Pass, Batya (Betty)

Batya (Betty), daughter of Chaya and Yehuda Leib Pass, was born on the 18th of Tishrei, September 18, 1928, in Berlin, the capital of Germany. The fifth of a family blessed with seven children, who immigrated to Germany in 1919 from the city of Olanow near Lvov in Galicia. In her parents’ home, she was educated in the spirit of religion and attended public school for general studies and studied Jewish studies in evening classes. In 1938,
the family fled from the Nazi terror back to Olanow and then moved to Warsaw.
Batya attended the Beit Yaakov religious school for girls. In the stormy
beginning of World War II, the family was taken to Pinsk. Because
they were refused Soviet citizenship, the family were sent to cut down trees in the Siberian forests. After the Stalin-Sikorski Agreement was signed, they were released and worked in cotton factories in Turkistan. Batya also worked there part-time.
A typhus plague struck the entire family. The father died and Batya remained with an ear disease as a result of the typhus. Her mother gave her to a Polish orphanage, which transferred the orphans to Tehran and from there she was taken to the transit camp of the Jewish Agency.
In 1943 she arrived weak and sickly, with the other children of Tehran and joined the religious Aliyat Noar youth group in Mikvah Israel. Batya worked in the vegetable garden and in the nursery school, and she also learned. She joined a kibbutz group. Meanwhile, the medical treatments she received restored her health and joy of life and she began to participate in the Gadna training and grew beautifully in body and spirit. She went out with the core group for a year of training in Kfar Etzion, worked in the army service and in the forest and was registered as a permanent member of the group.
She began to work with children and was sent to a training course
In the “Childrens’ Home” in Jerusalem. Meanwhile, she learned that her mother had survived, along with a sister and three brothers and they intended to immigrate to Israel.
When the siege of Gush Etzion began at the beginning of the War of Independence and the mothers and children were transferred
to Jerusalem, Batya remained in Gush Katif. She worked in various jobs, took part in guarding positions, watching the spotlights, training with various weapons and throwing grenades. Meanwhile she was informed
that one of her brothers had arrived in Israel and was accepted to the Youth Aliyah Institute. The rest of the family members also came to Israel.
Batya underwent a first aid course and was a responsible medic next in command to the commander of the western section. In this role she was excelled in helping a wounded friend under heavy enemy fire.
The circumstances of her death vary. On the day of the fall of Kfar Etzion, 4 Iyar 5708 (13.5.1948), acccording to one version, she perished in the clinic shelter under the ruins of the German monastery that was blown up by the enemy. According to another version, she was the blonde girl who, according to the stories of the Arab legionnaires in the area, who was hit by a machine gun.
On the 17th of Cheshvan 5710 (17.11.1949), she was transferred to eternal rest in the Gush Martyrs’ Military Cemetery Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.