The son of Sheindl (Sheine) and Herszka (Hirsch) Mandel. Born in 1925 in Hungary, in the town of Kishworda, brother of Zaidel (Chaim) and Queen Zeev (Bela) studied in a Jewish elementary school in his hometown of Kishworda, known by its Jewish name Klein Warden, where several thousand Jews lived. Hungary became a protectorate of Germany, and as such adopted racial laws and imposed restrictions on the Jews in its territory, and a series of anti-Jewish laws were enacted in 1938. From the summer of 1939, the Jewish men were taken to Hungarian Labor Service battalions. Until 1940, they were stationed mainly along the Romanian border and were employed in paving roads, afforestation and building airports In the summer of 1941, the conscripts were sent to the Carpathian Mountains and the Ukraine, where they worked on paving roads, digging trenches and clearing mines, and about 42,000 of them died of cold, hunger, and abuse. Zev was about fourteen years old when his father was taken to forced labor in the Hungarian army, and he was forced to leave his studies and go to work at odd jobs in exchange for a small wage in order to support his family. In which the Jews were concentrated from the vicinity. On May 25, 1944, the deportation from the ghetto to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland began. By the end of the war some 550,000 Hungarian Jews perished. All members of Ze’ev’s family perished in the Holocaust. His mother and brother (twenty-two years old, and a thirteen-year-old queen) perished in Auschwitz. Wolf’s father perished in the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, where he was deported along with his son Ze’ev. Only Ze’ev survived and was privileged to see the day of liberation in the camp. He remained the last and last descendant of his family. When Hungary was liberated from the German occupation, Wolf returned there at the age of twenty, but not for long. He emigrated to Italy, and in 1947 he left for Palestine on an illegal immigrant ship. The ship was seized by the British and its passengers were transferred to detention camps in Cyprus. At the end of 1947, Ze’ev was released from the detention camp and arrived in Israel. He settled in Tel Aviv and found his livelihood by polishing furniture. After the United Nations General Assembly resolution of November 29, 1947, on the establishment of a Jewish state, the events that preceded the War of Independence broke out, and Ze’ev enlisted in the framework of “volunteering with the people.” He served in the “Moriah” battalion of the “Etzioni” Brigade, the “Jerusalem” Brigade – the 6th Brigade of the Haganah. Ze’ev participated in many battles during the war, first in the “Michmash” battalion and later in the “Beit Horon” battalion. At the end of March 1948, on the eve of Operation Nachshon before the conquest of the besieged city of Jerusalem, the fighters of the Etzioni Brigade captured the Soba quarry of Solel Boneh (now the Castel quarry). The road to this quarry south of Castel also led to the Arab villages of El-Castel and Tzuba, thus severing the Castel fortress from these villages. The Arabs concentrated their forces to conquer this weak point. In order to protect the quarry, a force of forty-two fighters from the Etzioni Brigade was stationed there. The force was built in a quarry and seized two outposts near the quarry – “Boaz”, about 500 meters north of the quarry, and the second, which was later called Nachshon, some 300 meters south of the quarry. The Etzioni fighters fought back, and for several days the outposts passed from hand to hand. The village of Al-Qastal, which controls the road to Jerusalem, was not initially involved in the fighting, but later on, the extremists in the village increased, and the other residents began to flee from it and abandon their homes. On April 1, a fierce attack was carried out on the quarry by an Arab force of more than 200 fighters. Under the pressure of the enemy attack, the defenders withdrew from the southern outpost in the afternoon.During the withdrawal Ze’ev Mendel was killed. Shortly after their withdrawal, two armored vehicles arrived at the quarry and were under reinforcements under the command of company commander Nahum Shoshani. Shoshani organized the force and conducted a counterattack to capture the outpost again, while trying to find the body of a wolf. The attempt failed, the force withdrew, and Shoshani remained to cover up the withdrawal. Shoshani, whose underground name was “Nachshon”, fell in this battle, after which the outpost Nachshon was named. Private Zeev (Bella) Mandel fell in battle on the day of the 21st of Adar 5708 (1.4.1948). He was twenty-three when he fell. On the night between 7 and 8 April, Abdel Qadir al-Husseini, leader of the Arab gangs, was killed. On April 9, 1948, the Castel was conquered without a battle by the Palmach, an important milestone in the battle for the road to Jerusalem. , But only Wolf’s hat, stained with blood, was found. Due to the large number of casualties, it was decided to bury them in a plot of land at Kibbutz Ma’aleh Hahamisha and not in Kibbutz Kiryat Anavim, where the dead were buried until then. While the Palmach cells were identified by their comrades, the Etzioni Brigade was identified only in part and the others were classified as anonymous, until testimonies about their participation and fall were recorded in this battle. The burial of three of the victims in the Battle of Castelnuovo, In 1955, a paramedic testified about the circumstances of the discovery of the body of three Nahum Shoshani And Shoshani was identified by his father and buried in Ma’ale Hahamisha together with the victims of the Castel, while the additional body that was brought with him was not identified and buried as an “unknown”. ) In the IDF, in cooperation with the Unit for the Commemoration of the Soldier in the Ministry of Defense, revealed in 2010 that the body of Zeev Mendel, who was killed on the same day and in the same sector with Shoshani, was held on Mount Herzl on the 23rd of Kislev, (30.11.2010) The unveiling of the tombstone, in which the tomb of the “unknown” was replaced by the tombstone bearing the name of Zeev Mendel. 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.
