January 15, 2009
An Israeli community with close ties to New Jersey lost its 42nd soldier last Thursday when Capt. Omer Rabinovich of the Golani infantry brigade’s elite Egoz unit was killed in the northern Gaza Strip.
Rabinovich, 23, a resident of Arad, was killed in a battle with 10 Hamas gunmen who had ambushed the soldiers he commanded. He led his soldiers in a gun battle that ended with Rabinovich and all 10 Hamas fighters dead. One other Israeli soldier was lightly wounded in the incident.
Arad is a sister community to the Jewish Federation of Central New Jersey under the Jewish Agency’s Partnership 2000 program, along with the P2K cluster of New Jersey and Delaware communities.
Tehila Nachalon, the Central federation’s representative in Israel, led a delegation from the cluster who visited Rabinovich’s family on Monday and delivered a condolence letter from the communities to Omer’s mother, Rina.
A delegation from the cluster visited Rabinovich’s family on Monday and delivered a condolence letter from the communities to Omer’s mother, Rina.
Rina Rabinovich thanked the delegation and invited residents of Arad’s partner communities to visit her so she could talk to them about her son and Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip, which began on Dec. 27.
She said that her son had taken the tests necessary to become a Jewish Agency for Israel emissary in New Jersey, but changed his mind and decided to stay on longer in the army.
When news of Omer’s death reached the Rabinovich family, they sequestered themselves in their Arad cottage. Besides his mother and father, Ze’ev, Omer left behind two older sisters, Adi, 27, and Inbar, 24.
Three generations of the Rabinovich family have lived in Arad, starting with Omer’s grandfather, Zevulun. Rina and Ze’ev grew up together in the city. Ze’ev works at a security installation; Rina is in charge of special needs education in Arad.
“Omer was very devoted to the state from his days in the Shomer Hatzair youth group,” Zevulun said about his grandson. “He worked taking care of kibbutz youths for a year before enlisting, and then he made it into Egoz, the elite unit that he wanted.”
‘Omer was a classmate of the last soldier from Arad killed in action, Lt. Hanan Barak, who was killed in the same June 25, 2006, incident in which terrorists from the Gaza Strip infiltrated into Israel and kidnapped Corporal Gilad Shalit.
During the Second Intifada, in 2001, Danny Darai was killed by a sniper when he was on duty outside Bethlehem; Sharon Touboul was killed in 2002 by a suicide bomber when she was on a bus en route to Arad for her sister’s wedding.
Arad has so far been spared any other involvement in the war in the Gaza Strip. Although the city, like the other towns that have been hit, is in the Negev, it is out of range of Hamas rockets.
Hundreds of soldiers, friends, and family members crowded Omer’s funeral last Friday, crying, hugging, and expressing their grief. Soldiers in Omer’s unit remembered him fondly at his funeral in Arad’s cemetery. They said he was very brave, that they admired him and modeled themselves after him.
“He was a leader, an officer, and a gentleman,” a childhood friend said in his eulogy. “He was always in the right place at the right time. Whenever you needed him, he was there. In good times and bad, he was there for his good friends.”
Many of the soldiers who attended the funeral served under him in the Second Lebanon War in 2006. One of them, Asaf, said that Omer was always the first soldier to offer to help his comrades.
“He was always a leader, and that’s the way I will remember him,” Asaf said.
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