In Haifa’s Ramat Alon neighborhood stands an unusual memorial. Official municipal materials list twenty-two Righteous Among the Nations commemorated here — people who rescued Jews during the Holocaust and had a biographical connection to Haifa. They include individuals from Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia, as well as Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. The story of the Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations began with the gratitude of one rescued family. Years later, it became clear that the memorial’s original list was incomplete: eighteen names were recorded at its inauguration, a journalistic investigation counted twenty, and an official municipal booklet now shows twenty-two. The stories of four additional rescuers lead from Lviv, Nadvirna, and Bratislava to Israel’s Mediterranean coast — through hiding places, forests, displaced persons camps, and the ship Exodus.
On November 10, 2026, 91-year-old Yaroslava Levytska died in Haifa. She was the last Righteous Among the Nations residing in Israel. Born in Zolochiv, now part of Ukraine’s Lviv region, she had participated in rescuing Jews from Nazi persecution and extermination while still a child. Yaroslava spent her final years in Haifa. Her name had long been engraved on one of the memorial stones in the city’s Garden of the Righteous.
Author: Victoria Katsman.
Levytska’s death once again drew attention to this place. Yet the Garden preserves far more stories than the biography of a single woman. Visitors can learn about a man who hid his future wife behind a cupboard in an apartment in Lviv, a young domestic worker who fled through the forests of Galicia with a Jewish boy, a woman from Odesa who brought food to prisoners, and children who themselves rescued other children.
The Garden is called גן חסידי אומות העולם תושבי חיפה — the Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations, Residents of Haifa. It is located in the Ramat Alon neighborhood and was inaugurated on May 18, 2008. At its opening, the memorial contained eighteen individually named stones. In 2020, a journalist counted twenty, while an official municipal booklet published photographs of a memorial monument bearing twenty-two names and a map with markers numbered 21 and 22. The installation dates of the final stones have not yet been established.
In preparing this article, NAnews compared publications from the Haifa Municipality, a report on the 2008 inauguration, an investigative historical article in the newspaper Kolbo, an official illustrated municipal booklet, and an archival letter from 2014 concerning Frania Dedek-Belska’s memorial stone. The research also drew on publications by Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, materials based on Yad Vashem documentation, and testimony from relatives of those who were rescued. This comparison made it possible not only to reconstruct the memorial’s history but also to identify several discrepancies in published dates and figures.
It began with Veronika: Why a Haifa lawyer decided to create the Garden
The memorial’s history began not with a government decision but with the Grossman family.
Haifa resident and lawyer Roni Grossman grew up alongside Veronika Porocai, a Hungarian woman who had saved his father, Yitzhak, during the Holocaust. Veronika had worked for the Grossman family even before the war. When the Nazis began persecuting Hungarian Jews, she helped her former employers, delivered food, concealed people being hunted, and rescued children.
In an interview with the Haifa newspaper Kolbo, published on April 20, 2020, Roni recalled that his father had brought Veronika to Israel when Roni himself was about three years old. She lived with the family for approximately 35 years. For Yitzhak, she became a second mother; for Roni, a grandmother.
One episode concerns how Veronika helped Yitzhak avoid deportation to Auschwitz. Grossman’s recollections, recorded at different times, vary somewhat in their details. In a 2022 publication, he told schoolchildren that Veronika had hidden his father in a small toilet room at a hospital in Budapest. Other accounts mention a warehouse hiding place and a rescue during an attempted deportation. What remains unchanged is the essential fact: she endangered herself to save the life of a man she had known since he was a child.
Veronika never told the family everything she had done. When Roni contacted Yad Vashem, researchers informed him that she had helped far more Jews than he had imagined. She herself regarded these actions not as heroism but as a natural human duty.
There is another personal connection to the memorial. According to a Haipo publication from 2022, Roni’s mother survived the Holocaust thanks to a hiding place connected with Raoul Wallenberg’s rescue activities. Later, both rescuers — Veronika Porocai and Wallenberg — would be commemorated in the same Haifa garden.
Veronika died in Israel in 1998 at the age of 91. She had never married, and the Grossmans had become her family.
Roni wanted the memory of the woman who saved his father to receive proper recognition. But instead of proposing a single monument, he suggested commemorating all the Righteous Among the Nations who had lived in Haifa after the war. This was how the idea of the municipal Garden emerged.
From a proposal to the city council to the inauguration in May 2008
Grossman’s initiative received political support within the municipality. City council member Benzi Katz proposed naming a public garden in Ramat Alon after the Righteous Among the Nations.
According to Kolbo’s historical investigation, the proposal was considered on March 1, 2005. Council members unanimously supported the initiative. Haifa’s mayor at the time, Yona Yahav, explained that a suitable public space already existed and needed to be adapted for its new commemorative purpose.
A different numerical date for the municipal decision appears in the Garden’s own documentation. The exact date of the vote should therefore be established from the original city council minutes. Nevertheless, several independent publications confirm that the decision was made in 2005.
On May 18, 2008, the renovated Garden was officially inaugurated. A report by NEWSru.co.il published the following day mentioned 18 Righteous Among the Nations whose names had been engraved on the entrance memorial. A separate memorial corner with a stone was provided for each person.
