Avigdor Ben-Gal
Avigdor "Yanush" Ben-Gal (1936 – 2016, born Janusz Goldlust) was an IDF general. He was born in Lodz, Poland, and in 1939, fled the Nazis with his family. After his parents disappeared, he eventually arrived in Tel Aviv with his sister on the Tehran transport ("The Tehran children" were exiled to the USSR and reached Israel after a three and a half years long journey). He later found his purpose in the IDF, rising in the ranks to head the Seventh Armoured Brigade during one of the most difficult and heroic battles of the Yom Kippur War. These battles helped block the Syrian army on the Golan Heights.
Yanush Ben-Gal remembered in Tatarstan
During 2016 Limmud FSU Volga-Urals in Kazan, Russia’s chief rabbi Berel Lazar and several IDF generals commemorated a late war hero in a city he passed through while fleeing Europe during the Holocaust. A special commemoration service for Ben-Gal was held in the synagogue of Kazan, a city located in southwest Russia. The ceremony was also attended by Ben-Gal’s widow, Avital, and two of his seven children, the 12-year-old twins Tohar and Ilai,
Berel Lazar, the chief rabbi of Russia, spoke during the service about Ben-Gal's humanity, which Lazar traced back to Ben-Gal’s very challenging childhood. “He helped others around him in need because he never forgot his hour of need,” Lazar told the audience. “He recognized hunger in others because he had experienced it.”
“We had this commemoration here because it was an important stop on Yanush’s path to life,” said Limmud FSU founder Chaim Chesler. “But the fact that he is being honored in such a big way even here shows the magnitude of his impact on the Jewish people.” Also present at the commemoration, which was attended by several dozen people, was Haim Erez, a former commander of the IDF Southern Command who was also a member of the Tehran Children and a friend of Ben-Gal. Erez also spoke at the Limmud FSU annual event in Kazan, which had 600 participants and was themed around the story of the Tehran Children.