.svg)
In the moving video below, Yam Rom shares how a search for community led her to a powerful discovery about her family’s past. When Yam decided to transfer to Hadassah Neurim Youth Aliyah Village, she was feeling disconnected at her previous school and sought a place where she could thrive.
A week after moving in, she shared the news during a family dinner. To her amazement, her grandfather revealed that he had walked those same paths decades earlier. After fleeing the Nazis and finding a safe haven in Israel at age 13, he grew up at Hadassah Neurim.
“I didn’t know my grandfather knew Neurim,” Yam said. “It really moved me to hear that I chose exactly the same place where my grandfather grew up and received all his values.”
This connection took on a deeper meaning during the annual Poland heritage trip. Before Yam flew to Europe, her grandfather shared the family’s full history. He told her of his father, a rabbi in Lodz, and the family’s forced journey through Ghetto Lodz and Krakow to Auschwitz, where most of the family was executed in the gas chambers.
Yam sat with her grandfather for hours to hear the story of her family. “I heard the full story and the names and everything,” she said. “It's an honor to hear about generations before me.”
While standing at Auschwitz, Yam experienced a lifechanging realization. Looking at a historical photograph of an execution, she noticed a pole in the image. "There was a pole next to me and I leaned on it and read the signs," she recalled. "Then I look up and I realize that I'm standing exactly where that happened."
Watch the video to see Yam’s journey to the site of her family’s tragedy in Auschwitz.