The ceremony was attended by Righteous Among the Nations who were still alive, Holocaust survivors, relatives of rescuers and rescued individuals, representatives of the municipality and Yad Vashem, diplomatic missions from Ukraine, Poland, France, and the United States, youth organizations, and schoolchildren. The Haifa Institute for Holocaust Studies named after Hedva Eibschitz also participated in organizing the event.
The children’s participation was particularly significant. Even at the opening, municipal authorities intended the memorial to serve not only as a venue for annual ceremonies but also as a place for educational activities.
At the time of the inauguration, five of those originally commemorated were still alive. Many others had already been buried in Haifa.
Inside the Garden: Memorial stones among trees and a children’s playground
The Garden is located between Yaakov Azulai, Yigal Allon, Eliezer Alter, and Arthur Biram streets. It is a green space with shaded paths, walkways, benches, flowering plants, and a small amphitheater arranged among the stones.
The entrance features a large natural stone bearing the Garden’s name in Hebrew, Arabic, and English. Above the inscription are three symbols: the emblem of Yad Vashem, the Haifa municipal coat of arms, and the symbol of the Righteous Among the Nations.
Below is the well-known saying from the tractate Sanhedrin, expressing the idea that saving one human life is equivalent to saving an entire world. The memorial inscription uses the traditional wording referring to the saving of a Jewish soul.
Behind the entrance stone stand three memorial columns. One tells the story of the Garden’s creation and explains why Haifa chose to commemorate its Righteous Among the Nations. The second contains the list of names, while the third displays a map showing the locations of the memorial stones.
Each stone bears a person’s name and a brief account of the circumstances in which that person rescued Jews. This is more than a list of surnames: visitors can move from one story to another, gradually learning about people whose lives before the war unfolded in very different countries.
A special place is occupied by the Garden of Eternal Children — גן ילדי הנצח. This children’s playground is dedicated to the memory of the one and a half million Jewish children murdered during the Holocaust. It includes climbing structures, swings, and play equipment for both younger and older children.
This is an unusual approach to a memorial space. The playground is not separated from the commemorative area by a high wall. Young children play beside stones describing people who saved children from death. This proximity was intended to make remembrance part of the Garden’s everyday life rather than something experienced only during ceremonies on commemorative dates.
From eighteen to twenty-two: How the Garden’s list changed
There is considerable confusion surrounding the numbers given in publications about the Haifa memorial.
Some reports state that when the Garden opened in 2008, the city counted 19 Righteous Among the Nations, including nine associated with Poland, six with Ukraine, and four others with Sweden, Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia. According to these accounts, a twentieth stone was added later.
However, the report published on May 19, 2008, and the wording of the original memorial inscription explicitly refer to eighteen names.
A decisive contribution to reconstructing this history came from journalist Hagit Hornstein’s investigation, published in Kolbo on April 20, 2020. While walking through the Garden, she counted the memorial stones and discovered twenty. Yet the main list and map had originally been designed for eighteen people.
The nineteenth name — Yosef Gruber, also known as Nestor Zenon Sniadanko — had been added at the bottom of the memorial column. The typeface and size of the number differed from the original inscription. The twentieth Righteous Among the Nations, Frania Dedek-Belska, already had her own stone, but the journalist could find her name neither on the main list nor on the map.
Hornstein contacted Roni Grossman. He explained that additional rescue stories had become known over time and agreed that Frania’s name needed to be included on the general map.
Thus, these were not twenty stones installed simultaneously in 2008. The memorial’s list expanded over the years. Two additional stones were already in place by April 2020.
But the story did not end there. An official illustrated booklet published by the Haifa Municipality contains photographs of the main memorial monument with 22 numbered names and a Garden map marked with numbers 21 and 22. These refer to Johanna Budin and Władysława Chomsowa. The document also shows their individual memorial stones and provides biographical accounts.
This means that the memorial’s condition, which was unknown in 2020, can now be described more precisely: the municipal photographs confirm an expanded list and the inclusion of both additional locations on the map. At the same time, the materials do not specify the exact installation dates of the last four stones, nor do they include the official decision authorizing the addition of numbers 21 and 22.
A separate historical document sheds light on Frania’s stone. On May 1, 2014, researcher Gideon Raphael Ben-Michael sent a letter to Mayor Yona Yahav asking that she be commemorated. The mayor responded positively, but funding for the stone had not been allocated in the 2014 budget. The researcher hoped that funding would become available in 2015. The letter itself does not establish when the stone was actually installed.
All twenty-two names: Who is commemorated in Haifa?
The following list has been reconstructed from the Garden’s materials, Kolbo’s investigation, and the official municipal booklet containing a photograph of the monument with 22 names. Some surnames are rendered according to available Hebrew and Latin-script variants. The geographical designations reflect the memorial’s classification and do not necessarily indicate ethnic origin.
The original eighteen Righteous Among the Nations
1. Zofia-Marta Avni — Poland. Together with her mother Aleksandra and brother Antoni Wieczorek, she hid six Jews in an attic in Warsaw for a year and a half. The family supplied the people in hiding with everything they needed. It was thanks to this refuge that they survived Nazi persecution.
2. Anna Dobrutska-Jezerska — Poland. During the persecution of the Jews of Tarnów, she and her husband Władysław Dobruk helped rescue Kalman Feigner, another man, and two children. Władysław was arrested for helping Jews and sent to Auschwitz. After the war, Anna married Kalman Feigner, one of those she had helped save.
