarus, where he visited the forest in which a plaque memorializes his parents and the many others buried there in a mass grave. In 2019, he was invited to the unveiling of a monument to Jewish resistance in Moscow, where he embraced President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.