On Tuesday, 13 December, 2022 at an impressive ceremony was held at Kibbutz Hazorea, which allowed us to use its spacious hall, 210 Jewish Rescuer citations were awarded. We were also honored with the participation of three of the recipients, who accepted the citations themselves.
Israeli President Chaim Herzog sent his greetings via a video screen.
Speakers at the awards ceremony included David Gur, Arieh Barnea, Yuval Alpan, Bnai Brith World Center-Jerusalem Director Attorney Alan Schneider, Major General (ret.) Eliezer Shkedy, who accepted the citation on behalf of his father and Youth Movement Secretary General Naftali Deri. The ceremony was emceed by Prof. Gideon Greiff.
The Address by David Gur, Chairman of the Society for the Research of the History of the Zionist Youth Movement in Hungary
Friends, members of the Underground
Children of underground members
Recipients of the Rescuer Citation, for the activities of their parents
Honored guests,
Have you heard of the Underground Zionist Youth Movement in Hungary in 1944?
I am the last surviving operative of that underground.
I will describe to you the activities of the Underground:
Sending 200 emissaries to 300 communities, ghettos and forced work units, to warn them and rescue them. The emissaries brought money, documents and addresses in Budapest.
Smuggling 15,000 young Jews to Rumania, saving them from deportation to Auschwitz and certain death.
Establishing and managing 55 children’s houses, saving 6,000 children and caregivers.
Printing and distributing tens of thousands of Swiss protection certificates (Schutzpass), giving them to any Jew that requested.
Bringing food and heating materials, escorted and guarded by underground members – to the children’s houses, to the Glass House, to the safe houses and to the large ghetto in Budapest.
Cooperating with and assisting the local non-Jewish anti-Nazi organizations.
Ours was the only underground throughout all Nazi-controlled Europe during WWII – with all the local Zionist youth movements united, established a joint organization (the Underground) which worked in harmony and solidarity to rescue Jews, with impressive success.
In 1984, veterans of the 1944 underground established the Society for the Research of the History of the Zionist Youth Movement in Hungary, in order to gather all the material connected with the 1944 underground’s operations – biographies, essays and research reports. Our vision included initiating research, producing documentary films, preserving and publicizing the Underground’s existence, its significance, operations and unique rescue enterprises, and to bequeath them as an exemplar for future generations.
Indeed, the “Society” has managed to publish 20 books in Hebrew, English and Hungarian. We have produced 15 documentaries and launched a Facebook page and a website in Hebrew. The translation of the website into English is in the advanced stages of completion.
The society has a rich archive that has been assembled over the past few decades, and in keeping with the times its materials are currently being digitized. The books, the many documents and the correspondence in various languages will soon me accessible on the website, for the benefit of the interested public in Israel and around the world.
I am the acting chairman of the society since its establishment. Over the years a second generation has grown up in the society, and has contributed much to ensure the future of the society and the memory of the extraordinary rescue operation of the Underground Zionist Youth Movement in Hungary during the dark period of the Holocaust. Benny Barzilay is the creative director of the documentary films, Joseph Gonda, the driving force behind the development of the website and Yuval Alpan is helping us successfully in many other areas. The organization of this ceremony is testimony of this, and the list goes on.
The society works in conjunction with JRJ (Jews Rescued Jews) – with figures such as Chaim Roet, the legendary founder of JRJ, the brilliant Arieh Barnea, the current chairman, and Attorney Alan Schneider, director of Bnai Brith World Center-Jerusalem, who can find a solution to any problem. Thanks to their joint efforts, approximately 150 Jews were awarded the Jewish Rescuer Citation, and today over 200 Underground Zionist Youth Movement in Hungary members are receiving this citation.