3. Pelageya Guchak-Springer — Poland. She sheltered twenty Jewish women in the workshop where she worked. She also smuggled the son of a Jewish business owner out of the Sosnowiec ghetto, hid him, paid for his continued concealment, and later helped his father. She succeeded in reuniting the family.
4. Anna Hornung-Tomachak — Ukraine. She worked as a domestic helper for a Jewish family in the Ternopil area. When the family needed to hide under Christian identities, Anna helped create a convincing cover story and presented herself as the mother of two boys so that their father and the children would not be discovered.
5. Raoul Wallenberg — Sweden. A Swedish diplomat who organized the rescue of thousands of Hungarian Jews in 1944. His connection with Haifa dates to 1936, when he lived here and worked at a bank. Soviet military personnel detained Wallenberg in January 1945, and his subsequent fate remained the subject of investigations for many decades.
6. Irena Yakira-Ziental — Poland. Together with her mother Bronislawa, she sheltered thirteen Jews in a specially prepared hiding place at the family’s country house. Both women cared for those in hiding at considerable risk to their own safety.
7. Bela (Valya) Yakimova-Lipper — Ukraine. In the Rivne area, she refused to abandon her Jewish husband. With an infant in her arms, she was prepared to follow him into the ghetto. She subsequently hid her husband and six other Jews for nineteen months in a house in the village of Novostav.
8. Halina (Galina) Lugowska — Poland. Together with her husband, she took in a Jewish woman who had lost her family and was wandering in search of shelter. The couple concealed her for 32 weeks before arranging her transfer to another safe house.
9. Yaroslava Levytska — Ukraine. As a child, she delivered food to Jews in Zolochiv, while her family sheltered persecuted people and supplied provisions to a group hiding in a secret refuge. Yaroslava and her relatives were recognized as Righteous Among the Nations in 1989.
10. Viktor Melnyk — Ukraine. Together with his mother and sister, he sheltered Jews, helped locate other hiding places, and obtained false documents. When the liquidation of the ghettos began in the region, he helped one family escape to territory under Romanian control.
11. Tamara Maksymeniuk-Bromberg — Ukraine. Together with her mother, she helped Jewish acquaintances in Odesa. The women brought food, clothing, and other essentials to prisoners, supported deportees, and helped persecuted families find secret apartments.
12. Elizabeta Nicopoi-Strul — Romania. She warned Jewish acquaintances of planned attacks, sheltered more than fifteen people, and supplied them with food. Later, she delivered provisions to those sent to forced labor. Even arrest and severe beatings did not make her stop helping.
13. Maria Serbniak-Dicker — Poland. Together with two friends, she sheltered seven Jews who had escaped from the Janowska camp in Lviv. For two years, the women provided everything the fugitives needed. When their hiding place was threatened with discovery, they moved them to another apartment.
14. Veronika Porocai — Hungary. She rescued Yitzhak Grossman and other Jews in Budapest. She delivered food and clothing, concealed persecuted individuals, and helped children. After the war, she came to Israel and became part of the Grossman family. Her story inspired the creation of the Garden.
15. Viktoria Zukrovich-Eichberger — Poland. Together with her sister, she sheltered a Jewish man who had fled Wąbrzeźno after the extermination of the town’s Jewish population began. They helped him evade his pursuers.
16. Julia Kaldi-Ralbovska — Czechoslovakia. She hid a Jewish man who had escaped from Prague for a year. She also went to retrieve his mother, who had been left alone. When the elderly woman died, Julia dug a grave at night and buried her secretly to avoid exposing the hiding place.
17. Jerzy Szlag — Poland. During the German occupation of Warsaw, his Christian family continued living in a house that had become part of the ghetto. Jerzy, still a schoolboy, carried letters and food across the ghetto boundary. Even after his family was forcibly relocated, he continued helping Jews.
18. Bronislawa Ziental — Poland. The mother of Irena Yakira-Ziental. Together, they established a refuge for thirteen Jews. Bronislawa walked approximately three kilometers every day to deliver food to those in hiding and helped protect their safety.
Names 19 and 20, documented in the 2020 investigation
19. Yosef Gruber, born Nestor Zenon Sniadanko — Ukraine. A young Ukrainian from Sokal who rescued a Jewish student, Antonia Gruber, in Lviv during the Holocaust. After the war, they married, immigrated to Israel, and settled in Haifa.
20. Frania Dedek-Belska, also known as Fruma Belska — present-day Ukraine. A woman from Nadvirna who saved a Jewish boy, Binyamin Blitzer, and later another child, Eliezer Art. With both boys, she survived the war, the postwar flight from Europe, and the events surrounding the ship Exodus. She later established a family with them in Israel.
Two more names on the official monument: Numbers 21 and 22
21. Johanna Budin — rescue operations in Slovakia. A nanny employed by the Jewish Greenmandel family in Bratislava. In 1944, she hid the children Gertrude and Pavel, presenting them as her own. Pavel survived, but Gertrude was discovered and murdered at Auschwitz. After the war, Johanna came to Israel with the rescued family and lived in Haifa and Kiryat Yam.
22. Władysława Chomsowa — rescue operations in Lviv. A Polish social activist who headed the Lviv branch of the underground Council for Aid to Jews, known as Żegota. She organized deliveries of food and medicine, forged documents, and hiding places, including shelters for children. She later lived in Israel and died in Haifa.
