Rosa and Yuri Yadgarov, 80 & 78: Immigrant couple from Uzbekistan

Murdered by Hamas terrorists on the street in Ofakim on October 7 while they were heading to a bomb shelter

Yuri Yadgarov, 78, and his wife Rosa Yadgarov, 80, were murdered by Hamas terrorists just outside their home in Ofakim on October 7.

They are survived by their only son, Masnael (Mark) Yadgarov. They were buried on October 18 in Holon.

The couple made aliya to Israel in the 1990s from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, according to a eulogy from the Ofakim municipality. Yuri worked for close to 20 years for the Israel Nature and Parks Authority.

At a Memorial Day ceremony in the Knesset in 2024, the couple’s son, Mark, recounted seeing Hamas terrorists open fire at his parents as they were all trying to get to a bomb shelter amid the sirens and rockets.

“My father fell, his cane flew, and my mother was in shock, didn’t understand what was happening, and they shot mom too,” he said.

Mark said he wanted to run and try and save them, but “I saw that was it, there were no signs of life.” He ran with other neighbors to the nearby bomb shelter and tried to close and lock the door, but a terrorist stuck his weapon in the hinge to prevent it from closing, said Mark.

He managed to get it closed, and the terrorist fired inside the shelter’s air vent, but couldn’t get inside. After 8.5 hours, he said, everyone in the shelter was rescued by Israeli forces. Mark recounted seeing his parents’ bodies after he emerged, “and I wanted to just go with them. I didn’t want to live anymore.”

“They were good people, simple people,” he said. “They never did anything bad to anyone… they devoted their lives to generosity, to love.”

In a video released by a Buchari communal group, he recalled that every day when he would come home from work “my mother would be waiting for me with a smile on her face. She would give me a hug all the time, every morning, all the time she would be blessing me, always telling me ‘thank you that I have you.'”

His father he said, “felt that he found a home here [in Israel]. He was a simple man, with a smile on his face, always smiling. Everyone knew him, everyone in the city knew him.”

The couple, he said, would sit every evening on a bench in the city square and greet passersby, often handing out candy. On that bench today, is a plaque in their memory.