Family pleads for release of Holocaust scholar Alex Dancyg held in Gaza

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Family, friends and former students across Israel and Poland have urged the release of an elderly scholar renowned for teaching about the Holocaust as he remains held hostage in Gaza.

Orit Margaliot last spoke to her close friend Alex Dancyg, 75, on October 6.

The pair, who met in 2000 and worked together at Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust museum, previously talked on the phone every two days.

They had made plans to meet in Jerusalem, where Mr Dancyg’s grandson would celebrate his bar mitzvah.

The event went ahead, but Mr Dancyg was not there, instead held in Gaza, where an estimated 163 people are still hostages of Hamas.

“From the beginning, we decided that’s he’s alive because you can’t live otherwise. We all speak of him in the present tense,” Ms Margalit told media from her home in Jerusalem.

“Our belief is that he’s alive and coming home. We can’t imagine any other possibility.”

Born to Holocaust survivors in 1948, Mr Dancyg is best known for educating thousands of children on the Holocaust at Yad Vashem.

He fostered relations between Israel and Poland, where he has trained people working now as guides at the Auschwitz museum and other camps.

In his childhood home of Poland, colourful murals of Mr Dancyg have sprung up across the capital, where demonstrations for his release were held in October.

In Jerusalem, his former colleagues at Yad Vashem spoke of “thousands” of students taught by Mr Dancyg in his 30 years as an educator, shuttling back and forth between Poland and Israel during his time at Yad Vashem’s Poland department.