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Dafner, Abraham

Dafner, Abraham


Avraham, the son of Zerca Sara (nee Lipman) and Reuven, was born in 1924 in Poland, in the city of Zbierce, Upper Silesia, where he studied in the ” “He was already well-versed in organizational entrepreneurship, was loved by all his teammates and found a devoted and loyal friend, and was particularly sensitive to the weak and was in a hurry to come to their aid. In 1939, Zabierce was one of the first cities to be annexed to the German Reich, and because of its location, Poland’s heavy industry began to take control of the large factories before the occupation was completed, and the Jews of the area were exploited as labor camps, with deportation beginning in 1940. In 1940, the population of Zbierce numbered some 6,000 Jews. The Jews were sent to forced labor camps in Germany in June 1940. In August 1942 an Aktion was carried out during which about 2,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz, and the Zabierce community survived until the summer of 1943 under the auspices of a factory that manufactured uniforms for the German air force. With the liquidation of the ghettos in the Upper Silesia region in August 1943, all the Jews were deported to Auschwitz. During the first years of the occupation, Avraham and his comrades continued to gather in secrecy and held meetings with the group’s guide. They learned to use weapons, and later became an armed resistance organization, which tried to do everything possible to the Nazi occupier. The entire family of Avraham was sent to the camps and cut down by the Nazis. He himself survived the difficult conditions and even encouraged other Jews, helped in obtaining bread and more. From Auschwitz he was transferred to a concentration camp in Silesia and worked there in the coal mines. Instead, his spirit was broken, he decided to commit suicide, and he threw himself from a high rock. But the Nazis, who knew him as a diligent laborer, treated him until his leg was healed and continued to be enslaved. Abraham continued to roll between several camps until the end of the war. After the liberation Avraham worked in a religious training organization of the remains of the camps and She’erit HaPleita in the American Zone of Germany. He was active in the Bnei Akiva youth movement, and with his friends founded the “Torah V’Avodah” pioneering training commune (kibbutz hachshara) of the Ha – Shomer ha – Tsa’ir youth movement in Bavaria. Due to the importance of his activities in the Zionist pioneering training commune and his movement was delayed. When he was finally allowed to board an illegal immigrant ship, Abraham and the other immigrants were deported by the British to Cyprus. Abraham did not cancel his time in the camp, and studied diligently day and night to fill what he had missed during the war. More than once he was seen sitting alone after midnight in a tent, in the light of the lit candle, absorbed in his studies. In the summer of 1947 he was allowed to immigrate to Israel. For a while Avraham lived in Tel Aviv and Rehovot and worked as a laborer, but his growing loneliness and the ideals he held did not leave him. “I will not stay in the city,” he would say to his relatives, “I do not find a place here for me, a local in the village, my desire to live in a group, to be productive and to be constructive.” Declared – and did. With the outbreak of the War of Independence, he moved to Kfar Etzion, where his friends felt a spiritual connection from the past. Soon he found his place in work, society, protection, and protection. Like all the older Gush Etzion settlers, he served in the Haganah as part of the Etzioni Brigade, the “Jerusalem” Brigade (Division 6). He participated in training, in fortifications and in battles against the assailants, and here, too, he tried to reassure his friends about his safety. In his letters he spoke of the satisfaction he felt as a member of the group and of being allowed to fight a weapon, but he did not delude himself as to the situation of the strawWhere the Gush Etzion bloc is located. His letters always excelled with great humor, and with complete optimism that the liberation of the homeland was close. It was this hope that gave him strength and strength that kept him alive. Due to the strategic importance of Gush Etzion in the battle in the Jerusalem area, the regular Jordanian army (the “Arab Legion”) launched a fierce offensive against it prior to the end of the Mandate and the departure of the British from the country. The last battle took place on Wednesday, May 13, 1948. The Legion force broke through the fortifications of Kfar Etzion, followed by masses of Arabs from the nearby villages, and was in position 7 in the southwestern part of the village, where it fell along with all the people in the position. On May 14, 1948, the day of the declaration of the State of Israel, the defenders of the other three Gush Etzion settlements: Revadim, Masuot Yitzhak and Ein Zurim surrendered. Abraham was twenty-four years old when he fell. The bodies of those killed in the battle remained where they fell for a year or more. Their remains were collected in 1949 by a special operation of the military rabbinate. They were brought to eternal rest in a large mass grave on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem at a state ceremony held on the 17th of Cheshvan 5710 (17.11.1949). A relative of Abraham told the story of his life in a children’s story published on 14.4.1964, Volume 31, Issue 31: “In the Name of a Hero.” The space is “the last scion.” The last remnant of their nuclear family (parents, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters) who experienced the Holocaust in the ghettos and / or the concentration and extermination camps and / or in flight and hiding in territories occupied by the Nazis and / or fighting alongside members of the underground or partisans in the occupied territories The Nazis who immigrated to Israel, during and after World War II, wore uniforms and fell in the Israeli army.

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