Dear Friends and conference participants,
I am the last surviving member and representative of the underground Zionist Youth Resistance Movement. For me, this gathering is an important opportunity to hand over to you the message of my life.
All along the chain of the generations of the youth movements, each generation left a heritage, and each generation left struggles for the next generation.
We, our generation, members of the underground Zionist Youth Resistance Movements in Hungary during the Holocaust, left a heritage of taking responsibility for life and death, and taking conscious risks in order to save thousands of Jews whom we had never met.
In Israel, which has been struggling for its existence since its very establishment, there is a prevailing ethos of the man who carries a rifle for the sake of his homeland. You, in your generation, the second and third generation, must struggle for the acceptance of the ethos of rescue alongside the existing ethos – the ethos of rescuing Jews, rescuing at the risk of life, that we, the rescuers, the underground Zionist Youth Resistance Movements, did not know.
Each generation and its struggles.
The task is formidable and you are the hope.
Rise up an succeed.
David Gur – Chairman of the Society for the Research of the History of the Zionist Youth Movements in Hungary, and guardian of the glowing ember of the underground Zionist Youth Resistance Movements in Hungary.
