Yafeh Orbach’s mother HY”D was murdered when she was five years old. Today, Mrs. Orbach is 80. Mrs. Ethel Lachs, 88, survived Auschwitz and hid in the woods. Mrs. Ruth Bauman, 82, still has a hard time talking about the war years. Last week, they along with others, celebrated their bas mitzvah at the Kosel for as children, they never were able to have one.

Some 70 years later, thirty survivors who live in Kfar Saba were taken to Yerushalayim to celebrate a bas mitzvah together due to the initiative of Kfar Saba Mayor Yehuda Ben-Chamu.

Mrs. Orbach arrived in Israel at the age of 12, and for her, the bas mitzvah at the Kosel was the “closing of a circle”. She explains as a little girl she was starving for bread and back then, she never dreamed that one day she would merit celebrating a bas mitzvah, yet alone at the Kosel.

“Mother died and father was taken to Siberia and I remained with my older brother who was six years older than me in the streets” she explains. “I was born in Chernovitz in Vienna, a city that prior to WWI was Austrian. It moved to Romania after the war. We were taken from there in freight trains. My brother and I endured hell. We went from one orphanage to another and at the end of the war, when we returned to Chernovitz, we were sent to another place for children and we were both suffering from malnutrition. When I was 12, I got to a Greek vessel from Cyprus to my family in Tel Monde”.

Mrs. Orbach eventually joined the IDF, got married, and had two daughters. Today Baruch Hashem she is the grandmother of six. “I am proud to be the bridge between the Holocaust and the revival” she adds. She also proudly reflects to the time when she worked in Kibbutz S’dei Boker alongside David Ben-Gurion.

Mrs. Lachs was born in Romania, and her entire far with the exception of her brother perished in the Holocaust, in Auschwitz. She too hid in the forests and made her way to Israel with the assistance of the Russians. She explains that immediately after the war she returned to Romania and joined Bnei Akiva and when she arrived in Israel, she joined a Bnei Akiva kibbutz.

Mrs. Bauman explains she could not wait for the bas mitzvah, and she was counting the hours from a week before. “I am almost 83 and celebrating my bas mitzvah, and at the Kosel, in Yerushalayim, my capital, in my land” she adds. She arrived in Israel at the age of 15 and a half.

The event was full of emotion for all thirty women, who thanked the mayor for the opportunity to mark this special day in their lives, albeit several decades later than most.

(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem / Photo: Kfar Saba City Hall)