All twenty-two names represent not only different countries but also different methods of rescue. Some offered shelter for years; others transported documents or food; still others helped people escape or passed persecuted Jews off as members of their own families. Some of the rescuers were themselves children.
Kolbo’s investigation, which described twenty stones, specifically noted that four of the Righteous Among the Nations had carried out the deeds for which they were recognized while still children. Nine women rescuers later married Jewish men, including six who married Holocaust survivors.
The Ukrainian connection: How the geography changes as new names emerge
When examining the Garden’s connections with Ukraine, it is necessary to consider changing state borders.
Lviv, Zolochiv, Nadvirna, and other towns of what is now western Ukraine belonged to Poland until September 1939. Odesa, Rivne, and the territory of the present-day Ternopil region experienced German and Romanian occupation under different circumstances. Therefore, a designation such as “Poland” or “Ukraine” in the memorial list does not always establish a rescuer’s nationality or the present-day geographical location of the rescue.
Among the original eighteen names, five were directly classified under Ukraine: Anna Hornung-Tomachak, Bela Yakimova-Lipper, Yaroslava Levytska, Viktor Melnyk, and Tamara Maksymeniuk-Bromberg.
Two more stories with clear connections to the territory of present-day Ukraine were subsequently added — those of Nestor Sniadanko and Frania Dedek-Belska. This brings the number to seven under the expanded geographical classification of the original twenty names.
But there is an eighth important story: Maria Serbniak-Dicker is listed as a Righteous Among the Nations from Poland, although she rescued Jews in Lviv. Therefore, if the criterion is not origin or memorial classification but the location of the rescue, at least eight of the first twenty stories are connected to the territory of present-day Ukraine.
Now Władysława Chomsowa, who rescued Jews in Lviv, must be added to that group. Among the twenty-two names, this brings the total to at least nine stories. This is a geographical count, not a determination of the rescuers’ national identities.
Equating the location of an event with a rescuer’s ethnic identity would be historically incorrect. Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, and members of other communities lived in these territories. Many towns changed their state affiliation, and the lives of their residents do not fit neatly into modern national categories.
That is why specific actions and testimony matter more to this investigation than any attempt to distribute the twenty-two Righteous Among the Nations into national quotas.
Nestor Sniadanko: A student hidden behind a cupboard in Lviv and a love that survived the Holocaust
The fate of the man whose name became number nineteen on the memorial column was thoroughly investigated by Israeli journalist Shimon Briman. His article, “Overcoming Death: A Ukrainian-Jewish Love Story,” was published by Ukrainian Jewish Encounter on October 27, 2020.
Nestor Zenon Sniadanko came from the town of Sokal in Galicia. In 1936, he studied German philology at Lviv University. There he met a Jewish student, Antonia Gruber. They moved in a student environment that included both Ukrainians and Jews.
After the German occupation of Lviv in June 1941, Antonia’s family found itself in mortal danger. Her father, Shimon Gruber, was murdered during the July pogroms. Nestor helped Antonia, her mother Blanka, her brothers Yosef and Marcel, and her grandmother by delivering food and passing along news.
His knowledge of German enabled him to obtain a job connected with food distribution in the city administration, and he used this opportunity to help Jewish acquaintances.
In August 1942, Antonia managed to escape from the enterprise where she was working under German control and came to Nestor. The young man lived in an apartment in a Polish neighborhood of Lviv. He agreed to hide her, although the discovery of a Jewish woman in his apartment would have endangered his own life.
Whenever someone rang the doorbell, Antonia hid behind a large cupboard in the storage room. Neighbors and acquaintances could not be allowed to discover that a Jewish young woman was living in the apartment. Nestor also temporarily sheltered another Jewish woman and provided food to a Polish family hiding a Jewish child.
Antonia remained in hiding until the Red Army liberated Lviv on July 27, 1944. After the war, they married. Antonia’s close relatives had not survived the Holocaust.
In 1946, the couple managed to leave the Soviet Union as part of the postwar resettlement of former Polish citizens. At a displaced persons camp in Rosenheim, Germany, Nestor changed his name to Yosef Gruber, taking his wife’s surname. Their son Freddy was born there in August 1947.
In 1948, the family settled in Haifa. Yosef worked for Shell, later associated with the Israeli fuel company Paz, while Antonia taught music at the Haifa Conservatory.
Nestor-Yosef died in 1979. He was buried in a Catholic cemetery in Haifa associated with the Stella Maris Carmelite Monastery. According to Briman’s research, Brother Daniel — Oswald Rufeisen — attended the funeral. Born Jewish, Rufeisen had become a Catholic monk during the Holocaust. His biography is also connected with saving lives and complex questions of Jewish and Christian identity.
For many years, Antonia did not seek official recognition of her husband as Righteous Among the Nations. Only in old age did she submit the relevant testimony to Yad Vashem. The decision to recognize Nestor was made on November 6, 2005, and the posthumous award ceremony took place in 2006.
The family’s history continued through their son Freddy Gruber, a well-known Israeli television journalist and documentary filmmaker. He worked for Israel’s Channel One television and produced reports and films. In 2013, he visited Sokal, where his father had studied, and later established an award for schoolchildren studying foreign languages.
Antonia died in March 2012. Her final wish was to be buried beside her husband. The inscription on their gravestone states that she was rescued during the Holocaust by Nestor Sniadanko, Righteous Among the Nations.