How did we find the members of the Underground? In preparation for the 60th anniversary of the Underground’s activities, I took upon myself the almost impossible mission of gathering, interviewing, and researching the stories of the Underground members whose activities had not yet been published. That is how the book, “Brothers for Resistance and Rescue” was conceived, featuring hundreds of updated members, their photos and stories. This book was published in 2004 and is the only source for the description of the operations and eligibility of the Underground members for the Jewish Rescuer Citation.
In our battle-torn country, the ruling ethos is of the man holding a weapon and giving his blood for the state. Alongside that, the ethos of the rescuer has not yet been accorded the recognition it deserves, even though the Jewish rescuer knowingly endangered his life to save other Jews, whom he did not know.
Each generation has its struggles. Each generation also leaves a struggle for the following generations. We, the generation of the Underground have left you to finish the struggle for the full recognition of the rescue ethos.
Be proud of the deeds of the Underground generation and do not give up.
The address by Arieh Barnea, chairman of the Committee for the Appreciation of the Heroism of the Jewish Rescuers
Ladies and Gentlemen!
If our committee had decided to assemble, not the families of the rescuers from Hungary, but rather the families of the rescued – we would not have been able to do so. In the Kibbutz Movement, in the north and in the south, there would not be enough room in the cultural auditoriums. This thought shines a light on the great achievement of the rescuers, as thousands and tens of thousands of the children of four generations lived and are alive thanks to them.
When we watched the video greetings from Israel’s president, for a small moment the screen went black. Perhaps someone thought this was an insignificant technical malfunction, but I can tell you that it was all planned: the screen darkened, and rightly so, the moment the president mentioned that the youth movements went underground.
I would like to thank all the many members who contributed and are contributing to our ceremony, including members of the sub-committee that made the decision regarding the identities of the citation recipients, after long discussions and difficult deliberations: Channa Arnon, Ido Gilad, Dr. Mordechai Paldiel, Attorney Alan Schneider, and for an extended period, Noa Gidron.
A special thank you to David Gur, one of the rescuers, chairman of the Society for the Research of the History of the Zionist Youth Movement in Hungary, who also serves on our committee. We appreciate your work very much, and you are our teacher and inspiration.
I offer my heartfelt thanks to Yuval Alpan, vice-chairman of both the Society for the Research of the History of the Zionist Youth Movement in Hungary and the Committee for the Appreciation of the Heroism of the Jewish Rescuers. Yuval devoted countless hours to this ceremony, both night and day. He handled all the details from every angle and displayed exceptional dedication. Yuval, if your father is watching us from somewhere, I am certain he is very proud of you.
It is important to note that our committee deals with the rescue operations in all the Holocaust countries, which number more than 20, and grants the Rescuer Citation to Jewish heroes who operated in an area stretching from Hungary to Morocco.
In the near future we will complete the establishment of a center for the heritage of the rescuers from all the countries, which will be dedicated here, in Kibbutz Hazorea. Since 1951 the kibbutz has housed the Wilfrid Israel Museum for Asian Art and Studies. Wilfrid, a German philanthropist, donated the initial collection to the museum and was also a great rescuer. Our partners on behalf of the museum are here in the hall: Director Nurit Asher and curator Shir Meller Yamaguchi.
Why are we doing these things?
Ostensibly, to express our sense of indebtedness and to express our appreciation to the rescuers themselves, for example – the four rescuers from Hungary who are here in the hall, and toward their families. In addition, we want to contribute to the memory of this wonderful chapter in future generations. But that is not the main point.
The main point is the significance that we, and perhaps also future generations, attribute to the rescue. Perhaps in the future the children and the adults will not remember dates, and the names of people and places. We will achieve our goal if they connect these stories to the values that we seek to instill: the continued existence of the Jewish nation and the value of human life. Those are the values behind the Underground’s operations. In the future, a person will likely forget the details of the story of heroism that he heard in his childhood, but he will feel inspired by it and will draw on it for guidance and strength in emergencies, and even in regular times.
