Reevenbach, Isaac (Ijo)

Yitzhak (Izzo), son of Avraham and Regina, a Holocaust survivor, was born on December 4, 1946, in Germany and immigrated to Israel with his family in 1948. He completed his elementary and high school studies in his home town of Lod. Yitzhak was a clever and outstanding student. In high school he stood out as the leader of the students’ group in his class, and at the Technion he was a member of the student union council. In high school he participated in the Gadna training courses and in 1961 he completed a course for commanders in the framework of the Gadna, where he loved poetry and prose, read many books, studied philosophy and philosophy and was a follower of Schopenhauer’s teachings. He was very interested in cinema, admired cinema, loved music and enjoyed listening to the Beatles songs and Elvis Presley songs, and Yitzhak refused to accept things as they were and always struggled to change what he thought needed change. He had definite opinions, determined and capable of predicting things and events long before they happened Friends would consult him before being granted an important decision. He was a proud Israeli patriot in every sense of the word. Isaac was drafted into the army in August 1964 and was assigned to the Armored Corps. After basic training, and after completing the course, tank drivers and a tank commander course, he was sent to an officers’ course and completed a course for armored corps officers. After the Six-Day War, Yitzhak was called up for reserve duty and fought as a platoon commander in the division of Major General Avraham Yaffa. When he was studying at the Technion, he was called for periods of reserve duty, and in this framework he took part in a course for commanders of armored companies. In 1969 he married his girlfriend Tzipora, and three years later his daughter Rakefet was born. When Yitzhak completed his studies at the Technion in Haifa, he began to work as a chemical engineer, and was commended for his high level of work.In the Yom Kippur War, Yitzhak was among the soldiers of the first reserve battalion who arrived in the Golan Heights. On October 7, 1973, near the “oil axis”, his tank was hit by a direct hit by Syrian anti-tank fire, and he fell in the afternoon with shrapnel in his forehead. He was laid to rest at the military cemetery in Lod. He left behind a wife, daughter and parents. After his fall, he was promoted to the rank of Major. In a letter of condolence to the bereaved family, the then defense minister, Moshe Dayan, wrote: “Yitzhak was a sound officer, entrepreneurial, independent, disciplined and Ehud.” His colleagues at IMI also wrote to the family: “We will remember Yitzhak’s wonderful ability to live as a good friend of us all. We will remember his inexhaustible energy and his efforts to form a department in which everyone was friends and not just people who happened to work together. We worked with him willingly, not because he was in charge of us, but mainly because we valued him and loved him so much. “