“Yarin is missing. If you have any information, contact us. She was at the Nahal Oz base yesterday. » We are in the aftermath of the October 7 attack, when hundreds of Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel, attacking soldiers and civilians and killing at least 1,400 of them in a barrage of rockets. On social networks, the sweet face of Yarin, 20, a nurse at the Nahal Oz military base, on the border with Gaza, is shared by Patrick Spitz, her grandfather.
A few hours later, it was Yaël, one of Patrick’s three daughters, who, in a voice message sent, announced to me the death of her niece. She gasps: ” She is dead. His body is guarded by the army. She wasn’t kidnapped. We are all devastated. » No burial date has yet been decided since the entire region has been declared a combat zone.
Patrick Spitz’s wife, Yarin’s grandmother, is Malka Rafenberg, a distant member of my family who I have been following for several years, thanks in particular to social networks. We talk regularly without ever having met. In 1939, therefore, Malka’s father, Shimon, cousin of my great-grandfather, left Warsaw, enlisted in the cavalry of the Polish army and managed to flee on horseback, as soon as the German invasion, to the USSR . Pogroms, humiliations, anti-Semitism, Poland was a hostile land for Jews. Family members who fled to France, the United Kingdom or Russia survived. The others died in the Warsaw ghetto or in concentration camps.
In Leningrad, Shimon meets Helena, a medical student. Together, they settled in Tashkent (present-day Uzbekistan), where their son, Yoel, was born, then in Lviv, Ukraine, where their daughter, Malka, was born in 1951. Nine years later, they returned to Warsaw, where their parents disappeared and the family home razed. They then learned that Poland was the only country in the Soviet bloc to allow Jews to emigrate to Israel. They move to the suburbs of Tel Aviv. Shimon works in the aeronautical industry, while Helena, who has become a cancer specialist, devotes herself to raising their children.
“Equality and fraternity”
In 1970, Patrick Spitz, 23, from a Catholic family in Strasbourg, visited a friend in Israel. Left home at 18, with his brother, he enjoyed discovering the world and returned from a long trip to San Francisco, California. In the resort town of Eilat, he meets Malka, falls in love, converts to Judaism and stays in Israel.
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