“ It is an honour to remember him. I will light his candle on Yom HaShoah every year so that his memory will never fade”
Yonatan celebrated his Bar Mitzvah in April 2026
On my Bar Mitzvah I was honoured to be twinned with Jonathan Friedman, who was killed in Auschwitz at the age of just nine. Jonathan was a Hungarian Jew born in Salgótarján, Northeast of Budapest on the Czechoslovakian (modern day Slovakia). His parents were Terezia and Joseph. We know that Terezia was killed in Auschwitz with her son, but I cannot find anything about his father.
From 1938 to 1944 the Hungarian government (which was effectively a puppet of the Nazis) established anti-Jewish laws, similar to those across the German Reich at the time. During this period, the government deported thousands of Jews into German occupied Ukraine where they were murdered. I can only imagine what it must have felt like to be a young child, like Jonathan, having your freedoms whittled away. On the 19 of March 1944, the Nazis invaded Hungary and sent roughly 440,000 Jews to concentration camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau. In under two months most of them had been killed.
Jonatan was murdered on the 15 of June 1944. Jonatan was only nine when he perished; he was never able to have his Bar Mitzvah. I hope that this is used to remember him so that he may never be forgotten.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” – Viktor E. Frankl