Rabbi Yitzhak Elchanan Gibraltar was born in 1929 in Kovno, Lithuania, into an ultraorthodox Jewish family. When he was 12 years old the Germans conquered Kovno, and along with his parents, three brothers and other family members, he was sent to the ghetto that was set up in the city. As a young boy Rabbi Gibraltar worked as a courier for the labor office of the Judenrat and was a member of the study group, “Tiferet Bachurim”. The family, which was miraculously saved on several occasions from the “aktions” leading to the killings fields, was sent in the summer of 1944 from the Kovno ghetto to the Stutthof concentration camp in Germany where the family’s mother perished. A month later Rabbi Gibraltar was transferred with his father and brothers to the Dachau concentration camp from where they left on a death march until their liberation in May 1945. Rabbi Gibraltar sailed from Italy on an immigrant ship in September 1946. The ship was taken over by the British, and they were sent to Cyprus. Seven months later, in March1947, Rabbi Gibraltar arrived in Israel, and studied for seven years at the Hebron Yeshiva in Jerusalem. Rabbi Gibraltar married Rachel, from the Stern family, and together they raised a virtuous and blessed family.
The movie was produced by the International School for Holocaust Studies of Yad Vashem with the cooperation of The Ministry of Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs, and with the generous support of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany and The Adelson Family Foundation. DVD, Israel 2013, 22 minutes
