Riff, Joseph (Yank)

Son of Chava and Israel. He was born on December 9, 1914 in Hirov, Galicia, Poland, the eighth son of his family. He completed his studies in the elementary school in the town and joined the He – Chaluts movement. In 1925, his brother Yitzhak immigrated to Palestine and tried to influence the rest of his family to join him. In the early 1930s another brother and two sisters immigrated to Israel, and in 1934 Joseph also immigrated. When he could not find a job in Tel Aviv, he moved to Jerusalem, where he joined the ranks of the Haganah. With the outbreak of the 1936-1939 riots, he volunteered for the Nutrim Corps and participated in the aliyah to Hanita. In 1939 he was wounded in an Arab attack. During the Second World War he enlisted in the British Army and was assigned to the 462 Company of the Transport Corps. He served in Egypt and Lebanon and in late April 1943 he went on board the ship “Aryanpura” from Egypt to Malta, in order to participate in the Allied invasion of Europe. On the 27th of Nisan 5703 (May 1, 1943), the convoy of ships, headed by the “Aryanpura”, was bombed by German bombers. Joseph’s ship was damaged and drowned, and with it one hundred and forty soldiers of Company 462, Joseph among them, perished. He left two brothers and two sisters. Joseph’s name was immortalized in “The Book of Volunteerism,” in the Yizkor book of the Jabotinsky Institute and in the “Yearbook of the Journalists”, 1946. In the military cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, a monument was erected in the shape of a ship and next to it is a water pool with the names of all the company’s fallen engraved on the bottom.