Meir, Avraham (Corti)

Son of Roth and Shmuel, was born on December 18, 1924, in the city of Frankfurt, on the river Main, Germany. When Abraham was 6 years old, his father, who was disabled from the First World War, died. His mother could not bear the burden of raising the children on her own and had to put them in the large Frankfurt orphanage. Avraham and his sister were educated in the orphanage and attended schools in the city. Corti was the darling of the Marx family, the directors of the orphanage, and they had a son. On the occasion of Abraham’s 16 years, he immigrated to Eretz Israel in the framework of Youth Aliyah and was sent to the religious youth village. His sister Leah moved to the Netherlands as part of Youth Aliya, but when the Germans occupied the Netherlands she was also sent to the death camps with Dutch Jews. Corti joined the nucleus that established his home in Kibbutz Yavneh. One year, he studied at the Bnei Akiva Yeshiva in Kfar HaRoeh, but his love for the land attracted him and he returned to his kibbutz and to work on the land, and he married his girlfriend Hannah and together they hoped that they had arrived at the farm and that they could live quietly on their land. He also went to various courses of the Haganah and completed a course on water. In the kibbutz, he would guide the members and companies using weapons and security matters. On the night before they fell, Corti was able to join the small force of Givati ​​fighters and saboteurs who blew up the bridge north of Ashdod, which was later called the Ad Halom bridge. Here, the Egyptian army column on its way to Tel Aviv was halted. On May 24, 1948, an Egyptian aircraft overflew the Yavneh group and from a low altitude dropped bombs on a residential barracks; Among the three killed on the spot were Corti and his little daughter Ruti, named after his sister who perished in the Holocaust. Abraham was laid to rest in the cemetery in Yavne. He left a wife, a boy and a girl. His memory was immortalized in a booklet published by the Yavneh group, in which Corti is described by one of his friends as “a courageous man willing to lend a helping hand to whatever he needs” and “an innocent believer in his Creator.”