Joseph, son of Matilde and Yehuda, was born on 17.9.1927 in Italy, in the port city of Trieste in the northeast of the country, where his family moved to Greece and was conquered by the Germans in May 1941 after a heavy air attack, The Jews were forced to pay ransom, and in February 1943 the Nuremberg Laws were implemented and the Jews were isolated in three main ghettos in Salonika and its environs. It was not implemented in several stages: in March 1943 the deportation from Thrace and Macedonia, In the wake of the Italian surrender and the German takeover in the summer of 1944, the Jews were deported from the rest of Greece, where some 54,000 Jews were sent to Auschwitz and exterminated by gas or sent to forced labor and died from starvation, disease, and cruelty to the guards. To escape, but only a few Jews managed to survive, and by the end of the war more than 80 percent of the Jews of Greece had perished, about 67,000.Joseph experienced all the horrors of Nazi hell and survived three years of suffering and torture in Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz-Birkenau. All his family perished in the Holocaust and only he was able to reach the day of liberation. After the conquest of Germany by the Allies, Joseph returned to Greece, and from there he immigrated to Israel at the end of 1945 on the illegal immigrant ship Berl Katzenelson (Dimitrios). The ship, organized by the Haganah’s Mossad Le’Aliyah Bet, sailed from the port of Lavarion on November 17, 1945, carrying 211 immigrants on board, most of them from Greece and the rest from Eastern Europe. Among the immigrants were former concentration camp inmates, former POWs and members of the Youth Aliyah. During the voyage, the ship encountered a severe storm, but on November 22, 1945, it managed to reach the shores of Shefayim, where, with the help of Palmach fighters, most of the immigrants were removed. Arab fishermen were arrested by Palestinian fighters, but one fisherman escaped and reported to the authorities. When the British arrived, most of the immigrants were able to assimilate in the surrounding settlements. Only a few immigrants were arrested and interned in the Atlit detention camp. On November 24, 1945, the Palmach attacked Sidney Ali and the Coastal Police in Givat Olga, where he managed to get off the ship and was apprehended at Kibbutz Ein Harod, and after a year of training he relocated to Tel Aviv and worked as a construction worker. In January 1948, shortly after the outbreak of the War of Independence, Yosef was drafted into the Givati Brigade, the 5th Brigade of the Haganah, and was attached to Battalion 53 (the “Suburban”), a battalion most of whose fighters were conscripted in the suburbs of Tel Aviv. Before the battalion was able to organize itself, its men took positions on the outskirts of Tel Aviv and defended the southern neighborhoods against the attacks of Jaffa’s Arabs The battalion was southward and was stationed on the front line along the Majdal-Faluja road, defending the Jewish settlements in their area, escorting convoys to the Negev and conquering a number of Arab villages, and being an outstanding combatant who carried out the tasks assigned to him. On March 2, 1948, a convoy of 12 vehicles was set up to break through to the Gat and Gal’on kibbutzim and to supply them with supplies. They separated a few kilometers between the settlements, and a hostile Arab village pebbled between them. The constant harassment of the convoys turned the supply transfers into complex military operations that were almost always accompanied by battle.The Givati fighters guarding the convoys used dirt roads to bypass the hostile Arab settlements. The convoy in which Joseph was passing the villages of Iraq-Suwaidan and Faluja moved towards its destination. At the same time, a platoon from Kibbutz Gat set up a block to prevent enemy reinforcements from Iraq to Manshiyya, but encountered an ambush. In the ensuing battle Yosef was wounded and killed on the spot. He was twenty years old. Joseph was first buried in the winepress, and on the 23rd of Cheshvan 5705 (15.11.1949) he was put to rest at the military cemetery in Nahalat Yitzhak. 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.
