Goldman, Yoel (Yanu, Yanchi)

Son of Franciszka and Chaim, was born on December 24, 1924 in the city of Langilutti, Hungary. He studied in the elementary school of the community where his mother was a teacher (his father was a merchant) and was a talented student and a cheerful boy who played the violin and the harmonica and sowed the joy of life around him. His mother educated him and the rest of her sons (one of Yoel’s twin and one older than him) in the spirit of Zionism, but warned them not to participate in organized activities for fear of persecution by the authorities and hostile treatment by the Jews. Yoel did not attend to her warnings and joined a Zionist youth organization. According to his talents, it was appropriate to continue high school, but because of the growing anti-Semitism, he saw no use in knocking on the gates of his career, which were closed to Jews and studied tailoring. He quickly moved into the profession, moved to a big city, liked his employer and his friends, and there was also the moving spirit in the group. When the Nazis took control of Hungary he was taken with his brother to a labor camp, where he encouraged and strengthened the spirit of the members to hold out and believe in the future. On the occasion of a rumor about an armistice with the advancing Russian army, he returned with his twin brother to Budapest where they met with the older brother who had been separated from them earlier. The other members of the labor battalions also arrived there. But the Hungarian Fascists continued to fight, did not take into consideration the Swiss Jewish identity cards and transferred them to a labor camp and torture in Austria. From there the three brothers fled back to Hungary, crossed the frozen Balaton Lake, seven to eight kilometers wide between the German and Russian fronts, which bombarded each other. They were arrested by the Russians who suspected they were spies, released the two younger brothers, and detained the adult. After the war he was released. The parents were murdered in the Auschwitz death camp and the three brothers underwent training in Budapest, continued in Greece, immigrated to Israel in August 1946 on the Henrietta Szold, were sent to Cyprus, and in December 1946 were allowed to immigrate to Eretz Israel. Yoel started working there by profession and then went to work in Haifa. He served for several months as a guard in Nahariya and Hanita, and when the War of Independence began, he returned to Gedera and joined his brother in the Givati ​​Brigade. In the Naftali company he participated in the purification of the villages of the south (Mughar, Beit Daras). In the operations, the commanders shared him and his brother-in-law alternately, not both at once. He worked with his company in battles against the Egyptian invader. On the 22nd of Iyar 5708 (22.5.1948), in the third attack on the Iraqi-Suwaidan police, the sapper was wounded while trying to break through the fence. Yoel jumped under a shower of shots to take out the wounded sapper, and he too was hit by a bullet and fell. On the 16th of Shevat 5711 (23.1.1951) he was put to rest in the Nachlat Yitzhak military cemetery.