David Leitner, who made eating falafel a symbol of Holocaust resilience, dies at 94

David Leitner, the Holocaust survivor who started a widely-marked tradition of eating falafel to mark his 1945 march from the Auschwitz concentration camp, died Wednesday at the age of 94.

Known as “Dugo,” Leitner, who was born in Hungary, started the tradition shortly after his arrival in Israel in 1949.

He used to have falafel each year on January 18, the date when in 1945 German guards began marching him and thousands of other Holocaust victims away from Auschwitz death camp westward.

Like many of the underfed and starving inmates, Leitner’s mind focused on food and hunger during the march through the frozen countryside of Nazi-occupied Poland, he later said.

Specifically, his mother’s bilkalach — the Yiddish-language name for golden-brown dough balls that were popular food for Jews in Central Europe. Leitner would never see his mother again. She and his two sisters were murdered within hours of the family’s arrival in Auschwitz in 1944.

The sight of falafel, which he first saw in Jerusalem in 1949, immediately brought back memories of her bilkalach – and the death march, he recalled in interviews. The savory falafel balls, with their granular chickpea texture and cumin flavor, tasted nothing like his mother’s fluffy bilkalach, he said. But he resolved nonetheless to eat a portion each year on January 18 to commemorate his family and other Holocaust victims.

Leitner would order his portion unceremoniously for years in a private ritual at a falafel eatery near his moshav Nir Galim, near Ashdod. His family members – Leitner is survived by two daughters and multiple grandchildren and great-grandchildren — felt he wanted to be alone for it.

But, increasingly, a circle of family and friends recognized the act’s symbolism and word got out about it, reaching the media.

Dugo Leitner, a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau, holds a balloon shaped like the Jewish star that the Nazis forced Jews to wear. (Erez Kaganovitz via JTA)

In 2019, then-president Reuven Rivlin invited Leitner to have falafel with him in celebration of what is known as Operation Dugo – a ceremonious consumption of falafel.

The tradition has spread beyond Israel, to countries with Jewish communities large and small, including the United States, the United Kingdom, South Africa and France.

Some of the figures who have joined Leitner for falafel include President Isaac Herzog and former Israel Defense Forces chief-of-staff Aviv Kohavi.

David Leitner, holding a walker, and participants of his Operation Dugo tradition, eat falafel at an eatery in Jerusalem, Israel on January 18, 2021. (Courtesy of Leitner’s family)

Rachel Rosenman, CEO of the Testimony House, a small Holocaust education institution in Nir Galim that helped popularize Operation Dugo, in a statement about Leitner’s passing, wrote that he “personified the tremendous triumph of hundreds of thousands of Jews who had survived the Holocaust and started families in the State of Israel.”