Last Child of Gaza     

He passed away 10 years ago at 100, yet he never gave up the vision of Jews moving back to this seaside settlement that has become the Arab capital of hate and aggression

“Every time PLO chief Yasser Arafat proposed that all Jews return to their native lands, I would tell myself that I would return to Gaza City where I was born, and Arafat would return to Egypt where he was born,” my friend Reb Yosef Agiv a”h used to say.

Reb Yosef, who passed away a decade ago at the age of 100, was the oldest surviving Jew born in the Jewish community of Gaza. He was a fount of memories, clear as a whistle until his last days, and was happy to teach anyone who would listen about the better days of the community before the Jews were expelled, first by the Turks and then by the British.

Although the city was totally liquidated on the backdrop of the 1929 riots in which Arabs attacked a number of Jewish settlements in Eretz Yisrael, Yosef was only two when he and his parents were banished from Gaza during World War I, when the Turks expelled all civilian residents from the city, transforming it into a battle zone for their war against the British.

Although he was just a toddler when the family was expelled from Gaza to Jaffa, Yosef — a grandson of Reb Eliyahu Arvutz, one of the famed wheat merchants of the Jewish community of Gaza — returned as a teen, and his memories of that ancient Jewish city were always clear, focused, and eager to be shared.