Ghetto Survivor Finds Support and Love at Hesed

For the past 3 years, 70 year-old Joshua has been a Hesed client. Despite his old age and recovering from an illness (myocardial infarction), he is a very energetic man. He participates actively in group lessons and is respected by other Hesed clients and workers.

Joshua was born in Tyvrov, Vinnitskaya area in Ukraine in 1933. Before the war it was a peaceful place filled with gardens and fields. In September 1941, Joshua was supposed to start school but his dreams of a happy future were broken. For 3 years, from July 1941 through March 1944, Joshua lived an inhuman life in a ghetto. He survived by a miracle, but the pain and mental anguish he endured has remained with him. Joshua found the strength to complete evening school, polytechnic school, and then Kiev Polytechnic institute, after which he worked in Vinnitsa at an electromechanical factory.

In 1979 he was invited as an expert technologist to the Tashkent Aviation factory. He continued working through his retirement age, until illness forced him to stop. Today though love of life and natural optimism have helped him become active at his Hesed.

Hesed has become an integral part of Joshua's life. There he has found many new friends - the same fellow-sufferers in the past - former prisoners of ghettos and concentration camps. They are now a large and amicable family of the prisoners of the ghetto, in which no one can imagine life without each other, and certainly, without the Hesed. "I am very grateful to all Hesed workers for their sensitive and attentive attitude to us - the old! Honor and praise to you!" – Joshua.