Tajar, Gershon

Son of Nazia and Chaim. He was born on 15 September 1906 in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. From his youth he was a sports enthusiast and mainly engaged in athletics and gymnastics. He was a member of the Maccabi movement and served as a sports instructor. In 1926, after a year of training, he immigrated to Eretz Israel as a pioneer. At first he worked in various agricultural branches in the moshavot and later joined the founders of Moshav Beit Hanan. In the moshav he worked in establishing his agricultural farm and also worked in various external jobs. In 1940 he accepted the call of the national institutions to join the war against the Germans and volunteered for the British Army. He was assigned to the transport company in Hebrew 462, and with his comrades in the unit he went through the hardships of war in the Western Desert. In 1943 the Allies decided to invade the island of Sicily in order to storm out on occupied Europe. The members of Transport Company 462, who was part of the invasion force, were transferred to Egypt. After being re-equipped, they boarded the ship “Aryanpura” and sailed from Alexandria to Malta. On the 27th of Nisan 5703 (May 1, 1943), while the convoy of ships was making its way to Malta, the “Aryanpura” was bombed by a German plane and within minutes the ship sank into the sea. With whom one hundred and forty soldiers of the transport company, Gershon, drowned. He left a wife and a son. His brother, Mordechai, was killed in the Tel Aviv riots of 1921. In the military cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, a ship-shaped monument was erected in memory of the missing, and next to it is a water pool with the names of the fallen engraved on the bottom.