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Survivors of Holocaust and October 7 Speak Out Ahead of Holocaust Day
Nusia Bondriansky. Credit: Mishel Amzallag, IFCJ
As the world marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day with the horrors of October 7 still fresh, Holocaust survivors in Israel who also survived Hamas’ onslaught are reliving parts of their tortured childhood.
Ruth Haran was the same age as her abducted great granddaughter, Yahel, when she went through the terrors of the Holocaust. Born in Romania in 1935, her mother said her birth, given its timing at the peak of Nazism’s advent, was “unlucky.” Her father, born in Poland and forcibly exiled from Romania for not being a citizen, left his mother to fend for the family amid growing anti-Jewish violence in Romania.
“For years we were on the run and I can still remember the freezing cold and the starving nights we had to endure during our run from the Nazis,” Haran said.
Eight decades later, Haran said she experienced “a second Holocaust” when her kibbutz, Be’eri, was invaded on Oct. 7, murdering or kidnapping almost a tenth of the residents.
Ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Ruth Haran says she experienced a “second Holocaust” during the invasion of her kibbutz, Be’eri.
Her son, Avshalom, and two other family members were murdered.
Seven other members of her family, including her daughter Sharon, son Noam, daughter-in-law Shoshan, grandchildren Adi and her husband Tal, and their two children, Neve and Yahel, were kidnapped to Gaza. Six were released. Tal remains in captivity.
“I’ve endured pain before but this time it refuses to be internalized. I wake up and see the images [of Oct.7] in the night, it’s horrific,” Haran said in an interview with Israel’s Channel 12.
“On the lawns outside, babies and children were scattered everywhere, dead bodies. I will never forget it.”
Haran is part of an exhibition called ‘Humans of the Holocaust’, by photographer Erez Kaganovitz, himself the grandson of Holocaust survivors. Kaganovitz has recently added several survivors of Oct. 7 to the project.
Like Haran, Haim Ranaan, who is also part of Kaganovitz’s project, described October 7 as a “second Holocaust.” But unlike Haran, Ranaan, a co-founder of Be’eri, did not have any family members killed or murdered that day. “I don’t know what I would do if one of my grandchildren or great-grandchildren were kidnapped to Gaza,” he said.
Also from Be’eri is Yosef Avi Yair Engel, the son of two Holocaust survivors and a grandfather of released hostage Ofir Engel, 17.
“Don’t think only about what started 8 October,” Engel told journalists on Friday. “People are looking at the children of Gaza dying] but they have forgotten about the seventh of October.”
“For me as a specialist about the Holocaust, it was a day out of the Holocaust. What I feel now is the same.”
Yosi Shnaider, the third generation to holocaust survivors, is the cousin of Shiri Bibas, who was kidnapped from her home in Nir Oz with her two sons, Ariel, 4, and 9-month-old, Kfir. His aunt was also murdered.
“Five generations of my family have been persecuted because they are Jews,” Shnaider told reporters. “In two days, 33% of Kfir’s life will have been in captivity.”
Shnaider compared the list of hostages set for release in November’s truce to Schindler’s List from the Holocaust.
“We saw with this list of who will be alive, who isn’t, who will be freed and who will be kept in captivity,” he said. Every day of the staged prisoner swap, hopes were dashed as the Bibas family failed to appear on the list. “I don’t know if you can ever imagine it.”
At 102 years old, Nusia Bondriansky suffered the atrocities of the Holocaust already as an adult. Bondriansky has a different take about October 7, although she wasn’t directly impacted by the atrocities that unfolded in the Gaza periphery communities. Living in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, Bondriansky’s home, however, has been a target of Hamas rockets for nearly two decades. Beginning on October 8, the city sustained hundreds of direct impacts. Still, Bondriansky says at her age, she’s “not afraid of anything.”
“I actually want to look out the window and see how the Iron Dome manages to intercept the missiles,” she said. Her own house does not have a safe room and she’s too infirm to make it to the nearest public bomb shelter. These days, Bondriansky’s son looks after her and she also receives aid from the humanitarian organization, the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews.
