Lecker, Yigal

Yigal, son of Magda and Yehoshua, was born on January 31, 1953, in Jerusalem. He studied at the Hebrew Gymnasia Elementary School in Jerusalem. Afterward, he continued high school in the same school and graduated from the Lincoln School in Buenos Aires, where he traveled with his parents, who were on a mission. Yigal was drafted into the Israel Defense Forces in early February 1972 and assigned to the Armored Corps, and after completing basic training he was sent to the Armored Corps School, where he successfully completed a series of courses, “Yigal was a friend I do not believe I’ll find another like him,” Yinon, one of his closest friends at the Armored Corps Officers School, told of him, who always knew when to help and how, and I knew that he could always be relied on as a soldier. Even if we had to return from training at four in the morning, he would go check the tank and fill in a fault report, even though our tank belonged to the company’s deputy commander and hardly participated in the training and although he sometimes parked on the ground about a kilometer from our area. I remember that we used to turn around with the tank, and when I was still confused, I did not know what was happening Ernie, I already heard Yigal’s voice in touch, in his characteristic silence … “When the Yom Kippur War broke out, Yigal rode in one of the tanks who had descended from Rafah to the Canal Zone. On October 7, 1973, Yigal’s tank was hit, but he and the crew managed to escape. Yigal’s friend, Yinon, who was a long way away, found him with binoculars and hurried to pick him up. Yigal and other crew members on the ground boarded a damaged tank that was still able to move and at the order of the battalion commander began to retreat southwards. Suddenly, the force retreating from a volley of missiles. The tank that was sitting in it was hit and Yigal was killed. He was laid to rest in the military cemetery on Mount Herzl.