The Ukrainian-Jewish connection in this story did not end with the war. It continued in Haifa, on Israeli television, at a school in Sokal, and in the memory of the Gruber family’s descendants.
Frania Dedek-Belska: Two rescued children, the forests of Galicia, and the Exodus
The twentieth Righteous Among the Nations commemorated at the Haifa memorial, Frania Dedek, had an equally complicated life.
She worked as a domestic helper for the prosperous Jewish Blitzer family in Nadvirna, now in Ukraine’s Ivano-Frankivsk region. The family owned a leather-processing business and real estate. One of the children, Binyamin Blitzer, was born in 1938.
After the German occupation of the town in the summer of 1941, the murder and persecution of Jews began. The boy’s father, Dov-Berl Blitzer, was among the first victims. When the family members were forced into the ghetto, Frania remained in their former apartment and sent food to them through a local intermediary.
In December 1941, Binyamin’s grandmother asked Frania to take the boy out of the ghetto. She agreed and escaped with him. His sister Sonia remained with their grandmother; both were killed.
Over the following months, Frania and Binyamin hid in forests between Nadvirna and Skalat, moving from one refuge to another. At night, the woman left the boy in hiding and went out to search for food. Sometimes she managed to obtain work from farmers, but she had to keep the child secretly nearby — in barns, pigsties, or among crops. Whenever danger appeared, they returned to the forest.
She cared for Binyamin as if he were her own son, although neither she nor the child had any guarantee of survival.
After the war ended, Frania took another Jewish orphan, Eliezer, also known as Leizer, Art, under her protection. With both boys, she ended up in a displaced persons camp in Germany.
They attempted to reach Mandatory Palestine aboard the Exodus. This was one of the most famous ships involved in clandestine Jewish immigration after World War II. In 1947, British authorities intercepted the ship, and its passengers were ultimately forcibly returned to Germany.
Frania did not abandon the children after this setback. In February 1948, all three managed to reach Palestine and settled in Kiryat Haim, now part of Haifa.
Later, Frania converted to Judaism and married Avraham Belsky, a Holocaust survivor. She also became known as Fruma Belska. The couple raised Binyamin and Eliezer as their own sons.
Frania enrolled both boys in the religious Bar-Ilan school in Kiryat Shmuel. She believed that this was what their murdered parents would have wanted for them.
Frania died on January 1, 1986, at the age of 77. The decision to recognize her posthumously as Righteous Among the Nations was made on November 6, 2005. The award was received in July 2006 by Binyamin Blitzer and Eliezer Art, the two men she had rescued.
The story appeared in the international press as early as 2006, including in the British newspaper The Guardian, based on materials from Yad Vashem.
Frania’s memorial stone in Haifa recalls a rescue that did not end with liberation from Nazi occupation. She continued taking responsibility for the children’s lives after the war, accompanied them through emigration, and effectively became their mother.
What connects memorial stones 19 and 20?
There is a remarkable coincidence: Yad Vashem recognized Nestor Sniadanko and Frania Dedek-Belska as Righteous Among the Nations on the same day — November 6, 2005. Their awards were presented at a joint ceremony in July 2006.
The Kolbo article contains an error: it gives July 18, 2005, as the date of the award ceremony, even though that date precedes the commission’s decision cited in the same article. A contemporary report published by The Guardian on July 18, 2006, confirms that the ceremony took place in 2006.
Both stories also explain why the Garden’s geography cannot be limited to prewar citizenship or to the name of the state recorded in an archival file. Sniadanko came from Sokal, saved Jews in Lviv, and became a resident of Haifa. Dedek rescued children in Galicia, passed through Germany and the Exodus episode, and then settled in Kiryat Haim.
When the Garden opened in 2008, both had already been officially recognized by Yad Vashem, but their names were not part of the original group of eighteen memorial stones.
An important part of the administrative history concerning Frania is now known. On May 1, 2014, researcher Gideon Raphael Ben-Michael wrote to Mayor Yona Yahav, pointing out that her name had been omitted from the original list and requesting that a memorial stone be installed.
In his published report, he described the mayor’s positive response but noted that funding was unavailable in the 2014 budget. The document does not give the final installation date.
Two more names: What the municipal booklet revealed about Johanna Budin and Władysława Chomsowa
Following Kolbo’s investigation, another documentary layer emerged in the Garden’s history. An official booklet produced by Haifa’s education authorities shows a memorial monument bearing twenty-two names and a map with locations numbered 21 and 22.
It also includes photographs of individual stones and tells the stories of two women whose biographies were absent from the earlier list of twenty. The document does not establish who ordered the addition of their stones or when those decisions were made.
No. 21. Johanna Budin: The boy she saved and the girl she could not save
Johanna Budin was born on March 29, 1898, in Vienna. She worked as a nanny for the Jewish family of Vladimir and Bella Greenmandel in Bratislava.
When persecution intensified in 1944, the parents went into hiding with forged documents, while Johanna took their children — Gertrude and Pavel — to a rented apartment in Dúbravka, pretending to be their mother.
On September 22, 1944, Johanna left the apartment to help the parents. During her absence, Gertrude was discovered. She was deported to Auschwitz, where she was murdered. Pavel managed to reunite with his parents and survived the war.
Johanna continued helping the family and did not reveal the boy’s hiding place even when questioned by the Gestapo.
