Yosef, the son of Fruma and Mordecai, was born in Lithuania in the town of Lenkova in the District of Solay in 1924. He belonged to an enlightened and traditional Zionist family that raised its children in a cultural atmosphere and aspired to immigrate to Eretz Israel. Lithuania was an independent state at the end of World War I. In 1940, it was annexed to the Soviet Union in accordance with its agreement with Germany on the eve of World War II, and in 1941 the Germans went to war against the Soviet Union, In the city there were about a thousand Jews, including refugees from the area, almost all of them murdered During the following months, and his parents and two sisters were murdered by the Nazis, and he himself returned to his town from the seminar in Telz and was given the opportunity to see them before they were taken away and immediately imprisoned in the ghetto and sent to forced labor. , And was forced to work in a nearby forest and was later sent to the Dachau extermination camp with the rest of the remains of the German labor camps, Dachau, near Munich, was the first concentration camp in Germany. About 200,000 people passed through his gates until he was liberated by the Americans in April 1945. Joseph survived all the hardships of the camp and held on to Dachau until the day of liberation. After liberation, Yosef wandered with the stream of refugees and reached Italy. From there, in 1946, he emigrated to Palestine. When he arrived, he joined the Avuka group in the Beit Shean Valley, and a year later moved to Tel Aviv. At first Joseph worked as a construction worker, and then in diamond polishing. He had a good temperament and soon became fond of his co-workers. At the outbreak of the War of Independence, Yosef enlisted in the Haganah. He served in the 54th Battalion of the Givati Brigade, the 5th Brigade of the Hagana, which was organized in late 1947 by members of the Field Corps in the Tel Aviv area, and at the beginning of the war the Battalion members defended Tel Aviv and its surroundings. , And were then brought down to the south of the country to help curb the invading Egyptian army.The Egyptian invasion began the day after the declaration of the state on 15 May 1948. At the end of that month, the advance force of the invasion army arrived in the town of Isdud (now Ashdod), about 30 kilometers south of Tel Aviv, The bridge (now the “Ad Halom” bridge) was blown up a few weeks earlier by Givati fighters in order to stop the advance of the force of the spearhead The Egyptians, along the coastal plain, were arrested but not for long, and several attempts were made to stop them.An attempt was made to bomb the Egyptians from the air, one of the first air raids by Israeli planes, but the bombing, although it hit the Egyptian army concentrations, failed Since the Egyptian force was perceived as a serious threat to the southern settlements and to Tel Aviv and its neighbors, it was decided to launch a large ground offensive by means of a foot force, and the forces of the Givati Brigade and the Palmach’s Negev Brigade Artillery assistance was allocated. On the night of the 3 rd of Iyar 5708 (June 3, 1948) Givati forces attacked the Egyptian alignment near the destroyed bridge. The assault was halted by the heavy fire of the enemy, which preceded and strengthened its defenses, and the Israeli forces were forced to withdraw. In this battle, Yosef fell, was one of over twenty Israeli fighters killed that night. Despite the failure of the attack, the Egyptians’ advance to the north was halted, and they had to redeploy near the bridge. A few months later, after Operation Yoav in October 1948, they retreated southward. Joseph was twenty-four years old when he fell. The bodies of most of the fallen were found only after liberationAnd they were brought to rest in a mass grave in the military cemetery in Kfar Warburg. 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.
