Lavie (Levtzler), Ze’ev (“Zevik”)

Son of Avraham and Batya. He was born on August 28, 1948, at Kibbutz Ruhama. He grew up and was educated in a kibbutz and completed elementary and high school there. He was a man of energy and yearning for creativity. He always wanted to do, act, create. He was the first to do and bear the burden, at parties, in good conversations and in every action that required devotion. He loved people, was Simcha to give them of himself, to be willingly integrated into the joint work of the community. It was the secret of his perfection, the secret of his joy. Ze’evik was drafted into the IDF in January 1968 and joined the Nahal Brigade. “He was a Simcha man, because he always acted according to his conscience and his consciousness,” said a friend who spoke about him after he fell. To me he was the honest conscience-and so I was always so proud of him. – In the last conversations with him, I always enjoyed seeing him deliberating on conscientious problems that others had not paid attention to. I enjoyed watching him grow up. I loved it when in the fervor of the argument he would make things that I knew from my experience that in a year he would admit his mistake. “Zevik, the boy whose first meeting we conducted in the army, was always the boy who had the right to be a soldier. The vibrant spirit, which never rested and restless, set itself challenges and reached them. He wanted more. Zevik began with our unit as a soldier and graduated cum laude and became an outstanding grade commander. As a core group, Zevik decided at the end of the cycle to return with the members of the nucleus to the challenge he had set for him at the beginning of his career – settling in Kibbutz Kerem Shalom, but before he realized it in Kerem Shalom, Ze’evik decided that his military service would contribute to the IDF. And I wanted to be an officer in the unit, and I am sure that if he continued on the way he decided to go, he would certainly have been an excellent officer in our unit. “