After the war, the Greenmandel family adopted the surname Budin in gratitude. In 1949, Johanna came to Israel with them. She worked in Haifa and later lived near the family in Kiryat Yam. She died on November 29, 1985.
In January 2024, her rescue activities were remembered at a municipal ceremony held at the graves of the Righteous Among the Nations in Haifa. The municipality reported the participation of relatives of those she had saved.
Budin’s story cannot be described as the successful rescue of both children: Gertrude was murdered.
No. 22. Władysława Chomsowa: A Polish underground activist who rescued Jews in Lviv
Before the war, Władysława Chomsowa (also known as Władysława Choms) was involved in public and social work in Drohobych and later in Lviv. She spoke out against antisemitic discrimination.
In 1934, she visited Mandatory Palestine with her husband and became acquainted with Jewish social organizations.
After the German occupation of Lviv in 1941, Chomsowa helped Jews with food, money, and medicines and organized forged documents and secret hiding places.
She headed the Lviv branch of the Polish underground Council for Aid to Jews, known as Żegota. According to the municipal booklet, approximately sixty Jewish children were under her care.
According to the German Silent Heroes Memorial Center, she moved to Warsaw in late 1943 to escape arrest and continued her underground activities there.
Chomsowa lived in Israel from 1964. In 1966, Yad Vashem recognized her as Righteous Among the Nations; she died in Haifa on August 26 of that year.
Her name connects the memorial to another rescue network operating in the territory of present-day Ukraine — in Lviv. It does not change the Polish identity of the underground activist herself.
Unlike the first two additional names discovered in the memorial’s history, the appearance of Johanna’s and Władysława’s stones has not yet been explained by published administrative decisions.
The photographs in the official booklet confirm their presence on the expanded memorial list, but they do not establish when the stones were installed or whether a separate dedication ceremony took place.
Raoul Wallenberg: The Swedish diplomat who lived on Arlozorov Street
Among the twenty-two names, Raoul Wallenberg is the best known internationally.
In 1944, he worked at the Swedish diplomatic mission in Budapest and participated in rescuing Hungarian Jews by issuing protective documents, organizing hiding places, and using his diplomatic status to intervene against Nazi actions.
But there is a particular reason why he has a memorial stone in Haifa.
In 1936, Wallenberg lived for a time at 17 Arlozorov Street in Haifa. He worked at the Holland Bank on HaBankim Street.
According to local historical publications, it was here that he met Jewish refugees from Germany. This experience may have influenced his attitude toward the fate of persecuted Jews, although a direct causal connection is difficult to establish from documentary evidence.
In January 1945, Wallenberg was detained by Soviet authorities. His subsequent fate became the subject of diplomatic and historical investigations lasting many decades.
His inclusion demonstrates that the Garden was not created exclusively for people who had lived in the city for decades. A genuine biographical connection with Haifa was sufficient for the municipality to consider a particular rescuer worthy of commemoration.
Yaroslava Levytska: Childhood in Zolochiv and life in Israel
Yaroslava Levytska was born in Zolochiv in 1935. During the war, the town was under German occupation, and its Jewish population faced persecution and extermination.
Her grandfather Oleksandr, mother Kateryna, and other family members helped Jews by providing food, medicine, and places to hide.
Young Yaroslava participated in food deliveries. Bread and potatoes could be carried discreetly in her schoolbag.
Accounts of the rescues associated with the Levytsky family include children hidden from the Nazis and a group of twenty-five Jews sheltered in a secret hiding place. The family helped them survive until the region was liberated in 1944.
Different publications give figures of 25 and 29 people rescued. These may refer to different groups or methods of counting, but they cannot simply be added together without checking the archival records of the individuals involved.
On September 21, 1989, Yad Vashem recognized Oleksandr, Kateryna, and Yaroslava Levytsky as Righteous Among the Nations.
After the war, Yaroslava received medical training and worked as a medical assistant and in sanitary services. She immigrated to Israel in 1995.
In Haifa, Yaroslava maintained ties with organizations dedicated to preserving the memory of the Holocaust.
On February 12, 2025, students from the Bosmat school congratulated her on her 90th birthday at Beit Gil HaZahav, where she lived.
Her name was engraved on a memorial stone in Ramat Alon during her lifetime. By 2025, she remained the last Righteous Among the Nations living in Israel.
Following her death on November 10, 2026, the Haifa Municipality emphasized the significance of her actions and the need to pass these stories of rescue to future generations.
Her biography is presented in greater detail in another NAnews article: “Ukrainian Yaroslava Levytska — Righteous Among the Nations in Haifa”.
Odesa, Rivne, Ternopil, Lviv: The geography of rescue
The Ukrainian dimension of the memorial is not limited to the most extensively documented stories of Levytska, Sniadanko, and Dedek. Chomsowa’s story adds the underground rescue network in Lviv.
Tamara Maksymeniuk-Bromberg’s story unfolds in Odesa. There, rescue did not mean hiding someone just once. It meant continuously supplying several families with food, clothing, contact with the outside world, and opportunities for shelter. The assistance continued even after people were transferred to places of detention.
Bela Yakimova-Lipper saved her husband and other Jews in the Rivne area. Hiding seven people for nineteen months meant constantly finding food, preventing denunciations, and maintaining secrecy during any inspection. Her willingness to enter the ghetto with an infant underlines how personal this struggle was for her.
