WII rescuer reunites with Jews she saved
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5 سال پیش
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(4 Nov 2019) LEAD IN
(4 Nov 2019) LEAD IN :
Forty members of an Israeli family held a tearful reunion with a 92-year-old Greek woman to whom they owe their very existence.
The emotional encounter was the first time Melpomeni Dina met the offspring of the Mordechai family whom she helped save during the Holocaust.
STORY-LINE
An emotional encounter. This Jewish family owe their very existence to this elderly Greek woman , who sheltered them during World War II.
Dina saved Sarah Yanai and Yossi Mor from the holocaust.
The Mordechai family lived in Veria, Greece, near Thessaloniki.
As the Nazis began rounding up the Jews for deportation in early 1943, the family's non-Jewish friends provided them with fake identity cards and then hid them in the attic of the old abandoned Turkish mosque.
They were there for almost a year, but eventually had to leave because their health was declining.
That's when Dina and her two older sisters took the family of seven into their own single-room home on the outskirts of the city.
One of the children was Yanai, now 86, "we were hiding in her house, " she recalls, "she saved all my family six persons and thanks to her, now she can see all our large family. All this, thanks to her."
Dina gets to meet for the first time the offspring of the Mordechai family.
Mor, today 77, was just an infant but he remembers the kindness of Dina's family "they had to share the food that they got for themselves. They had to share it with us. We were more than they were , you see. We were six at the beginning, then Shmuel died. So really it is something unbelievable and of course she remembers it much more, much better than I do because I was small, I was a baby actually. But here and there, I remember a few things" he says.
Shortly after, Dina's sisters and their relatives helped them flee in various directions. They provided them with clothing before their departure.
The family reunited after liberation, and eventually made its way to Israel where the children built families of their own.
About 6 million European Jews were killed by German Nazis and their collaborators during World War II.
More than 27,000, including some 355 from Greece, have been recognized as "Righteous Among the Nations," Israel's highest honor to those non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.
The most famous cases are Oskar Schindler, whose efforts to save more than 1,000 Jews were documented in Steven Spielberg's 1993 film "Schindler's List," and Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who is credited for having saved at least 20,000 Jews before mysteriously disappearing.
The names of those honored for refusing to be indifferent to the genocide are engraved along an avenue of trees at the Jerusalem memorial. Only a few hundred are believed to still be alive.
Joel Zisenwine, director of the Righteous Among the Nations says "It's a very moving story because we have a case here where an extended Greek family, several generations took part in a rescue action in order to save a Jewish family and what we see here is moving in the sense that we have the evidence to an ongoing kind of relationship of the rescuers with the survivors and their descendants. There's an ongoing form of paying tribute than simply saying thanks."
"This is probably going to our last reunion, because of age and frailty," says Stanlee Stahl, the executive vice president of the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, which sponsored the event and which provides $1 million a year in monthly stipends to those recognized.
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Forty members of an Israeli family held a tearful reunion with a 92-year-old Greek woman to whom they owe their very existence.
The emotional encounter was the first time Melpomeni Dina met the offspring of the Mordechai family whom she helped save during the Holocaust.
STORY-LINE
An emotional encounter. This Jewish family owe their very existence to this elderly Greek woman , who sheltered them during World War II.
Dina saved Sarah Yanai and Yossi Mor from the holocaust.
The Mordechai family lived in Veria, Greece, near Thessaloniki.
As the Nazis began rounding up the Jews for deportation in early 1943, the family's non-Jewish friends provided them with fake identity cards and then hid them in the attic of the old abandoned Turkish mosque.
They were there for almost a year, but eventually had to leave because their health was declining.
That's when Dina and her two older sisters took the family of seven into their own single-room home on the outskirts of the city.
One of the children was Yanai, now 86, "we were hiding in her house, " she recalls, "she saved all my family six persons and thanks to her, now she can see all our large family. All this, thanks to her."
Dina gets to meet for the first time the offspring of the Mordechai family.
Mor, today 77, was just an infant but he remembers the kindness of Dina's family "they had to share the food that they got for themselves. They had to share it with us. We were more than they were , you see. We were six at the beginning, then Shmuel died. So really it is something unbelievable and of course she remembers it much more, much better than I do because I was small, I was a baby actually. But here and there, I remember a few things" he says.
Shortly after, Dina's sisters and their relatives helped them flee in various directions. They provided them with clothing before their departure.
The family reunited after liberation, and eventually made its way to Israel where the children built families of their own.
About 6 million European Jews were killed by German Nazis and their collaborators during World War II.
More than 27,000, including some 355 from Greece, have been recognized as "Righteous Among the Nations," Israel's highest honor to those non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.
The most famous cases are Oskar Schindler, whose efforts to save more than 1,000 Jews were documented in Steven Spielberg's 1993 film "Schindler's List," and Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who is credited for having saved at least 20,000 Jews before mysteriously disappearing.
The names of those honored for refusing to be indifferent to the genocide are engraved along an avenue of trees at the Jerusalem memorial. Only a few hundred are believed to still be alive.
Joel Zisenwine, director of the Righteous Among the Nations says "It's a very moving story because we have a case here where an extended Greek family, several generations took part in a rescue action in order to save a Jewish family and what we see here is moving in the sense that we have the evidence to an ongoing kind of relationship of the rescuers with the survivors and their descendants. There's an ongoing form of paying tribute than simply saying thanks."
"This is probably going to our last reunion, because of age and frailty," says Stanlee Stahl, the executive vice president of the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, which sponsored the event and which provides $1 million a year in monthly stipends to those recognized.
Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork
Twitter: Twitter: AP_Archive
Facebook: Facebook: APArchives
Instagram: Instagram: APNews
You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/you...
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