Karmela and Jakob Ben Dom

This is a photo of my sister, Karmela Ben Dom, and her husband, Jakob Ben Dom, in a Haifa suburb on 28th February 1954, a day before their wedding. Jakob was born in 1926 in a small village by the town of Topolcany in Slovakia. During the war, in 1942, he left for Poland in order to avoid the deportations and then returned to the Slovak State. His uncle arranged false Aryan papers for him, and he then worked as a farmhand. Then he joined the partisans. His parents and three brothers were murdered. My sister Karmela came to Israel with our mother and me in 1949, when she was 15. She went with a group of young people to the Kfar Hmakabi kibbutz, whose members were mostly from the Czechoslovak Republic. She left the kibbutz at the age of 20, and married Eugen Weiss. Later they changed their name to the Hebrew Ben-Dom. They've got two children, a son, Ran, and a daughter, Naomi, who has a PhD in biochemistry. Ran is a medical doctor, his wife, Dalia is from Persia - Iran. They've got two nice children, a son, Itay, and a daughter, Maayan, and live in Beer Sheva. Naomi has a daughter, Roni, who's pretty and smart, and has all adults wrapped around her finger. My mother lived with Karmela's family in Kyriat Gat since 1964, where she died in 1993 and where she's buried. She was almost 85. My sister and her husband still live in Israel, in the town of Kyriat Gat.

Photos from this interviewee