Porus, Isaac

Son of Nechama and Yehuda. He was born in 1913 in the town of Rzesica, Latvia, and immigrated to Eretz Israel in 1943. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Yitzhak accepted the call of the National Institutions and was one of the first volunteers to the British army. He was stationed in a 462 unit that served all over the Middle East. At the end of April 1943, Yitzhak’s unit boarded the ship “Aryanpura”, which headed a convoy of ships from the port of Alexandria to Malta to transport soldiers and equipment in preparation for the invasion of Sicily. On 27 Nisan, May 1, 1943, a German reconnaissance plane discovered the convoy and bombed the ship. The Aryanpura suffered a direct hit and drowned, and with it 140 soldiers from the unit. Yitzhak among them left a wife and child. Yitzhak’s name and his friends’ names are commemorated in the booklet “LaChayal” that was published on the first anniversary of the disaster, in the Book of Volunteerism, in the Book of the Journalists’ Union in 1946, and in the Yizkor book of the Jabotinsky Institute. On Mount Herzl in Jerusalem a memorial was established in memory of the drowned “Arinfora” in the shape of a ship and at the bottom of the water pool next to it are engraved the names of the 140 victims.