In tearful reversal, Holocaust survivors mourn beloved IDF soldiers killed since Oct. 7
As Israelis commemorate those lost in the Shoah as well as fallen troops and terror victims, the elderly grieve for young volunteers who visited them, felled over 19 months of war
Two years ago, on what would be his final Holocaust Remembrance Day, Master Sgt. (res.) Omri Ben Shachar took Holocaust survivor Moshe Adler to a memorial ceremony. The two had formed a close bond through Ben Shachar’s regular visits, part of a national volunteer program that pairs young Israelis with aging survivors.
This year, in a reversal almost too bitter to grasp, Adler lit a candle for Ben Shachar, who fell in Gaza three months into the Israel-Hamas war. The ongoing conflict began on October 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists invaded southern Israel, butchering some 1,200 people and kidnapping 251 to the Gaza Strip.
“It’s unthinkable that I, as a Holocaust survivor, would have to endure such a loss in the final chapter of my life,” Adler told The Times of Israel.
The inversion is at the heart of a joint initiative by the Foundation for the Welfare of Holocaust Victims and the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews called “He Was Like a Grandson to Me,” launched during the somber stretch between Holocaust Remembrance Day, which this year fell out on April 23-24, and Memorial Day a week later.
The project preserves the memory of several pairings of Holocaust survivors and young volunteers killed in the current war through the personal testimonies of the Holocaust survivors themselves. Some of the slain soldiers had begun volunteering in high school as part of “Connected,” a program linking 800 11th- and 12th-graders from the ORT school network with 400 survivors across Israel.
International Fellowship of Christians and Jews president Yael Eckstein, who called remembrance “the most outstanding trait of the Jewish people,” said her organization had pledged “to remember the elderly Holocaust survivors living in Israel, and the families of the young fallen soldiers in this long war.”
Adler was born at the end of World War II in a labor camp in Transnistria, Ukraine. He grew up in a home where the Holocaust was never mentioned. As a child, he discovered that before his father had married his mother and fled to Italy, he had been married to another woman with whom he had four children. All five were murdered by the Nazis.
Decades later, Ben Shachar entered the Ramat Gan home Adler shared with his wife, Malka, for what would be the first of hundreds of visits. On October 7, 2023, Ben Shachar was the first to call the Adlers at 6:30 a.m. to check if they were safe as reports of Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel began to emerge.
Ben Shachar, a fighter in the Paratroopers Brigade, was killed on December 8, 2023, in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza. Adler was smoking a cigarette outside when Ben Shachar’s father, Reuven, called to deliver the news of his son’s death.
“I couldn’t talk,” Adler said. “I told him to speak to Malka. It was too much.” To this day, stickers and photos of Ben Shachar cover the Adlers’ home.
“We loved this child. Even today, I tell people my grandson was killed,” Adler said.
The reversal of roles between survivors and the young during this week of memorial days has echoed beyond the commemoration project. Outside the crematoria at Auschwitz last week, hostage Bar Kuperstein’s grandparents called their grandson’s abduction into Gaza a “second Holocaust.”
That same day, Staff Sgt. (res.) Asaf Kafri was killed by sniper fire in the north of the Gaza Strip at the exact moment his 96-year-old great-grandmother was visiting the Bergen-Belsen camp where she had been imprisoned during the Holocaust.
Like Adler, Aviva Ben Yakar was born at the end of World War II, and like him, she too was accompanied by her volunteer companion, combat medic Staff Sgt. Shay Arvas, to what would be his final Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony before he was killed in Gaza, just weeks into the war.
“When I heard what happened to Shay, it was incredibly difficult. Traumatic,” Ben Yakar told The Times of Israel. “These days for me, Holocaust Remembrance Day is October 7.”
Arvas had begun visiting Ben Yakar — a widow from Holon — during high school. After graduation, he enlisted in the IDF but continued to visit. Even before going home on his first leave from basic training, he showed up at her door still carrying his full army backpack.
“We would talk about everything,” Ben Yakar said. “And it did me good, as someone who’s alone.”
Arvas had dreams of opening a pastry business. “He would bring cake with him each time he came to visit, because he said, ‘You don’t drink coffee without cake,’” Ben Yakar said.
She was sitting in a café with friends when they heard a soldier named Shay had been killed. It wasn’t until she returned home that she learned it was “my Shay.”
“I felt like a part of me had been taken,” she said.
Asher Wolach is another Holocaust survivor commemorating his fallen volunteer, Rabbi Avi Goldberg, a father of eight who was killed in southern Lebanon in October of last year.
Born in the former Yugoslavia, Wolach was seven when WWII broke out. He spent four years hiding in the forest.
“Holocaust Remembrance Day is the hardest day of the year,” he said on a video posted to social media.
Six years ago, Goldberg’s wife, Rachel Goldberg, was assigned to stand with Wolach during the Holocaust Remembrance Day siren, part of the Foundation for the Welfare of Holocaust Victims effort to ensure no survivor is alone in that moment. When she got home and told her husband, he informed her that he, too, was a volunteer for Wolach.
“We loved each other. He cared for me as if I was his father,” Wolach said.
Since Goldberg’s death, his widow and children have continued to visit Wolach in his Jerusalem home.
Aviva Ben Yakar said that after Arvas’s death, the foundation sent other volunteers to visit her, but none left the same mark. “I was so connected to Shay that I couldn’t connect with anyone who came after him,” she said.
Adler, on the other hand, asked the foundation to send only Ben Shachar’s twin brother, Nadav. He’s been visiting ever since.
Reuven Ben Shachar remembered his son as a “hero and an overachiever, who had relentless optimism.”
He praised the commemoration project, “unique to our small, precious country,” as a way for people to “remember Omri and young soldiers like him who fell defending the homeland.”
The Times of Israel Community.