The Tishrei holiday season is already at its peak, and we are all preparing our stomachs for the meals that await us ahead of every holiday eve.
On the occasion of the new year, confectioner Moran Gil and the Holocaust Welfare Welfare Foundation are collaborating on a project to raise food baskets and donations for the survivors, by preparing sweet desserts from the childhood of three survivors, in order to make this year sweeter for them.
Even before he started the original project, the 31-year-old Moran worked as a vice president at a digital advertising company. - and entered the field with all his might.
One of the three survivors who participated in the videos taken on the occasion of the fundraising campaign is Yehudit, Gil's Holocaust survivor grandmother - so this issue is very close to his heart.
"My grandmother made turosh gombutz (cheese dumplings) for me for years, but I never made it for her," he told Israel Today.
"Of course she knows my cooking abilities, but she was surprised and very excited that I made it for her myself."
Moran with Colette and a nostalgic picture, the Holocaust Welfare Foundation
"It was my favorite cake"
A Jewish grandmother is not the only survivor for whom Moran made a sweet dessert that reminded her of her childhood: 89-year-old Janina Helena Acker, who was born in Poland, also wrote an article in a nostalgic dessert.
When she was 10, the Nazis who invaded the country at the time wanted to put them on a train with other Jews - but her mother simply pushed her to a Polish couple who were there, and disappeared en masse.
Yanina moved in with the couple, and after a long period of lack of communication between them, the relationship between the three became particularly loving, so much so that they told her they were willing to die to save her life.
She was later transferred to a Catholic convent, where she hid her Jewish identity along with four other Jewish girls - until her mother, who survived the war, picked her up from there.
Yanina asked Gil to make a poppy seed cake for her, as her mother used to make for her as a child.
"It was my favorite cake, and my grandchildren love it too," she said.
"The meetings were very exciting"
Colette Hazan also participated in the project, and she asked from an age to bake an apple pie, one that reminded her of her childhood scents from her grandparents, who raised her after her parents were murdered during the Holocaust even before she turned 4. The two passed on the 82-year-old French-born Hazan and Her brother, to a house run by two women - who were later recognized as Righteous Among the Nations who cared for about 15 children whose parents fled to the French colonies - and thus saved her life.
The same apple pie he baked for her, brought her back to her childhood in San Raphael and Cannes.
"It was a something-something cake. To me, my grandparents were older and older, but they were only about 60 when they raised me," she told us.
"They gave me the strength for the new life after the war."
Moran with Yanina, the Holocaust Welfare Fund
Gil himself said that at first he was very apprehensive about meeting the two ("I was stressed because I did not know if they would like what I made for them"), but in the end these went smoothly and very excitingly: "We started talking and got into interesting conversations, for example about the stories behind The desserts they asked for and that I made for them. "It felt to me that the very thought and conversation with them was far more meaningful to them than the dessert itself, and it was worth it all.
I was happy to be there and listen to them. "
The director of the Holocaust Victims' Welfare Foundation, Etty Farhi, said that through the donations, the foundation will be able to address the various hardships of many victims. , And that about half of them are forced to give up necessary products and services because they find it difficult to cover the running expenses of their household.
"The campaign with Moran Gil is intended to raise awareness of the plight of Holocaust victims in Israel in the wake of the Corona plague," Farhi noted.
"With the help of the donations, we will be able to help the victims get a solution to the same hardships in the foundation's various assistance channels. Let's make the year of the victims of the Holocaust sweeter."
You can donate to the project through the website of the Holocaust Welfare Fund or at the non-profit complex on PayBox.
