Gelber, Mordechai

Mordechai, the son of Gitel and Chaim, was born on June 6, 1915, in Poland, in the city of Ternopol in eastern Galicia (now in Western Ukraine). He completed an elementary school in his city. Later, he learned the shoemaking industry. Mordechai joined the Polish army in 1936 and served for two years. When he got back he married. He and his wife had two children. Until World War I Ternopil was included in Galicia under Austrian rule, and between the two world wars was ruled by independent Poland. Jews had inhabited it since its founding, and for a long time constituted a majority among its inhabitants. On the eve of World War II, when the city was annexed to the Soviet Union, there were about 18,000 Jews living there. After the Nazi occupation of the city in July 1941, thousands of Jews were murdered in a series of pogroms. Hundreds of Jews were taken to forced labor. The Tarnopol community was liquidated in the summer of 1943 in the Belzec death camp. Mordechai lost his entire family in the Holocaust. His wife and two children perished in Germany; his parents were sent to an extermination camp. After his entire world was destroyed, he joined the Red Army, the Soviet Army, in 1942 and fought the Germans. After the war Mordechai remained in Europe for a while, and in 1948 he immigrated to Israel from Italy on an illegal immigrant ship. Shortly after his immigration, in mid-September 1948, he was drafted into the IDF and assigned to the 7th Battalion of the Negev Brigade (Brigade 12.) He served in the Negev for almost ten months and was transferred to the Ordnance Corps equipment and munitions base after his release in 1949. In Tel Aviv, and worked in Jaffa as a shoemaker On the 18th of Cheshvan 5711 (18.10.1950), during reserve service, Mordechai died of illness. Thirty-five years old when he died. Mordechai was laid to rest in the military cemetery in Nahalat Yitzhak. This hero is a “last scion”. The survivors of the Holocaust are survivors of the Holocaust who survived the last remnant of their nuclear family (parents, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters) who experienced the Holocaust in the ghettos and / or concentration camps and / or in hiding and hiding in territories occupied by the Nazis and / Or in combat alongside members of the underground movements or partisans in the Nazi-occupied territories who immigrated to Israel during or after World War II, wore uniforms and fell in the Israeli army.