Our supreme goal is not that every future child and adult know the historical details, but rather that they learn from the rescuers how to conduct themselves, with courage, resourcefulness and leadership, for the sake of the national and humanitarian values.
We all appreciate the young people who took up arms against the Nazis. These young people went above and beyond, for the sake of the national honor of the Jewish nation, and set an example. The Underground in Hungary, on the other hand, made a momentous decision: not to go into armed combat for that value, but rather to save lives. That is the example we are addressing this evening.
We are issuing a call from here to all teachers in Israel, some of whom are here in this hall: tell your students the story of the rescue, even if just once a year, in a history lesson or a home room lesson, and try to present the rescue as an exciting example for the children. If we act in the future guided by the light of this example – the State of Israel, the Jewish nation and human society will overcome great difficulties and will go onward and upward.
Address of Yuval Alpan, vice-chairman of the Committee for the Appreciation of the Heroism of the Jewish Rescuers and active member of the Society for the Research of the History of the Zionist Youth Movement in Hungary
Good evening,
We have gathered here today to show our appreciation to the men and women of the Underground Zionist Youth Movements in Hungary. To recognize their struggle, their courage, the tremendous rescue efforts they undertook to save the Jewish nation. We will award the Jewish Rescuer Citation to 209 of them, the vast majority of whom are very unfortunately no longer alive. I would like to remind everyone that 126 members of the Underground have already merited to receive the citation in previous years.
We, the relatives, activists of the society and its supporters, thank the Committee for the Appreciation of Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust and World Bnai Brith for awarding this citation, and especially for recognizing that you are granting to this rescue effort, the greatest in the history of the Holocaust, an effort that for some reason is absent from public awareness, and has not at all resonated.
I stand here today with great emotion and genuine pride as the representative of all 209 men and women that were young in years and in spirit, and acted with wisdom, resourcefulness, with mindfulness and tremendous courage, under horrifying conditions and in times of murder and annihilation, doing everything they could to save others. I also accept this citation on behalf of my mother, Tova Alpan, and on behalf of my father’s sisters, Shoshana Yaar and Ella Foltyn.
Members of the Halutz Youth Movements in Hungary decided against resistance – not to take up arms when the Germans invaded Hungary on March 19, 1944. The youth movements decided to try to save their members, their relatives and as many other Jews as possible. The Underground sent emissaries to warn the Jewish communities in a countless number of towns and villages. In an operation code named “The Tiyul”, thousands of young men and women were smuggled across the border from Hungary to Romania. The Underground operated from inside the Glass House where more than 3,000 people were hidden. In a daring and clever operation, 120 members that were captured and detained in the Central Prison, were freed.
Dozens of Underground operatives ventured out into the deadly streets day in and day out, to find safe houses for the fugitives and provide them with food, clothing, money and forged identity papers so that thousands could survive. Thousands more were rescued from the clutches of the Arrow Cross gangs. Someone wrote the following to me seveal days ago: “If you think about it, the natural instinct in such a situation is to escape and save yourself, as soon as possible, but that group of young rescuers was there from the beginning until the end, endangering their lives not just every day, but every hour. This is unimaginable!”
After the overthrow of the Arrow Cross, on October 15, 1944, any attempt to start a rebellion or armed uprising in the conditions that prevailed in Hungary would have meant certain death to the Jews of Budapest. “We made a clear-headed decision,” recalled the members of the Underground, “that the value of every Jew rescued, every child, or youth, was far greater than a few praises that would be recorded in the history of the Jewish nation, about the courageous instigators of rebellion who sacrificed their lives.”
Many were captured, tortured and murdered while fulfilling their missions. None of them expected a medal or asked for recognition. The sought to save and be saved. Their heroic actions saved thousands of Jews! One might ask, what is so great about saving one person, a Jewish soul? What is the big deal in sending an underground member on a mission? After all, whoever outfits his friend with identity papers and sends him on a mission is essentially sending him to the battlefront, into the “line of fire” (in this case the “fire” is critical eyes of the inspectors looking for forged documents).
