Yehuda Hauptman, the last Holocaust survivor from Moshav Tkuma, survived the Oct 7 massacre ‘by a stroke of fate’

Moshav Tkuma was not a common name for many Israelis before the Gaza War that began in October 2023. For the past year and a half, it has mostly been associated with the Burned Cars Memorial in the fields west of the moshav (settlement). The Israeli government relocated vehicles damaged in the Oct. 7 attack to the site, where it has become a pilgrimage site for visitors. 

The village, located just seven kilometers (4.3 miles) from the Gaza border, was spared by an apparent stroke of fate that horrible day. 

Moshav Tkuma was established along with 10 other settlements in the Negev Desert area in 1946, just after Yom Kippur, on the night of October 5-6. Most of Tkuma’s first settlers were Holocaust survivors from Eastern Europe, which is how the settlement got its name. “Tkuma” means rebirth or re-establishment in Hebrew. 

Now, except for one resident, Yehuda Hauptman, there are no Holocaust survivors left at the moshav. Shoshana Neumann, one of the founders of Tkuma, passed away last year – leaving Yehuda as the last remaining Holocaust survivor there. The settlement's name symbolizes the resurrection of the Jewish people after the Holocaust.

Hauptman was born in 1938 in Czechoslovakia. After the Slovak regime collaborated with the Nazi’s, his family fled to Budapest, Hungary in 1941. 

“I think of my father’s siblings who stayed in Czechoslovakia and didn’t survive,” he said. “We moved to Hungary and survived. They were a generation of World War I, thinking if they kept their heads down, the trouble would pass. Even in World War II, they hoped that the trouble would pass over them.” 

After the Nazis occupied Budapest in 1944, Hauptman's family was forced into a ghetto and required to wear the yellow star to mark their Jewish identity. His father was taken to a labor camp, where he escaped, only to be captured again two weeks after returning home. He was sent back to the camp, and Yehuda found himself sneaking out of the ghetto to scavenge for food scraps in the waste bins to help his family survive. 

The Nazi program of extermination eventually extended its murderous reach to Hungary, killing around half a million Jews in less than two months, between May 15 and July 9, 1944. 

“It was a stroke of fate – we weren’t put on the trains, others were,” Hauptman said.

After immigrating to Israel with his sister in 1950, Hauptman joined a kibbutz, where he worked in agriculture and pursued his studies. He later enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces' Nahal Brigade and fought in several of Israel’s wars. Eventually, Hauptman and his wife Yehudit moved to Moshav Tkuma, where he worked to fulfill the dream of developing the dry southern Negev region. 

The couple now has six children, 23 grandchildren, and 10 great-grandchildren.

Hauptman, who has already endured so much, described the miraculous way his community emerged unscathed from the Oct. 7 massacres as “a stroke of fate.”

Hauptman is hard of hearing and did not hear the rocket alarm sirens that awakened most of southern Israel that fateful day. 

“On Simchat Torah, my daughter and granddaughters were with me,” Yehuda recalled to Ynet. “We wanted to celebrate. I went out towards the synagogue, I didn’t sense the events. Even if there's noise, I don't hear it that much. It’s a matter of fate – Tkuma’s fate.”

Dressed in his finest Shabbat attire – a suit and hat – he made his way to the synagogue for morning prayers, until a neighbor stopped him and urged him to return home, explaining the situation.

By that same stroke of fate, despite a lack of sufficient weapons and ammunition for the neighborhood security team, the invading Hamas terrorists simply drove by Moshav Tkuma, never attempting to enter the settlement. 

“There was a policeman who blocked the gate with his vehicle,” Hauptman told Ynet News. “The terrorists who passed by outside the gate simply passed by. There was debate among the residents about opening fire, but the security commander said, ‘Let them go; we don’t have enough weapons or ammo.’” 

In the aftermath of the horrific attacks, Moshav Tkuma, like most southern communities, was evacuated for months. The time and the distance only deepened Hauptman's connection to the land he had grown to love. 

“Tkuma was founded by Holocaust survivors along with some native Israelis,” Hauptman related, noting that it was founded ahead of the UN Partition Plan in an attempt to establish a Jewish presence there, and gain the territory for the future Jewish state. 

After the Six-Day War in 1967, the moshav became a leader in agriculture for the surrounding settlements. 

“We wanted to help the settlements of immigrants learn from us what grows well in our area,” he said. “We pulled the wagon forward.” 

When asked about the political situation, Hauptman declined to say much. 

“I’m too small to bring political opinions,” he stated, quoting Proverbs: “Many are the plans in a man’s heart, but the counsel of the Lord prevails.” (Proverbs 19:21) 

However, he laments the failure of the ultra-Orthodox men to enlist in the army. 

“I remember there were days when yeshiva heads said that whoever studies Torah, the Torah protects the land, but whoever does not study Torah in a yeshiva – it is as if they are shedding blood,” he said. “It pains me that the rabbis today do not say the same things that those who study less are obliged to conscription.”

In honor of the Holocaust on Wednesday evening, Yehuda Hauptman, 87, who was a child at the time and survived the worst Jewish massacre since that time, will recite the “El Malei Rachamim” [God full of mercy] prayer at Yad Vashem’s Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day ceremony.