At 19 and pregnant, her life turned upside down overnight when World War II broke out. Her husband, who was enlisted in the Red Army, was killed, leaving her to flee Odessa after the Nazis came. Along with her sister, who was also pregnant, the two fled for many months, while bombs fell around them. She survived for years in Siberia, raising her son alone.
“Contrary to the feeling of fear I had in World War II, I feel safe. I live in Israel, we have an army that protects us,” she said.
Bondriansky expressed sorrow over the deaths of IDF soldiers, which has reached 216 since Israel’s military campaign against Hamas began.
“The most painful thing now is to hear about our young boys dying in the war. I am sad for everyone who died,” she said.
The post Survivors of Holocaust and October 7 Speak Out Ahead of Holocaust Day first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Trump Eyes Bringing Azerbaijan, Central Asian Nations into Abraham Accords, Sources Say
US President Donald Trump points a finger as he delivers remarks in the Roosevelt Room at the White House in Washington, DC, US, July 31, 2025. Photo: Kent Nishimura via Reuters Connect
President Donald Trump’s administration is actively discussing with Azerbaijan the possibility of bringing that nation and some Central Asian allies into the Abraham Accords, hoping to deepen their existing ties with Israel, according to five sources with knowledge of the matter.
As part of the Abraham Accords, inked in 2020 and 2021 during Trump’s first term in office, four Muslim-majority countries agreed to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel after US mediation.
Azerbaijan and every country in Central Asia, by contrast, already have longstanding relations with Israel, meaning that an expansion of the accords to include them would largely be symbolic, focusing on strengthening ties in areas like trade and military cooperation, said the sources, who requested anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Such an expansion would reflect Trump’s openness to pacts that are less ambitious than his administration’s goal to convince regional heavyweight Saudi Arabia to restore ties with Israel while war rages in Gaza.
The kingdom has repeatedly said it would not recognize Israel without steps towards Israeli recognition of a Palestinian state.
Another key sticking point is Azerbaijan’s conflict with its neighbor Armenia, since the Trump administration considers a peace deal between the two Caucasus nations as a precondition to join the Abraham Accords, three sources said.
While Trump officials have publicly floated several potential entrants into the accords, the talks centered on Azerbaijan are among the most structured and serious, the sources said. Two of the sources argued a deal could be reached within months or even weeks.
Trump’s special envoy for peace missions, Steve Witkoff, traveled to Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, in March to meet with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. Aryeh Lightstone, a key Witkoff aide, met Aliyev later in the spring in part to discuss the Abraham Accords, three of the sources said.
As part of the discussions, Azerbaijani officials have contacted officials in Central Asian nations, including in nearby Kazakhstan, to gauge their interest in a broader Abraham Accords expansion, those sources said. It was not clear which other countries in Central Asia – which includes Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan – were contacted.
The State Department, asked for comment, did not discuss specific countries, but said expanding the accords has been one of the key objectives of Trump. “We are working to get more countries to join,” said a US official.
The Azerbaijani government declined to comment.
The White House, the Israeli foreign ministry and the Kazakhstani embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment.
Any new accords would not modify the previous Abraham Accords deals signed by Israel.
OBSTACLES REMAIN
The original Abraham Accords – inked between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan – were centered on restoration of ties. The second round of expansion appears to be morphing into a broader mechanism designed to expand US and Israeli soft power.
Wedged between Russia to the north and Iran to the south, Azerbaijan occupies a critical link in trade flows between Central Asia and the West. The Caucasus and Central Asia are also rich in natural resources, including oil and gas, prompting various major powers to compete for influence in the region.
Expanding the accords to nations that already have diplomatic relations with Israel may also be a means of delivering symbolic wins to a president who is known to talk up even relatively small victories.
Two sources described the discussions involving Central Asia as embryonic – but the discussions with Azerbaijan as relatively advanced.
