In a Monday ceremony marking Yom Hashoah at the Knesset, Speaker Amir Ohana lit a memorial candle in honor of Ada Dadosh, who underwent Nazi experiments during the Holocaust.
“At the age of three months, she fell ill with pneumonia. Her father, Yosef, helplessly approached the camp doctor, whom he called ‘hell on earth,’ and asked him for a cure. The doctor held Ada, took a syringe, stabbed and injected it into her body,” Ohana said. “A few minutes later, her heart stopped beating. It wasn’t medicine that the devil injected, but poison.”
According to the Holocaust Survivors’ Rights Authority, a dwindling number of survivors still remain to offer testimony. On Sunday, Esther Greitzer, an Auschwitz survivor, died at the age of 95, with no children to recite the Jewish Kaddish memorial prayer on her behalf because of the Nazi experiments performed on her during the Holocaust.
Only 133,362 survivors and victims of antisemitic harassment during World War II currently live in Israel, according to the authority, with 96% of the survivors being children at the time of the Holocaust. The cities with the highest number of survivors are Haifa (9,060), Jerusalem (8,468), Tel Aviv (7,033), Ashdod (6,747), Netanya (6,642), and Beersheva (5,633).
Among the Holocaust survivors in Israel, 35,436 were born in Europe, with the largest group (39%) hailing from Romania (13,881). Other notable birthplaces include Poland (4,965), Bulgaria (3,579), Hungary (1,645), and the former Soviet Union (5,647). Only 2.8% of survivors, or 1,016 individuals, were born in Germany.