Anna Hornung-Tomachak operated in the Ternopil area. Her method of rescue was based on concealing family identities. By presenting herself as the mother of Jewish boys, she helped them hide under the guise of a Christian family. Here, the principal means of protection was not a secret room but a convincing everyday cover story.
Viktor Melnyk and his female relatives combined shelter with assistance in travel, obtaining forged documents, and organizing escapes.
This is particularly important for understanding the Holocaust in occupied territories: rescuing people often required an entire network of acquaintances, transportation, and others willing to receive persecuted individuals at the next stage of their journey.
Maria Serbniak-Dicker operated in Lviv. Together with her friends, she hid Jews who had escaped from the Janowska camp and was forced to find another refuge when their original hiding place was at risk of discovery.
Władysława Chomsowa’s story adds another dimension to the events in Lviv: assistance to Jews was provided not only by individual families but also by members of the Polish underground associated with Żegota.
The geography of these actions, from Odesa to Lviv, demonstrates that the rescue of Jews was not carried out under a single organization or common plan. In most cases, decisions were made by individuals and small groups forced to operate under very different conditions.
How Israel awards the title of Righteous Among the Nations
The title of Righteous Among the Nations is awarded by Yad Vashem to non-Jews who rescued Jews during the Holocaust while risking their own lives, freedom, or safety, without acting for previously agreed material compensation.
A special commission investigates the circumstances of the rescue, witness testimony, documents, and the motivations behind the actions.
What matters is not simply sympathy or assistance but genuine participation in saving persecuted people.
Recognition can be granted posthumously. This was the case with Nestor Sniadanko and Frania Dedek-Belska. Both died long before their official recognition, and their awards were received by the people they had rescued or by relatives.
In Nestor’s case, the decisive role was played by the application submitted by Antonia Gruber — the woman he had hidden and who later became his wife.
In Frania’s case, testimony survived from the two boys whom she had brought to safety and raised.
For the Garden in Haifa, this has special significance. The city commemorated not merely people recognized by the State of Israel but also the personal relationships between rescuers and those who owed them their lives.
Where are the Righteous buried, and why does the number of graves differ from the number of stones?
Apart from the Garden, Haifa has another important dimension of preserving the memory of the Righteous Among the Nations: their burial sites.
An official municipal announcement dated February 1, 2024, refers to eleven Righteous Among the Nations buried at Haifa’s Latin Cemetery.
At the same time, municipal publications from 2023 and 2025 give a higher figure: eighteen Righteous Among the Nations whose graves were identified at the Latin Cemetery and the Darkhei Shalom Cemetery.
These figures are not contradictory: eleven refers to one cemetery, while eighteen covers two burial sites.
But neither figure can automatically be equated with the twenty-two names on the municipal memorial list.
Some Righteous Among the Nations are commemorated in Haifa because they lived here temporarily, not because they are buried in the city. Raoul Wallenberg is an obvious example. Moreover, different municipal programs may have included somewhat different groups of people.
One noteworthy grave is that of Nestor Sniadanko and Antonia Gruber in Haifa. In their case, the memory of rescue is preserved not only on a separate stone in Ramat Alon but also at the family’s burial site.
The preservation of graves has another dimension. Some of the Righteous were non-Jews who did not have large families in Israel and whose graves might have been left without regular care after their deaths.
Bosmat students, Rotary, and the municipal institute: How Haifa continues its work
In recent years, the municipal authorities have organized an educational program combining Holocaust studies with the maintenance of the graves of the Righteous Among the Nations.
On April 27, 2022, a ceremony was held at the Latin Cemetery with approximately 160 schoolchildren and representatives of municipal organizations.
The municipality defined the program’s purpose: students should learn exactly whom the Righteous rescued, where they are buried, the circumstances surrounding the rescues, and why these stories matter to society.
The program consists of three successive elements: studying biographies at school, visiting burial sites to care for the graves and hold commemorative ceremonies, and then visiting the Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations, where students learn about the rescuers’ personal histories.
Participants include Haifa’s municipal Institute for Holocaust Studies named after Hedva Eibschitz, the city’s education department, the Moriah-Haifa Rotary Club, Bosmat school, and other educational institutions.
In 2023, the municipality reported that eleventh-grade students at Bosmat were researching biographies of the Righteous as part of their preparation for history examinations, including work with encyclopedic articles.
On January 29, 2024, a memorial ceremony was held at the Latin Cemetery. Among the stories presented was that of Johanna Budin, a Righteous Among the Nations whose name appears as number 21 on the municipal memorial list and who helped rescue members of a Jewish family.
Her actions were preserved even in the surname of the rescued family: its members adopted the name Budin in gratitude.
These commemorative activities continued in January 2025.
On January 27, 2026, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Kolbo reported another ceremony — the fourth consecutive event under the current program — with participation from the municipal institute, Bosmat school, and Rotary Club.
Roni Grossman also continued working with schoolchildren. During a meeting in 2022, he personally told students at the Ehud school how Veronika had saved his father.
Teachers wanted children to visit the Garden not merely with a memorized list of names but also with questions about why ordinary people had made such dangerous decisions.
In this way, the original idea behind the memorial acquired a practical continuation. The Garden ceased to be merely a location for annual official ceremonies and became part of the city’s ongoing educational work.
What remains unknown even after examining the sources
The history of the memorial list’s expansion to twenty-two names can be traced through documents, but several questions remain unanswered.