But challenges remain and there is no guarantee a deal will be reached, particularly with slow progress in talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
The two countries, which both won independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, have been at loggerheads since the late 1980s when Nagorno-Karabakh – an Azerbaijani region that had a mostly ethnic-Armenian population – broke away from Azerbaijan with support from Armenia.
In 2023, Azerbaijan retook Karabakh, prompting about 100,000 ethnic Armenians to flee to Armenia. Both sides have since said they want to sign a treaty on a formal end to the conflict.
Primarily Christian Armenia and the US have close ties, and the Trump administration is wary of taking action that could upset authorities in Yerevan.
Still, US officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump himself, have argued that a peace deal between those two nations is near.
“Armenia and Azerbaijan, we worked magic there,” Trump told reporters earlier in July. “And it’s pretty close.”
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Trump Reaffirms Support for Morocco’s Sovereignty Over Western Sahara
A Polisario fighter sits on a rock at a forward base, on the outskirts of Tifariti, Western Sahara, Sept. 9, 2016. Photo: Reuters / Zohra Bensemra / File.
US President Donald Trump has reaffirmed support for Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara, saying a Moroccan autonomy plan for the territory was the sole solution to the disputed region, state news agency MAP said on Saturday.
The long-frozen conflict pits Morocco, which considers the territory as its own, against the Algeria-backed Polisario Front, which seeks an independent state there.
Trump at the end of his first term in office recognized the Moroccan claims to Western Sahara, which has phosphate reserves and rich fishing grounds, as part of a deal under which Morocco agreed to normalize its relations with Israel.
His secretary of state, Marco Rubio, made clear in April that support for Morocco on the issue remained US policy, but these were Trump’s first quoted remarks on the dispute during his second term.
“I also reiterate that the United States recognizes Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara and supports Morocco’s serious, credible and realistic autonomy proposal as the only basis for a just and lasting solution to the dispute,” MAP quoted Trump as saying in a message to Morocco’s King Mohammed VI.
“Together we are advancing shared priorities for peace and security in the region, including by building on the Abraham Accords, combating terrorism and expanding commercial cooperation,” Trump said.
As part of the Abraham Accords signed during Trump’s first term, four Muslim-majority countries agreed to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel after US mediation.
In June this year, Britain became the third permanent member of the U.N. Security Council to back an autonomy plan under Moroccan sovereignty for the territory after the U.S. and France.
Algeria, which has recognized the self-declared Sahrawi Republic, has refused to take part in roundtables convened by the U.N. envoy to Western Sahara and insists on holding a referendum with independence as an option.
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Israel Says Its Missions in UAE Remain Open Despite Reported Security Threats
President Isaac Herzog meets on Dec. 5, 2022, with UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan in Abu Dhabi. Photo: GPO/Amos Ben Gershom
i24 News – Israel’s Foreign Ministry said on Friday that its missions to the United Arab Emirates are open on Friday and representatives continue to operate at the embassy in Abu Dhabi and the consulate in Dubai in cooperation with local authorities.
This includes, the statement underlined, ensuring the protection of Israeli diplomats.
On Thursday, reports appeared in Israeli media that Israel was evacuating most of its diplomatic staff in the UAE after the National Security Council heightened its travel warning for Israelis staying in the Gulf country for fear of an Iranian or Iran-sponsored attacks.
“We are emphasizing this travel warning given our understanding that terrorist organizations (the Iranians, Hamas, Hezbollah and Global Jihad) are increasing their efforts to harm Israel,” the NSC said in a statement.
After signing the Abraham Accords with Israel in 2020, the UAE has been among the closest regional allies of the Jewish state.
Israel is concerned about its citizens and diplomats being targeted in retaliatory attacks following its 12-day war against Iran last month.
Earlier this year, the UAE sentenced three citizens of Uzbekistan to death for last year’s murder of Israeli-Moldovan rabbi Zvi Cohen.