‘These Voices Won’t Be Here Forever’: Jerusalem Event Preserves Survivor Testimonies
Gabriel Colodro reports from Jerusalem on a Holocaust remembrance event that stepped away from formal scripts and into the raw mechanics of survival. During the week of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, survivors gathered at the Friends of Zion Museum to talk about “miracles,” not as theology, but as the tiny human decisions and coincidences that kept them alive long enough to build lives afterward.
The occasion marked the launch of I Remember a Miracle Too (Zachur Li Gam Nes), a new book compiling 52 testimonies from Bobot veChalomot (Dolls and Dreams). The ceremony followed a simple pattern: survivors’ recorded stories on screen, then the survivors onstage lighting memorial candles alongside Israel Defense Forces soldiers. Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion, former Chief Rabbi David Lau, and project founder Michal Fundaminsky framed the evening.
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The accounts were specific and brutal. Beni Harel, born in Tripoli in 1936, survived bombings that killed his brothers and paralyzed his mother. Hungarian siblings Haia and Mordechai described separation from their parents and an astonishing roadside encounter that reunited them with their father. Hari Gimpovich, deported as a child, said his grandmother saved him by thrusting him off a transport at the last moment. Orna, born in Paris, recalled a priest pulling her close and pretending to pray as German boots passed. Naomi Cassuto said a delay caused by her father teaching tefillin made the family miss a train they later learned went to Auschwitz.
Fundaminsky said Oct. 7 reawakened fears for survivors’ descendants. Colodro’s full piece is worth reading for the details that ceremonies rarely capture.
