Fuld, Bracha

Daughter of Lotte and Luther. She was born in Berlin, Germany on December 26, 1927, to a well-off and assimilated Jewish family. As a child, Barbara was very ambitious, learned to read on her own, according to the notebooks of her older sister, and excelled in school and sports, and won many prizes. She encountered anti-Semitic phenomena in her school, and between her parents there were differences of opinion. In the end she was transferred to the Jewish school. Kristallnacht, which fell on November 9, 1938, shattered the faith of her father in Germany and he committed suicide. Her mother was in France at the time, and from there she went to England, where she met with the daughter, who was smuggled to the Netherlands via a friend of the family, and was admitted to a boarding school near London. She excelled in her studies, was known for her precision and knowledge of literature and music, and was also attracted to social activity. After graduating from high school in the summer of 1944, she joined a number of her friends on aliyah and was active in the Palmach and was a member of the H Company, which was located in Kibbutz Kiryat Anavim On 26.3.1946, she participated as a squad leader in a Palmach and Hayash operation to take down the illegal immigrants of the Orde Wingate on the Tel Aviv coast, south of the port. The British discovered the ship and sent it to Atlit, but this was not known by Bracha’s squad members, who had barricaded themselves in a house on Marmorek Street. Because of a technical malfunction, the signal was not given to stop the operation, which was no longer necessary. In the exchange of fire with the British forces who came from nearby Sharona, the commander of her army was wounded in the British armored vehicle, mortally wounded. She was taken to the Jaffa prison for interrogation and from there she was taken to the hospital where she died shortly thereafter. She was laid to rest in the “Haganah” section of the Nahalat Yitzhak cemetery. She left a mother and a sister. The press in Israel published extensive news about the events of that night, and the Haganah journal “The Wall” published a leaflet in its memory, including her picture. In 1958, her family founded “The Collection in Memory of Bracha Fuld” at the National and University Library of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.