“What did you really do?” were asked members of the youth movements who immigrated to Israel from Hungary. “All you did was forge some documents?” In our little country such actions were taken for granted. As if nothing was done. Rescuing is a given!
In one of his speeches my father, Moshe Alpan, o.b.m. said, and I quote:
“In the situation we were facing in those fateful days, the moral equation had only one answer: the value of life is measured by the number of lives that you can save.” And then he said, perhaps somewhat bluntly:
“Rescuing is a grey matter, compared to blood, which is red!”
He continued and asked, in his piercing manner:
“How many Jews does one have to save in order to get one line of honor in history?”
Yitzhak Herbst (Mimish), whose friends called him “Mr. Underground” because he was such a master of disguise and pretence, taught his friends how to behave, what to wear, how to blend into their surroundings and be inconspicuous. He used to ask:
”What’s better? A line that will be written in history, or maybe a settlement that will be named after me in Israel? Or that I prefer building a place in Israel using my own two hands?” To them, the answer was crystal clear.
Regretfully, to this day no place or institute, no memorial, has been built honoring the exceptional courage of the Zionist Youth Movements in Hungary, and in recognition of the extraordinary rescue missions they undertook. There is not even a street, city square or alley named after them.
The public has no awareness or any understanding, even today, of the motivations and thoughts of the Jewish rescuers, and their willingness to sacrifice their own lives for others. They had no obligation to do this!! They listened to their own personal, group and movement conscience and took initiative. They took responsibility and did what is perhaps the most noble thing a person can do: save people’s lives. With their actions these undercover fighters served as an example of Jewish and human solidarity.
Yoshka Meir, one of the Underground heroes, disguised himself as an Arrow Cross officer and rescued distressed men and women members of the Underground. He delivered and distributed hundreds of sponsorship letters to people even as they were on “death marches.” in his book, “The Way of the Warrior,” he wrote, “…but even though members of the Halutz Underground took part in the historic victory, they lost the battle over history!”
“Why didn’t you revolt?” they were asked-questioned, with an increasingly measure of accusation and insolence. “How many weapons did you have? Why weren’t you prepared?” And then comes the question in his book, and I quote:
“And what could Rafi Friedl and Moshe Alpan, leaders of the Underground, and Yoshka Meir, who needlessly prepared himself from a battle that never materialized, say then? Eretz Yisrael, the State of Israel, needed dead heroes! And these men in their humility brought live Jews. These men, whose entire fight was aimed at ensuring the future of the Jewish nation, refused to turn their lives and deaths into an Israeli legend, and of that they were accused.”
“We knew,” they said, “The Jewish nation cannot exist without Jews! Every Jewish soul must be saved. Every Jew must be ripped from the talons of the wild beasts, at any price and in any way. Now is not the time for Kiddush Hashem – sanctifying God’s name through martyrdom – but for sanctifying life.”
This ceremony, here today, is part of the process of recognizing the heroism of those Jewish rescuers, who operated in the various countries under Nazi control, including Hungary, to save their own people. This assembly is another step toward the internalization of the immensity of their deeds.
The certificate that the family members are receiving today on behalf of their parents, and the honor that we bestow on those who are no longer with us and whose relatives we were unable to find, is a moral and humanitarian act that will strengthen the legacy of their courage and the ethos of the rescue.
This ceremony here today, with this large audience, is touching and fills my heart with pride.
Thank you all for coming, the relatives of the citation recipients, the representatives of the youth movements, the representatives of the kibbutzim who came to receive the certificates for their members, whose relatives could not be located. Thank you, everyone who took part in this heartfelt event.
A big thank you to Attorney Arieh Barnea, Chairman of the Committee for the Appreciation of the Heroism of the Jewish Rescuers, who initiated the project for providing the recognition to so many, and for leading the effort to check the actions of the candidates and approve them, based on predetermined criteria.
