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Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day 2015

(Yad Vashem - The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority) Holocaust Remembrance Day begins on Wednesday evening. Each year in Israel, six torches are lit at the central memorial ceremony at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem in memory of the six million Jews who were murdered. These are the torchlighters: Shela Altaraz was born in 1934 in Stip, Macedonia. Most of her family were murdered at Treblinka, while she survived being in a concentration camp. Shela arrived in Israel in 1949. After serving as a medic in the army, she came to Jerusalem and began working as a nurse. Avraham Harshalom was born in 1925 in an area of Poland that is today Belarus. His parents, brother, and grandmother were murdered at Birkenau, while he survived in Auschwitz and other camps. In March 1949, Avraham arrived in Israel, and served in the Israel Air Force during the War of Independence. Eggi Lewysohn was born in 1924 in Breslau, Germany. In December 1938, after the Kristallnacht pogrom, Eggi joined a Youth Aliya group that was sent first to Denmark, where the group members were dispersed to different farms. In October 1943, the entire group was caught by the Germans and deported to Terezin. He arrived in Israel in 1951. Ephraim Reichenberg was born in 1927 in Hungary. In July 1944 his family was deported to Auschwitz. He was told to say that he and his brother were twins, so that they would be taken for experimentation and not to the gas chambers. The boys were taken to Dr. Mengele's laboratories for medical experiments on their vocal chords. Ephraim reached Israel in 1948 and served in the Hagana and Palmach. In 1967, he lost his voice due to complications in the wake of Mengele's experiments. In 1984, he regained the ability to speak with the aid of a device manufactured in Germany. Dov Shimoni was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1919. In 1944, after Germany occupied Hungary, thousands of Jews in Budapest, including Dov's family, were imprisoned in a number of buildings throughout the city. Dov managed to transfer his family to a house whose Jewish tenants had been taken away, and upon which a sign hung declaring it "Jew-free." Thus his family survived. In 1949, Dov immigrated to Israel with his family and worked as a manager at hospitals and health care organizations. Sara Weinstein was born in 1935 in an area of Poland that is today Ukraine. In 1942 her family escaped the Stepan ghetto on the eve of its liquidation and fled to the house of a friend. A few weeks later, Ukrainian villagers broke into the friend's home and murdered the people they found there including the friend, his wife, and Sara's mother. Sara was wounded. She survived in the forest with her father, brother and two sisters. In 1944, after the Red Army liberated the region, Sara's father was murdered by local Ukrainian villagers. Sara came to Israel in 1947.
2015-04-15 00:00:00
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