Bakshi, Shimon

The son of Yedida and Ezra-Isaac. He was born in 1921 in Bukhara. His observant family was one of the first families to be caught in that land for the Zionist idea, and they decided to realize it and immigrate to Eretz Yisrael. The family, with small children, suffered many hardships on its way to Israel. The border of the Soviet Union was closed and they were forced to make their way to neighboring Afghanistan and from there to Persia and the Arab countries. Shimon, who was then thirteen years old, went through all the hardships of wanderings and forged them for years to come. In 1936 the family arrived in Israel as tourists who had the right to stay there for three months and moved to Jerusalem. At the end of this period, the authorities began to search them in order to expel them from the country, and the family moved to Afula. There Simon’s youth passed through poverty and destitution. He graduated from the local school and went to work, like most boys of his own age from Bukharan immigrants, to help with the household agriculture. When the Second World War broke out and the young people of the Yishuv were called to volunteer for the Allied forces, Shimon enlisted and joined the ranks of the British army. He was sent to a transport unit, served in Libya and then transferred to Egypt. On 25 November 1945, he fell in the land of Egypt and was buried at the military cemetery in Muaskar, near Ismailia.