Schwartz, Jonah (Yonel)
Yona, son of Sarah-Rivka and Moshe, was born in 1927 in Romania, in the village of Atiya in the district of Satmar (Transylvania), the eldest of a family with many children. There was an independent Jewish educational network in Romania, Jewish creativity flourished, and the Zionist movement took up a considerable part of the lives of the young people, who numbered some 600,000 Jews on the eve of World War II, but Romania’s backward agriculture and lack of internal stability were fertile grounds for the growth of nationalist right-wing movements and the spread of anti-Semitism. Who visited the Romanian people and suffered persecution, restrictions and outbursts During the reign of King Karol II’s tyranny, from February 1938 to September 1940, the Jews were gradually removed from all areas of activity and occupation, and with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Romanians joined them in an attempt to regain the lands taken from them. Some 40,000 Jews lived in villages and towns from their homes, some were transferred to detention camps and many became welfare cases, and in June 1941, the Jews of Bessarabia and Bukovina began to be murdered, and about 160,000 Jews were murdered with the help of the local population – Romanians and Ukrainians. In mid-September 1941, some 150,000 Jews were deported to Transnistria, the region that Hitler had given to Romania in exchange for its participation in the war, and which had become the valley of death for the Jews. By the end of the war, about half of Romanian Jews had perished. During the Holocaust, Yona’s entire family was taken to Auschwitz, where most of them perished, and only three survived – a pigeon and two of his uncles, his mother’s brother. On the day of the liberation, Yona’s uncles immigrated to the United States. He himself returned to his hometown and joined a group of young Jews who organized themselves to emigrate illegally to Eretz Israel without certificates. They succeeded in arriving in Israel at the end of 1946. Here Jonah began to build his new life. Lived in Tel Yehuda, Ramat Gan, worked and even knew a girl and was about to marry her. At the outbreak of the War of Independence, Yona enlisted in the “Alexandroni” Brigade – the 3rd Brigade in the Haganah. He began to train in Battalion 33, which was organized mainly among the members of the Field Force in the Gush Dan and the Sharon settlements On 1 Adar I 5708 (11.2.1948), during training in the Efal-Kfar Azar area, Yona was brought to eternal rest in the military cemetery in Nachalat Yitzhak, the “last bastion.” The last survivor of the Holocaust is Holocaust survivors who remained the last remnant of their nuclear family (parents) who were killed by Arabs who ambushed a nearby orchard. , Brothers, sisters, sons and daughters) who experienced the Holocaust in the ghettos and / or the concentration and extermination camps and / or in flight and hiding in the territories occupied by the Nazis and / or fighting alongside the members of the underground The partisans or Nazi-occupied territory who immigrated to Israel, during the Second World War or after, uniforms and fell in Israel’s wars.
