Spalnitz (Kushmirski), Yosef (Yossi)

Joseph, son of Henia (nee Spelnitz) and Abraham-Zelig Kushmirski, was born on February 15, 1937, in the city of Porba in the western part of the country, at the foot of the Sudeten mountains. Of the world Jewry in the fields of religious, national, political, social and cultural activity, there were about 3.5 million Jews living in the country, who suffered an economic and anti-Jewish boycott in the late 1930s, and on September 1, 1939, World War II With the German invasion of Poland and its conquest in the lightning war (“Blitzkrieg”) In the following years, the Polish ghettos were liquidated by sending their inhabitants to extermination camps, and by the end of the war about three million Polish Jews had been murdered Who survived the camps, passed through Russia and reached the day of liberation, after which he lived for a few more years in Poland and at the beginning of 1949 arrived in Israel as part of the Youth Aliyah. To facilitate his immigration, his relatives wrote down his name – his mother’s name, Spellnitz – and since then he has remained there. When he arrived Yosef was sent to the Ramat Hadassah facility near Tivon, where he stayed for a short time and was then transferred to Kibbutz Merhavia in the Jezreel Valley. In Merhavia Yosef found his home. He has lived here for over five years, studied and worked as a tractor operator. At the age of 15, he joined the Gadna (Youth Battalions) Brigade, and in 1956 he joined the IDF, and was joined to the infantry unit. He was a tanker during the Sinai Campaign, and then passed a tank commander course and was ordained as a tank commander with the rank of sergeant. At the beginning of 1958 Joseph volunteered for permanent service as a tank commander. On the night of the 21st of Av 5758 (6.8.1958), Yosef was killed in an accident while performing his duties as he passed by a vehicle near Kibbutz Gvat. Joseph was twenty-one years old when he fell. He was laid to rest at the military cemetery in Kiryat Shaul, Tel Aviv. His friends from Yosef’s unit published a pamphlet called “Pages in Memory”. His commanding officer eulogized him: “Yossi was our favorite, an outstanding soldier and an excellent rifleman … When he was assigned key and responsible positions in the unit, he was able to fulfill them with loyalty, dedication and exemplary talent. I have the right to be Yossi’s commander. ” 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.