25/04/2026
Dimona | Visiting Holocaust Survivors in Dimona After the Iranian Missile Attack on Their Community (Day 2)
(More Survivors Visited after Missile Hit Their Street)
Another day of visiting survivors whose apartments sustained the most damage when Iranian missile hit their street. Helping Hand Coalition with GAiN representatives visited several survivors and brought help and gifts. Three stories especially touched our hearts, and we share them here:
Maissa's windows and doors were blown out by the blast wave when the missile hit her street. The windows have already been repaired, but the entrance door still can't close properly and be locked. She is grateful for all the help she is receiving. She said someone from another charity came to visit her just to make sure she' OK.
Maissa moved to Israel in 1995 and has lived in Dimona since then. She’s been active in the community: in the choir, the theater group… and likes that there is so much cultural activities in the town. She is originally from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, that’s why she has carpets on the wall.
She got a bouquet of flowers to cheer her and a cane to help with walking.
Rosa was just 3 years old when the war started in the former USSR. She, with her older sister and brother, was in a ghetto.
When Rosa was 37, her husband passed away. Shortly after, she had a massive heart attack and almost died. But she lived and worked several jobs to care for her two children. Her elder sister lived with her till she passed away in 2017.
Her daughter lives close by. She has pleaded with Rosa to go to the bomb shelter on the ground floor and even asked the neighbors to make sure to take her there, but Rosa does not like it. “I have been close to death four times”, she says, “and I lived four years in the ghetto. I am not afraid of anything.”
This year the Passover celebration was more modest compared to the last. Rosa's daughter is helping to cook for 50 soldiers so that they'd have some good home cooked meals. The army brings the groceries and she and a few other women cook. Even the social worker now visits less because of the war.
Rosa was very touched to receive a bouquet of flowers and a walker. She thanked the volunteers with tears in her eyes.
Dima, who is almost 90, lives with his wife Natasha. She was initially a caregiver to his first wife, and after she passed away, Dima proposed to Natasha and they got married.
“I cannot really leave the house”, she says. “When there is an alert, I help Dima down to the shelter. It is an old neighborhood, and the shelter is also old. The air in there is very bad, so I also bring his oxygen so he can breathe. There were two rockets on that day, both with about 450kg of explosives. One fell in the yard of a kindergarten. If we had not been in the shelter, we would probably be dead now. Our windows crashed into the room, onto the table. In the shelter we could hear the blast, and then there was the heat. We could feel it even down there, and we were very scared. Dima was shaking so badly that I gave him his heart drops. He was so anxious that I went out of the shelter alone at first; I wanted to see how bad it was.”
The windows have already been replaced.
Dima is thankful for people that care for him. He shares that they got help immediately: “When they heard that I was a ghetto survivor, seven volunteers came. I was pleased that they recognized my status.” Dima is also a member of the partisan’s club. He was born in Ukraine, made Aliyah in 1990 and came to Dimona in 1995. He also loves that there are a lot of cultural activities in the town, and he appreciates the concerts and presents that Elena organizes. When he thinks of the time when the rockets fell, he gets emotional and starts weeping. “I was hoping that I could live my last few years in peace”, he says, “but people are treating each other worse and worse. We need to stay tender and not harden our hearts.”
He was grateful to receive a cane to help him walk steadily.
