Sneh, Jonah

Born in Jerusalem on November 10, 1921, his parents immigrated to Lebanon and lived in Beirut, where he studied at the American University, received a Zionist education at home, and felt that he was an Israeli living only temporarily in a foreign country. When he finished high school and continued to study law, Rommel’s armies threatened the Land of Israel from the western desert, and Yona left a farewell letter to his parents, fled to Israel and volunteered for the British Army. But he refused to be released, with the Jewish Brigade participating in the battles of Italy, during the Allied occupation campaigns He was a member of the Hagana and later joined the Irgun underground, where he served as the deputy drori. In 1947 he applied for admission to the diplomats’ school that the Jewish Agency had set up. When the War of Independence broke out he abandoned his studies and devoted himself to war. When he went with the Irgun to attack Manshiyeh in northern Jaffa, he gave his commander a closed letter to his parents, asking forgiveness for the sorrow that caused them to fall, and when he returned safely from the battle he took the letter back to his friends. Once he suggested to his commander in the Irgun a plan that he undertook to carry out: to organize a large-scale sabotage operation in the enemy territory that was well known to him, but the plan was not accepted . After the establishment of the State of Israel, he moved to the IDF and served in the Alexandroni Brigade as a commander, and he also took part in the conquest of Ein Ghazal and Ighzim, which blocked the Tel Aviv-Haifa highway , And our daughters were ordered to attack a mountain on which the enemy’s snipers had survived and was hit by one of the bullets and fell on 25 July 1948. He was laid to rest in the military cemetery in Netanya.