First, the exact dates when the memorial stones for Nestor Sniadanko and Frania Dedek-Belska were installed have not been established.
Both were added after the memorial’s original arrangement and were already present in April 2020, when Hagit Hornstein conducted her investigation.
The names of Johanna Budin and Władysława Chomsowa appear in photographs of the memorial monument and map in the official booklet, but the document does not identify when their stones were installed or who initiated the changes.
It is still not entirely clear why two people recognized by Yad Vashem as early as 2005 were not included in the Garden’s original list at its inauguration in 2008.
However, the letter dated May 1, 2014, shows that researcher Gideon Raphael Ben-Michael noticed the omission of Frania Dedek-Belska’s name and formally requested that the mayor arrange for her memorial stone.
The situation can now be clarified further: in the official booklet, Frania is listed as number 20 on the main monument, and the map includes numbers 19, 20, 21, and 22.
But the absence of a precise date or an indication of when the photographs were taken means that this document alone cannot establish the administrative sequence of every addition.
Variations in surnames, dates, and geographical classifications also require further archival research.
For example, Ben-Michael’s 2014 letter and earlier publications state that Frania died in 1986 at the age of 77, while the later municipal booklet gives 1987 and an age of 76.
Until her death certificate is checked, this remains a discrepancy between documents rather than a reason to silently change the biography.
In historical records, the same individuals could appear under prewar, postwar, married, or Israeli names. Nestor Zenon Sniadanko and Yosef Gruber were the same person. Frania Dedek and Fruma Belska were the same woman.
Differences in the reported number of people rescued are also important.
A correct count requires distinguishing between individuals directly sheltered in a house, those supplied with food, and those helped to escape. The same family may appear in several testimonies.
These unresolved questions do not invalidate the established facts, but they demonstrate that even a well-known municipal memorial requires continuing historical research.
How to find the Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations in Haifa
The Garden is located in the Ramat Alon neighborhood, between Yaakov Azulai, Yigal Allon, Eliezer Alter, and Arthur Biram streets.
Its official address for map searches is: פארק חסידי אומות עולם, רמת אלון, חיפה.
Official Garden page on the Haifa Municipality website.
Visitors can walk along the paths, read the stories on the memorial stones, and see how the memory of those who rescued Jews during the Holocaust remains part of the urban landscape of contemporary Israel.
Twenty-two names and one city’s story
The Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations in Haifa came into being because of a man who had grown up alongside the woman who saved his father.
His personal desire to express gratitude developed into a municipal decision and then into a memorial whose officially published monument photograph documents twenty-two names of Righteous Among the Nations.
Each of these people had a story of their own. Some opened their homes, others used their professions to help, some protected Jews by pretending they were relatives, and some were themselves still children.
After the war, some of the rescuers arrived in Israel together with the people whose lives they had saved.
This is what makes the Haifa memorial distinctive.
It tells not only the story of the Holocaust in Europe but also what happened to the rescuers and survivors after 1945: how they crossed borders, founded families, changed names, came to Palestine and Israel, found work, and grew old alongside people they had once helped.
The Ukrainian connection of the Garden is not merely a matter of national remembrance.
These are stories from Zolochiv, Lviv, Nadvirna, Odesa, Rivne, and other towns where, during the Holocaust, some people participated in the persecution and murder of Jews, others remained indifferent, and still others risked their lives attempting to save them.
Yaroslava Levytska, the last Righteous Among the Nations residing in Israel, died on November 10, 2026.
But the memorial in Ramat Alon continues to tell her story and those of the twenty-one other people named on the official monument.
Children still play beside their names in the Garden. It is for future generations that Haifa continues to preserve this memory.
Documentary sources for this investigation
- Haifa Municipality — Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations — official information about the memorial.
- Kolbo, Hagit Hornstein, April 20, 2020 — “The Secrets of the Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations” — the founder’s story, a list of names, and an investigation of two additional memorial stones.
- NEWSru.co.il, May 19, 2008 — inauguration of the memorial — contemporary reporting on the original eighteen names.
- Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, Shimon Briman, October 27, 2020 — the biographies of Nestor Sniadanko and Antonia Gruber.
- The Guardian, July 18, 2006 — “Paragons of Peace” — information about the recognition of Nestor and Frania and the stories of those rescued.
- Haifa Municipality — educational project for preserving the graves of the Righteous Among the Nations — school participation and the municipal remembrance program.
- Haifa Municipality — ceremony held on January 29, 2024 — information about eleven burial sites at the Latin Cemetery.
- NAnews — the story of Yaroslava Levytska — family history, recognition by Yad Vashem, and life in Haifa.
- Haifa Municipality — announcement of Yaroslava Levytska’s death, November 11, 2026.
- Haipo — a meeting with Garden founder Roni Grossman, 2022 — additional personal testimony and information about the educational program.
- Haifa Municipality — illustrated booklet about the Righteous Among the Nations — photograph of the main monument with 22 names, map, memorial stones, and biographies of Johanna Budin and Władysława Chomsowa.
- Gideon Raphael Ben-Michael — “From the Holocaust to Renewal,” letter to the Mayor of Haifa dated May 1, 2014, pp. 48–52 — the initiative to install Frania Dedek-Belska’s memorial stone and the lack of funding in 2014.
- Silent Heroes Memorial Center — biography of Władysława Chomsowa — leadership of the Lviv branch of Żegota, underground activities, and life in Israel.