Meisner, Benny (Benjamin)

Ben Roth and Eric. He was born on the 18th of Iyar 5724 (30.4.1964) in the city of San Salvador, in El Salvador, and was three and a half years old when his family immigrated to Israel and settled in Kiryat Tivon. He studied at the Rimonim Elementary School in Kiryat Tivon and completed his high school studies at the ORT Greenberg High School in the Electronics Department. From an early age, he liked to create, invent and plan and study electronics. In addition to his studies at school, Benny was involved in sports, especially in the field of basketball. He was a member of the Tivon team and the Israeli national team and invested in this hobby for a long time. His excellence in this industry even opened the possibility of him serving when he joined the rear unit as an outstanding player, but Benny’s election was different. In January 1983, he enlisted in the IDF and volunteered for an elite unit, where he underwent basic training and high motivation, but was forced to leave the unit due to medical problems. Despite the fact that the army allowed him to move to a unit where the physical effort and risk were much lower, And was added to Battalion 202. In the course of the battalion he underwent professional training and continued to provide the best with dedication and diligence, and despite his military service he did not abandon the water ball game and occasionally participated in competitions and even in the games of his team abroad. After his release, Benny joined the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI) as a tour guide in the Eilat area and established his residence in a field school in Eilat. He has always loved nature and when he was in Eilat, he was bound in all his senses to the open spaces, the mountains and the magical world of the Red Sea. In his work as a guide he saw great importance in educating teenagers and adults to understand, love, and preserve nature in its savagery against irreversible destruction. He devoted hours to discussions with his students and various environmental protection projects organized by the school. In Eilat he also began to delve deeply into the subject of man in the desert – his development, his culture and his coping with environmental conditions, and like everything else he dealt with – here too he invested all of it, with devotion and thoroughness, with lots of curiosity and love and with humor and a smile in his eyes. On February 19, 1989, during an active reserve service, Benny fell in combat when he was on a tour of the Casbah of Nablus. He was laid to rest in the military section of the Kiryat Tivon cemetery. Survived by his parents, brother and sister – Rafael and Tamar. The Jewish student organization in Italy planted trees in the forests of the Jewish National Fund. The Jewish community in El Salvador, Benny’s birthplace, planted a forest in his memory in the JNF forests near Tivon, where the staff of the Nilit factory, where Arik’s father worked, planted trees in the JNF forests in memory of Benny.