Malukin, Yaakov (Yasha)

Son of Hannah and Shimon. Born in 1915 in the city of Baku, Russia. Yaakov attended an elementary school in his city. Due to the worsening economic situation in general and the harsh treatment of Jews in particular, the family fled to Iran and after a few years managed to obtain a permit and arrived in Eretz Israel in some way after passing Iraq in 1935. The family settled in Givatayim and Yaakov began working as a wood plower. After the outbreak of World War II, Yaakov responded to the call of Yishuv institutions and volunteered for the British army. He was assigned to the Hebrew Transport Unit 462 in the Transport Corps. The unit served in Egypt and the Western Desert. At the end of April 1943, a large convoy of ships headed towards Malta was concentrated in the port of Alexandria to assist Allied forces in the invasion of Sicily. Yaakov and his unit boarded the “Aryanpura” that was sailing at the head of the convoy. On 27 Nisan, May 1, 1943, a German reconnaissance plane discovered the convoys. The Aryanpura suffered direct damage and drowned with 140 members of the unit and Yaakov among them. Left parents and brother. His memory is commemorated in “The Book of Volunteerism,” in “The Book of the Year of the Journalists”, in the Yizkor book of the Jabotinsky Institute and in the “Society for a Soldier” that was published on the first anniversary of the Holocaust. A water pool at the bottom of which is engraved the names of the fallen is on Mount Herzl, Jerusalem. His burial place is unknown.