Thank you, Alan Schneider, director of the Bnai Brith World Center in Jerusalem, who is the driving force behind the publicizing of the phenomenon of Jews saving Jews and who has been active in this effort for 20 years, along with Chaim Roet (who initiated the awarding of the citation).
Thank you, David Gur, chairman of the Society for the Research of the History of the Zionist Youth Movement in Hungary, one of the last surviving Underground operatives, who is with us today, and who embarked many years ago with his friends, on the quest to attain recognition for that exceptional group of young people.
I would like to thank the small team that helped produce this conference – Efraim Cohen, Ami Kilon and Dani Benshalom, who, among other things, took upon themselves the search for relatives as a personal mission and a supreme goal, to reach as many as possible, and indeed we managed to find over 90 families of recipients of the citation, and thanks to that effort, our audience today includes over 300 relatives who came to participate in the ceremony. To me, this is simply amazing.
In 1981 I received a call-up notice to the naval commando unit of which I was a veteran, to a top-secret operation to save Ethiopian Jews. We landed on the Sudanese beach in 20 rubber dinghies and took approximately 300 Jews who were waiting there, whom the Israeli government had decided to rescue. During that operation, the Sudanese security forces fired at us. Our commander ordered us not to return fire and not to launch any reprisal attack. We were there as a rescue team, and did everything to hasten the boarding of the children, women and men onto the dinghies, and to head back out to sea, to bring them to the Bat Galim ship, where a large team of doctors and nurses were waiting to take care of the rescued in the best possible way.
We were trained soldiers! Soldiers who knew that behind them stood the entire Israel Defense Forces, on standby, in case something went wrong.
Why? I ask myself again, “Why is Operation Solomon, to take Jews out of Ethiopia and bring them to Israel considered an action of national importance, and why are similar secret operations by Mossad agents, to rescue Jews from places where their lives are in danger – from Morocco, Iraq, Yemen and Syria – considered and known as important and praiseworthy actions, while the rescue operations of the Underground in Hungary, even before the State of Israel, are barely heard of?
Why were those same persecuted Jews who came to Israel from these countries in which the Jews were in great distress not asked – why didn’t you revolt, but our parents were repeatedly asked, “Why did you not rebel?”
In Hungary, the mission if the Underground operatives was to save Jews! They were not trained soldiers, and did not have any backup. Not from anyone. And still, they enlisted for reserve duty for the Jewish nation. The decided not to take up arms, because there was no chance of that succeeding, and instead deliberately decided to save the surviving remnants (sheirit hapleita). Most were active for a long time, under assumed identities, in mortal danger every day and every hour. Many of them could have escaped and saved themselves.
It is incomprehensible why the deeds of the Halutz Youth Movements in Hungary are barely known, and that their actions are not perceived as an ethos of heroism that is a guiding light in education.
I will conclude with a short story. My father and Abba Kovner, one of the leaders of the underground in the Vilna ghetto, were both members of the same youth movement – Hashomer Hatzair. They had a principle disagreement that lasted many years. Kovner claimed that the youth movements in Hungary should have revolted and taken up arms! Mosha Alpan argued that conditions did not support that, and that the end of the war was already on the horizon, and it was already known that there were almost no Jews left in Europe. “We thought,” said my father, “that we must save whomever we can.”
Toward the end of his life, Abba Kovner told my father, “You were right!”
The proof that members of the underground rescue units in Hungary were right is here in front of us. The proof is you, the relatives of the rescuers, and their next generations, who are here with us to day.
I hope that the ceremony today, on behalf of the heroic men and women, members of the Underground rescuers, will break through the walls of silence and public awareness. I hope we will succeed in our struggle to historically amend and justify the recognition of their deeds in those horrific times in Hungary in 1944.
Their legacy must be an example and role model in Israel.
I invite you to join this struggle.
Thank you, everyone, for your participation.
Good evening.
