Kaufman, Efraim

Efraim was born on May 31, 1948 in Poland and immigrated to Israel with his family in 1950. When he was 17 he was orphaned from his father. He studied at the Neve Ne’eman Elementary School in Hod Hasharon, at the Beit Berl High School in Kfar Sava, and continued his studies at Tel Aviv University in electronics, engineering and computers with the help of a scholarship from Tadiran. Ephraim was a diligent and diligent student and was very careful in preparing the lessons. He read a lot and was knowledgeable in many fields. He was one of the members of Hanoar Haoved Vehalomed, a dynamic and active member who devoted much of his time and energies to the activities of the Neve Ne’eman branch. Together with his friends in the movement he traveled a lot around the country. He was a sports fan, an avid soccer player and an outstanding goalkeeper. He liked to play chess, worked hard to improve his game, took part in chess competitions and won great achievements. He also received certificates of appreciation and excellence. He also collected stamps and devoted himself to this hobby for a long time. Ephraim was drafted into the IDF in early August 1967 and assigned to the Communications and Electronics Corps, where he was trained as a technician, who was “a good professional, dedicated, responsible, loyal, disciplined and punctual, and fulfilled his role to their satisfaction.” When he was released from regular service he was assigned to a reserve unit and was sometimes called for reserve duty, and Ephraim worked for Tadiran’s development labs, where he wrote that he “knew how to devote himself entirely to the subject that dealt with him. He had an independent and original thought and was meticulous about the integrity of his performance. He was very friendly, easy to make friends, cheerful and Simcha, and his friends liked him for his good humor, his sense of humor and his good spirits, and he liked to joke and joke, In 1970 he married his girlfriend Chaya and eventually had a son. Ephraim was a devoted son of his parents, a loyal husband and a loving father to his son, and when the Yom Kippur War broke out, Ephraim was drafted and sent with his unit to the front in Sinai, and on October 11, 1973, he was seriously wounded by a bullet in the stomach. He spent many weeks fighting for his life until he passed away on December 23, 1973. The next day he was brought to rest in the military cemetery in Kiryat Shaul, leaving behind a wife and son. He was raised to the rank of sergeant, was twenty-five years old when he fell in a letter of condolence to the bereaved family: “Ephraim was a loyal, quiet soldier, very devoted to his job and loved by his friends.” His mother planted a grove in the Forest of the Defenders, a thousand trees.