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Ostrover

B’nai B’rith World Center Director Alan Schneider and Haim Roet, Chairman of the Committee to Recognize the Heroism of Jews who Rescused Fellow Jews During The Holocaust (JRJ) presented a Jewish Rescuers Citation in July to Dina “Donia” Ostrover (90) at her home in Ramat Gan.

Dina Ostrover was born in Stryi, Ukraine as Donia Pickholz, the youngest of four children in an Orthodox Jewish family. The Germans captured the area in June 1941 and assembled the Jews in a ghetto. 1,000 Jews from the city were murdered in a nearby forest in September 1941. A year later the Germans conducted the first Aktion in the city, rounding up and deporting some 5,000 Jews to the Belzec death camp. In the second Aktion in October 1942, the Germans discovered the Ostrover family in hiding and they were loaded onto cattle cars along with other Jews. During the journey, Donia’s father encouraged her to jump from the moving train. She lost consciousness in the fall, but fortunately landed behind a bush that concealed her, returning to the ghetto psychologically broken. Donia’s uncle managed to procure a counterfeit Ukrainian birth certificate for her and Donia stole out of the ghetto incognito.  Posing as a non-Jewish Ukrainian orphan, she found work as a laborer at an inn which served German officers next to the town of Bolechow, not far from Stryi. (More of this story here).