Yakira’s maternal great-great uncle, Moshe Alexander Gross, is pictured in this photograph standing in the front row second from the right. He is with his Navy unit during WWII.

Moshe Alexander was born in 1922 in Krulah, Romania and immigrated with his family to the United States in 1934 at the age of twelve. Moshe Alexander voluntarily enlisted in the U.S. Navy even though he was exempt from the draft because he was studying in Yeshiva in Brooklyn.

He believed that as a Jew it was important to fight for his country and to help his fellow Jews being annihilated in the Holocaust. Moshe Alexander Gross was killed in the D-Day Invasion of France on June 6, 1944, at the age of twenty-three. After Moshe’s death, his parents wanted to create a living memorial in honor of their brave and beloved son. In 1945, Yeshiva Zichron Moshe was founded in his memory in the Bronx by his parents, Isaac and Regina Gross, with Rabbi Yerucham Gorelick as the Rosh Yeshiva.

The Yeshiva grew and expanded and moved to South Fallsburg, N.Y. in 1969. Today, it is a vibrant and flourishing yeshiva community with a high school, kollel, and yeshiva k’tana.