Dayan, Shimon
Son of Sodia (Haviva) and Zachariah (craftsman, descendant of a family of rabbis), was born in 1924 in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, and immigrated to Israel with his family in 1932. In Israel he studied at the Talmud Torah and continued to study in evening classes. For several years he worked as a laborer, and during his free time he read books and played soccer. At the beginning of World War II, he volunteered for the British Army (although he had not yet reached the age of 17) and served in Egypt, the Western Desert, Greece, Libya, the Jewish Brigade in Italy and later in Germany, Holland and France. In the battles he excelled bravely and sacrificed and was promoted to corporal. He also defended the honor of the Jews with courage and a strong hand and with friendly blows to his fellow British soldiers who dared to show hatred or disdain for the Jews. Once he gave such a lesson to an officer and was taken down as a result of his rank and sentenced to imprisonment. Even on a military expedition on the ship, he urged his fellow Jews to retaliate against the insults of the drunken British soldiers. At his request, he was transferred to a commando unit on the Italian front and in a bold and bloody raid he was badly wounded in the leg, escaped on his own and was taken to a hospital. After he recovered, he volunteered to evacuate a very dangerous minefield, and when he performed the mission with courage and success, the corporal was restored. He participated in the decisive battle over the Sanyo River and the Brigade expedition to the Low Countries. When he returned home and was released from the army and saw the hostility of the British government to the Jews, he tended to fight them within the underground, but first went to arrange his private life. He started working in the framework, but was forced to stop because of a severe burn in his hand. For a few months he tried his luck at working in diamonds in Netanya and then moved on to a simpler job: in the winter as a carpenter in the packing of citrus fruit and in the summer as a construction worker, he was employed as a night guard in the Netanya neighborhoods of Benzion and Zvi. In the winter of 1948, he participated in Etzel activities against Arab villages in the mountains of Ephraim and in the battle for northern Jaffa on May 30, 1948, three days after He went out to fight in Rosh Ha’ayin and in the fierce attack of better enemy forces he stood with a Bren machine gun, first from the ground and then from a roof and refused to retreat with the others. And died of his wounds, the fire increased and he could not be removed from it … A few days after his death, his little daughter died and his body was found after several years and after being identified, was brought on Friday, (24.11.1952) to rest in the military cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.
