Faces of Iron: Dora

Stand for Israel | September 20, 2024

(Photo: Mishel Amzaleg)

“I remember the war,” says Dora, thinking back to early childhood. “I remember how my father left home and went to serve in the army. I remember my mother crying the day he left.”

Dora’s mother bundled the four-year-old girl and her young brother onto a freight train to somewhere—in hopes of outrunning the Nazis. She gave what little food she could find to her children, hoping to keep them alive.

“When we reached northern Russia, she was just skin and bones,” Dora recalls her mother’s selfless love, a love that helped her and her brother survive the war.

And then Dora recalls another time of horror and violence, another time when she was targeted because of her Jewish faith. She recalls when Hamas terrorists overran her home in Ofakim in southern Israel on October 7^th.

“That Shabbat, I woke up early to the sound of alarms and a big commotion outside. If my son hadn’t been with me that morning I don’t think I would have survived.” The elderly woman’s son locked them into her apartment as terrorists massacred people outside, the sounds of the attack seeming to last forever.

But, just as her mother’s love saved Dora’s life during the darkest days of the Holocaust, so too did her son’s love help her survive October 7^th. And though war and rockets still threaten the southern Israeli apartment that this precious Holocaust survivor calls home, she is strengthened and kept going because of continued help from Christian friends around the world. “Thanks to The Fellowship’s assistance I have food at home. It moves me that even while there is a war, you continue to send help.”