He worked as a teacher, founding a school, and as a dramatist in both Yiddish and Hebrew, starting a theatre group which toured Poland and Lithuania.

He was deported to a detention camp in Vittel, France, where the Nazis held American and British citizens and nationals of other Allied and neutral countries, for possible later prisoner exchange.

In late April 1944, Itzhak Katzenelson and his son Zvi were sent on a transport to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where they were murdered on 1 May 1944.

The Ghetto Fighters' House Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum in Israel, is named in his memory.

"The Song of the Murdered Jewish People" has been translated into numerous languages and published as an individual volume.