KIBBUTZ MEFLASIM, Israel — When Hamas fighters invaded southern Israel on October 1. On September 7, the militant group that rules the Gaza Strip carried out the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust.
That’s why this year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, which begins Sunday night in Israel, carries more 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 1. On September 7 she urged her to commemorate summer vacation with a pilgrimage she had long avoided: she will visit Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp in Poland.
Tzamir, whose kibbutz defended Hamas attackers on October 1. On January 7, he will join 55 other Holocaust survivors from around the world and around 10,000 others who will participate in the March of the Living. The event reenacts the three-kilometer (two-mile) march from Auschwitz to Birkenau, where approximately 1 million Jews were murdered by Nazi Germany.
The event, now in its 36th year, typically attracts thousands of participants, including Holocaust survivors and Jewish students, leaders and politicians. This year, Israeli hostages freed from captivity in Gaza and families whose relatives are still 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 had turned down previous invitations to visit Auschwitz. “To remember that there is still anti-Semitism and that there are still people who kill only for religious reasons.”
Holocaust Remembrance Day, commemorated on the anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, has traditionally been a time for Israelis to gather and hear the testimony of survivors.
It’s one of the summeriest days of the year, highlighted by a two-minute siren as traffic stops and people stand at 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 Israeli hostages still held in Gaza.
In 1948, when Tzamir was four and a half years old, 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 hugging her doll, Yula, when they revealed to her that they were not her parents and that the woman standing in front of them was her biological mother.
Tzamir’s mother had hidden her Jewish identity during World War II by serving in the German army. She gave birth to Judith in 1943 in a hospital run by nuns and left Judith behind her to save her life. Tzamir, then called Donata, was placed with a foster family. He had no idea she was Jewish until he met his 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 her studies, she returned to Meflasim, she fell in love with a new immigrant from Argentina who also lived on the kibbutz and stayed, raising four children.
In October On January 7, Tzamir faced the possibility of losing his home once again. Hamas militants crossed the border from Gaza and attacked cities, military bases and a music festival in southern Israel. Meflasim was luckier than many other kibbutzim in the area, where militants burned houses and left large areas of destruction.
That day, militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapped another 250. The attack sparked the Israeli invasion of Gaza, where the death toll soared to more than 34,500 people, according to local health officials, and forced around 80% of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million to leave their homes. The high death toll and humanitarian crisis have led to accusations of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice, an accusation that Israel angrily rejects.
Hamas has said its attack was aimed at the Israeli occupation and its blockade of Gaza, and pro-Palestinian activists deny any anti-Semitic motives in their opposition to Israel’s military offensive. For most Jewish Israelis, global protests calling for boycotts of Israel and questioning the country’s right to exist often descend into anti-Semitism.
On the day of the attack, Meflasim’s emergency preparedness team was able 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 was able 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 within a few kilometers of the borders with Gaza and Lebanon. Meflasim, Tzamir’s firm anchor after a childhood filled with turmoil 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, unsure of what their next steps will be, although Tzamir and some others hope to return to the kibbutz in June.
Tzamir said on October 1. The attack on the 7th brought back all kinds of memories of his childhood trauma. She could function during the day, but when she went to sleep her dreams were filled with blood, death and fire, visions that reminded her of the bombings she witnessed when she was 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 Israel’s Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs. The ministry estimates that 132,000 Holocaust survivors live in Israel.
Tzamir was 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 (a mile) from the Gaza border. The explosions from Gaza reverberate in the buildings and the feeling of security is difficult to recover.
But it was never a question for her, she said.
“I’m 80 years old and I don’t want to lose my home again,” said Tzamir as her husband Ran tended a garden full of flowers and succulents, just before their flight to Poland. “We will be back.”