KIBBUTZ MEFLASIM, Israel (AP) — When Hamas fighters invaded southern Israel on Oct. 7, the militant group that rules the Gaza Strip carried out the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust.
So this year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, which begins Sunday night in Israel, carries greater weight than usual for many Jews around the world.
For Judith Tzamir, a Holocaust survivor from Germany who moved to Israel in 1964, the horrors of October 7 led her to mark the grim holiday by making a pilgrimage she had long avoided: she will visit Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp in Poland. .
Tzamir, whose kibbutz repelled the Hamas attackers on October 7, will join 55 other Holocaust survivors from around the world and about 10,000 other participants in the attack. March of the Living. The event recreates the three-kilometer march from Auschwitz to Birkenau, where approximately 1 million Jews were killed by Nazi Germany.
The event, now in its 36th edition, typically attracts thousands of participants, including Holocaust survivors and Jewish students, leaders and politicians. This year, Israeli hostages released from captivity in Gaza and families whose relatives are still held captive will also join the march.
“I don’t know if the world will listen, but even for me it’s important,” said Tzamir, who has declined previous invitations to visit Auschwitz. “To remember that anti-Semitism still exists and that there are still people who kill just for religious reasons.”
Holocaust Remembrance Day, marked on the anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, has traditionally been a time for Israelis to gather and listen to the testimonies of survivors.
It’s one of the darkest days of the year – highlighted by a two-minute siren as traffic stops and people stand to attention in memory of the victims. Memorial ceremonies are held throughout the day and the names of the victims are recited. While Israel’s national Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, tries to stay away from politics, its ceremony this year includes an empty yellow chair in solidarity with the Israeli hostages still held in Gaza.
In 1948, when Tzamir was 4 and a half years old, the people she knew as her parents dressed her in a light blue dress, with black shoes and white socks, and took her to a square in Berlin. She remembers grabbing her doll, Yula, when they revealed that they were not her parents and that the woman standing before them was her biological mother.
Tzamir’s mother hid her Jewish identity during World War II, serving in the German army. She gave birth to Judith in 1943 in a hospital run by nuns and left Judith behind to save her life. Tzamir, then called Donata, was placed in a foster family. She had no idea she was Jewish until she met her mother.
Sixteen years later, while in college, Tzamir went to Meflasim, a kibbutz in southern Israel on the border with Gaza, through a student exchange program. After his studies, he returned to Meflasim, fell in love with a new Argentine immigrant who also lived on the kibbutz, and stayed, raising four children.
On October 7, Tzamir faced the possibility of losing his home once again. Hamas militants crossed the border from Gaza and attacked towns, military bases and a music festival in southern Israel. Meflasim was luckier than many other kibbutzim in the area, where militants burned homes and left large areas of destruction.
The militants killed around 1,200 people that day, most of them civilians, and kidnapped another 250. The attack triggered the Israeli invasion of Gaza, where the death toll rose to more than 34,500 people, according to local health authorities, and expelled around 80% of Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants from their homes. The high death toll and humanitarian crisis have led to accusations of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice – a charge Israel angrily rejects.
Hamas said its attack was directed against the Israeli occupation and blockade of Gaza, and pro-Palestinian activists deny any anti-Semitic motives in their opposition to Israel’s military offensive. For most Israeli Jews, global protests calling for boycotts of Israel and questioning the country’s right to exist often veer into anti-Semitism.
On the day of the attack, Meflasim’s emergency preparedness squad managed to keep most of the Hamas militants outside the kibbutz perimeter. Many residents remained in safe rooms for almost 24 hours until the Israeli army managed to evacuate them the next day.
Although there were no fatalities in Meflasim, its approximately 800 residents were told to leave, along with more than 120,000 Israelis living just a few kilometers from the borders with Gaza and Lebanon. Meflasim, Tzamir’s constant anchor after a childhood full of upheaval and uncertainty, was no longer a safe haven.
Many Meflasim residents have been living in a hotel north of Tel Aviv for the past seven months, uncertain about their next steps, although Tzamir and a few others hope to return to the kibbutz in June.
Tzamir said the Oct. 7 attack brought back all kinds of memories of his childhood trauma. She was able to work during the day, but when she went to sleep her dreams were filled with blood, death and fires, visions that reminded her of the bombings she witnessed as a child in Germany.
Tzamir is one of approximately 2,000 Holocaust survivors in Israel who were forced to evacuate due to the war in Gaza, according to the Israeli Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs. The ministry estimates that 132,000 Holocaust survivors live in Israel.
Tzamir served as director of her kibbutz for 13 years, so she knows all the residents. She said some families may never return to Meflasim, just 1.4 kilometers from the Gaza border. The explosions coming from Gaza reverberate through the buildings and the feeling of security is difficult to regain.
But that was never a question for her, she said.
“I’m 80 years old, I don’t want to lose my home again,” said Tzamir as her husband Ran busied himself tending a garden full of succulents and flowers, just before the flight to Poland. “We’re coming back.”
