Aharon Hoter-Yishai

Aharon Hoter-Yishai (; January 1, 1905 – May 20, 2003) was an Israeli military officer and lawyer.

Early life and career

Hoter-Yishai was born as Aharon Khotorsky in the Russian Empire in 1905, and was one of five children. He moved to Ottoman Palestine at age 8 with his twin sister and older brother. His parents and two other sisters later joined them. During World War I the family lived in Hadera, where his parents purchased a farm. After the war he studied at the Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium in Tel Aviv.

In 1926, he began studying law in Jerusalem. He also joined the Haganah and participated in its first officer's course in 1927. After being certified as a lawyer, he moved to Haifa. He represented Shlomo Ben-Yosef and Mordechai Schwarcz at their trials.

He married Rachel Rabinovitz in 1930. They had three children: On, Dror, and Smadar. He traveled throughout Europe to locate Holocaust survivors in order to assist them in immigrating to Palestine. He visited several of the Nazi camps and places where Jewish survivors were including Freimann Flak-Kaserne and the St. Ottilien Archabbey. In June 1945 he arrived at Theresienstadt. He also visited the camps at Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, and Mauthausen. He found many refugees in a dire situation and discovered that some of those who had returned to their home countries had not survived due to the hostility of locals. He confronted British and American officers in demanding improvements in the refugees' living conditions and a halt in repatriations to their original countries. He pressured David Ben-Gurion to visit the refugees before returning to Palestine from a conference in London in 1945 and organized a gathering of Jewish soldiers from numerous Allied armies in Paris. He also helped organize professional courses for soldiers to help them reintegrate into civilian life and gather evidence regarding looted Jewish property for the Nuremberg trials. and the Yad Vashem committee.

In 1961 Hoter-Yishai was called as witness in the trial of Adolf Eichmann. He testified regarding what he found at the concentration camps he encountered:

Attorney General: "Mr. Hoter-Yishai, in 1945, at the end of the Second World War, you were in Europe as an officer in the second battalion of the Jewish Brigade – is that correct?"

Witness Hoter-Yishai: "Correct...I believe that if I were to try to confine myself to a few sentences, I could say: We found a collection of living people who, psychologically, were not very different from those corpses we found lying there without limbs and even heads. From the physical point of view, everything was done, to a certain extent, especially during the first stages, in order to put them back on their feet, as far as that was possible. If my memory serves me correctly, there were, at the time, in Bergen-Belsen, 52,000 refugees, of whom 27,000 died in the course of receiving medical treatment."

Hoter-Yishai released a book in 1958 and another one in 1991. He suffered a stroke in 1992 that left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak, and devoted himself to writing. He released a further book and worked on another one which remained unpublished. He died in 2003 at the age of 98.