“Tonight we’re letting some women who survived the Holocaust have something that was robbed from them in their youth,” said David Parsons of the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem, a sponsor of the Helping Hand group which organized the event. “We want to give something back to them tonight it’s for them to enjoy.”
Walking along to tunes like “Pretty Woman,” the participants included German-born Malka Gorka, 73, who came to Israel in 1948 with her parents and Hungarian-born Carmela Ben Yehuda, 89, who arrived in British-run Palestine in 1945 after surviving the Nazi German Auschwitz death camp.
Judges named 75-year-old Russian-born Anna Grinis, who was two-days old when the war started, as the winner.
“When my mother was alive, she always used to tell me about this period (when) we ran way from Moscow … and there was nothing to eat there,” she said. “We barely survived.”
