Nechama Grossman, Israel’s oldest Holocaust survivor, died at the age of 109 on 24 April, coinciding with Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Born in 1915, she fled Europe to escape the Nazis and settled in the southern Israeli city of Arad where she built a family.
She is survived by two children, four grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren, and two great-great-grandchildren, according to Kan News. Her funeral was held in Arad on 25 April.
Her granddaughter Luba told the public broadcaster shortly after her death: “I am in shock – I have no words. Honestly, we thought she’d make it to 110. Yesterday, I gave her a bath, and she wasn’t feeling well. She was lucid until the end and died peacefully. On Holocaust Remembrance Day of all days.”
In recent days, Grossman “dreamed that there were Nazis near her; she woke up and said she dreamed they were choking her. She was afraid of the Nazis – that it was coming back,” Luba said.
“She always said that we need to live in peace and without wars. All the grandchildren served in the army so it wouldn’t happen again.
“On October 7 [2023], her great-grandchildren were in the army. It was very hard for her. She cried that it’s happening again, and that antisemitism is rising.”
Eve Kugler, a 94-year-old Holocaust survivor from the UK who had been scheduled to participate in the March of the Living in Poland on Thursday, also died on Yom Hashoah.
Kugler was born in 1931 in Germany and experienced the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom.
Approximately 120,000 of the Holocaust survivors who made Israel their home after the 1941-1945 destruction of European Jewry remain alive as of this month, the Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs said last week.
According to the government figures, around 10 per cent of the country’s survivors, or 13,000 people, died since last year’s Yom Hashoah in May 2024.
Some 1,400 (0.6 per cent) of the estimated 220,800 Holocaust survivors living in 90 countries today are centenarians, and half of the remaining survivors live in Israel, according to figures published by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany on Tuesday.
The Claims Conference’s report, titled “Vanishing Witnesses: An Urgent Analysis of the Declining Population of Holocaust Survivors,” projects that just half of the Holocaust survivors alive worldwide today will remain in six years, with just 30 per cent, or about 66,250, remaining in 2035.
By 2040, just 22,080 survivors will remain, according to the Claims Conference.
