Vaknin, Abraham (“Avi”)

Son of Yaakov and Chana. He was born in 1953 in Casablanca, Morocco, and immigrated to Israel in 1962. Avraham studied at the Massuah State Religious School and at the Gross High School in Kiryat Gat and was an active and loyal member of the Beit Yitzhak youth club. Even after graduating from school, Avraham did not forget what he had learned and often prayed in the synagogue together with his other adult friends, while in elementary and high school he was a youth counselor. A spirit of purity, timidity, and humility were in him, along with dedication and boundless courage His friends, who were privileged to be with Avraham, discovered the “ideal person” – the intellectual and the working man – even in the field of sports was active and this did not detract from his serious attitude toward his theoretical studies. Avraham was drafted into the IDF in the middle of August 1971 and assigned to the Artillery Corps, but he fell ill and was hospitalized, and died on July 19, 1972. He was laid to rest in the military cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. The synagogue at Masua School in Kiryat Gat is named after the Abraham Synagogue; In addition, a Torah scroll was placed in his memory for the synagogue.