The Day Centre is a club of elderly people in Hesed "Polina". Each of them lived through the Great Patriotic War either as a person fighting at the front or working extremely hard in the rear, or else as a child who survived starvation. Many of them are rewarded with orders and medals for the military and working merits. On the 11th of May, 54 aged persons, the club members, came together to commemorate the sequential anniversary of the Great Victory.



Of course this holiday cannot be celebrated without a festive dinner and stories about accomplishing this difficult Victory! Many people of the Soviet Union made their contribution to the crushing defeat of the Nazi Germany, and the Jews were among them. The club members remembered the Jewish Heroes of the Soviet Union, a Jewish military brigade of 30,000 volunteers from the territory of the modern Israel, the righteous men of peace, who rescued thousands of people from terrible deaths. The memories of these days touched everyone; there were tears of grief and joy of the Victory. Amongst the elderly guests, Gita Yakovleva and Yakov Muchnik are former prisoners of a ghetto, and another 25 guests were victims of the Nazism.

Gita Jakovleva read her own poems about the war, and all the guests emotionally sang wartime songs accompanied by a guitar player who was invited to the Day Centre celebration, the volunteer Victor Rayzman. It could be seen on the faces of the guests that no one and nothing is forgotten.

Natalia Kriventsova