Annia, Yair (Mologata)

Ben Yaffe (Teguda) and Ezra. He was born on August 1, 1978 in Ethiopia. In the spring of 1984, at the age of six, he immigrated to Israel with his mother and three sisters after a grueling journey. For six years he lived with his family in an absorption center in Safed and then moved to Rishon Letzion. Yair began his studies at the “Beit Ephraim” elementary school in the city. Already as a child, it was evident that he was a sociable, gentle man, willing to help and give himself to others, and quickly acquired many friends. His younger sister, Dana, says: “Yair was a full-fledged child, the only son among four daughters, to whom he was their entire world.” When he reached the age of eleven, Yair went to study in a boarding school in Afula, to the dismay of his parents who wanted him close to them. He was satisfied with his studies and insisted on continuing to live there. “During the whole week we waited for him at the window, waiting for him to come,” adds Dana, who tells about his studies at the boarding school: “We would all sit around him and listen eagerly to his words.” Fifteen-year-old Yair continued his studies at the Yemin Orde boarding school in Nir Etzion, near Haifa. At the end of a year and a half, he decided that he had split up his life and returned to the family home in Rishon Letzion. When he returned to his home, Dana says, “From the moment he returned home, everything changed and the house became lively and lively, and Yair got his own apartment and turned it into a studio apartment, bringing a billiards table and painting portraits of his favorite singer Bob Marley on the walls of his apartment.” Yair’s main hobbies were cooking, reading books and reggae music, and his dream was to go to Jamaica at the end of the army. Yair persuaded his parents to let him stop his studies for work. With the money he earned in the various jobs he worked, he spoiled the household. But after three months of work it became evident that Yair Shinui had changed: he decided to return to study in order to complete his matriculation exams and register for Ariel College. At the beginning of his studies there, he moved his residence to the college dormitories and the family home again ordered only on weekends. Yair enlisted in the IDF at the end of November 1998. He served in a nutrition unit in the Naval Commanding Squadron at the Nevatim base and served for fifteen months on April 25, 2000. On April 25, 2000, Yair fell while serving, Twenty-two years old. He was laid to rest in the military cemetery in Rishon Letzion. Survived by parents and nine brothers and sisters – Anat, Dina, Zehavit, Sigal, Pesach, Sarah, Avi, Levi and Lior. In a letter of condolence to the bereaved family, Miki, the unit’s commander, wrote: “… the heart is suffocated when such young lives come to an end and when the promise is not fulfilled.” The Nevatim family bows its head in the face of Yair’s premature loss. Yair was immortalized on the website of the Levinsky College, as part of a research project that was conducted among the Ethiopian community in the Ramat Eliyahu neighborhood of Rishon Letzion and in the Kiryat Moshe neighborhood of Tiberias and was dedicated to his memory. The memorial page can be found at http://www.levinsky.macam98.ac.il/nofel/nofelpage_yair.html.