Itamar Elia
He was born in Arad on 29 May 1976, the eldest son of Edna and Shmuel. Brother to Uriel and Aya. As early as his childhood, he seemed to be curious and willing. At school his curiosity was expressed in the desire to know everything, in profound learning, in the love of reading, and his love for music developed. He studied music from the age of eight and played the recorder, and then, for nine years, he played clarinet. When he entered middle school, he joined the tour groups of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel. In tour groups he traveled extensively – initially in the immediate vicinity of the Judean desert and the Negev, and then throughout the country – from the south to the north. After graduating from a junior high school in the ninth grade, he guided groups of children in the tour groups for two years, and at the beginning of the 11th grade he went on a youth delegation from the Shepherd School to the United States as part of the Young Ambassadors program of the Israel- America”. During that year, his interest in enlisting in the “Shayetet” began. After completing the tests at the Gadna diving camp, he was determined about the way he chose, despite the additional possibilities he faced, graduating from high school in the physical-mathematical track and enlisting in the summer of 1994 to the “Shayetet 13.” Itamar fell on September 5, 1997), together with eleven of his friends, at the entrance to the village of Ansariya in Lebanon. His body remained in the area and only after nine months of negotiations was it buried in the military section of the Arad cemetery.
