Ephraim took the helmet of the captured Syrian pilot as a souvenir from the war.

Now he wants to return her to his family

Ephraim Yosef fought in a tank in the Yom Kippur War, when he and his team captured a Syrian pilot.

One day he came across a post in a Facebook group about testimony from the Israeli captivity of a pilot, and recognized him as the captured pilot and in possession of his helmet.

Now, after discovering that he died two years ago from Corona, his goal is to return her to his relatives

Eli Ashkenazi

09/29/2022

Thursday, September 29, 2022, 4:23 p.m. Updated: Tuesday, October 4, 2022, 11:53 a.m.

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Endless memories of the battles of the Yom Kippur war in the Golan Heights are burned into Ephraim Yosef's head.

Long days of fighting for life and death.

Since those infernal days, he also keeps one tangible souvenir - a Syrian pilot's helmet that he and his tank crewmates captured.

Since then, for 49 years he has been thinking about the day he will return the helmet to the pilot or his family.

He recently discovered by chance who that Syrian pilot was and learned a little about the enemy who sat for about an hour inside his and his friends' tank.

He connected the ends of the event of that day, Sunday, October 7, 1973, the second day of the Yom Kippur War.

Like many of those who participated in that war, Yosef is also a member of the Facebook group "Yom Kippur War, Memories, Scars, Pain and Everything Else".

Like him, another 10,600 members of the group.

One day he read a post put up by Yoni Dinor in which he wrote about the memories of a Syrian pilot who was captured by Israel.

"I knew it was the pilot we captured," Yosef said.

After conversations with Dinor and data cross-checking, they realized that indeed the same Syrian pilot whose testimony Dinor found was the same pilot captured by Ephraim and his friends.

A heroic story of an attack on Haifa.

Othman Atzfar (photo: official website, courtesy of the photographer)

Dinor is a tour guide.

The deep crisis that hit the tourism industry during the Corona period found him with a lot of free time.

Part of this time he devoted to his hobby - making contact with citizens in neighboring countries.

In the past he studied Middle East and over the years learned Arabic on his own, at a level where he can correspond in the language.

Thus one day he found testimony from the Israeli captivity from a Syrian pilot whose plane was shot down on the front of the Golan Heights.

The pilot's name is Othman Atzfar.

In 1973 he was 20 years old, and he flew on a MiG 17, a Soviet fighter plane.

Atzfar was born in the port city of Latakia on the Mediterranean coast.

Following that testimony, Ephraim called Dinor and told him that it was the pilot he and his friends were with.

"I didn't trust an almost fifty-year-old memory, and I made some more inquiries and it turned out that it was indeed the same pilot," Dinor said.

One of those signs, for example, that Ephraim Yitzchak remembered were the captive's green eyes.

Dinor continued the investigation and discovered that a heroic story of an attack on Haifa was attributed to that pilot, something that did not exist and was not created.

He also found that the same pilot was interviewed by Voice of Israel in Arabic during the time he was a prisoner.

In the testimony found by Dinor and published, the pilot Othman is quoted as saying that at the beginning of that investigation in Israel he was asked routine questions about his personal details, rank and unit.

"Then they began to go into details," he was quoted as saying.

"The names of airports, the names of my commanders and my colleagues at the base, and more. They repeated and dwelled on every detail, however small and insignificant it may be," he testified.

Grades from school, names of family members - the captive researchers knew everything

He boasted that he tried to mislead his investigators, as he was trained, "to give close and inaccurate details and try not to reveal real secrets."

He stated that he must "confess the truth - the Israelis never raised their hands on me nor on any of the other captives I knew. They did not use physical or even verbal violence. They interrogated in a neutral and indifferent tone, almost kind and polite I would say."

It seemed strange to him that they asked him which plane was flying and he thought at the time that it was a "naive and simplistic investigation".

At the end of one of the interrogations, the investigator said to him, "Allah Ya'atich Alafia (may God give you health). That's it, your interrogation is over."

On the second day of the interrogations, he was brought into a room full of document folders that were scattered on the floor and on the table.

"I sat down in front of the investigator who didn't seem bothered that I entered the room. After a few minutes he raised his head from a pile of papers, looked at me and asked: 'Well Othman, are you a MiG 17 pilot? We're not going to dwell on every detail you gave us in the investigation yesterday and it really isn't It's so important to us. We need to finish here quickly."

Othman continues: "Then he started detailing my entire biography; when I was born, where was my school, elementary and high school. Details of my military services, my progress in the army, grades from school, names of first, second and third degree relatives, Their wives and children. Everything. Things I didn't tell them at all."

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He returned to his parents' house after the war with the helmet.

Ephraim Yosef (photo: official website, courtesy of the photographer)

The researcher made it clear to him that the details about which he was asked the day before were absolutely unnecessary, continued talking and suddenly stopped and asked: "You are from Latakia, right? You must know where the offices of the Muslim Waqf are located in the city."

Othman in his quoted testimony admits that he was surprised by the question, but in any case he had no answer to that question.

"The investigator turned off the light and projected an aerial photograph of Latakia on one of the walls of the office. He began pointing to various sites and asked, 'Maybe here near this garden? Maybe near the prison? Maybe in that neighborhood?'

I really didn't understand why the Waqf building mattered so much to him. In the end I pointed to two buildings in an attempt to please him and get rid of the strange question. The investigation ended and I was taken back to the cell."

It is also quoted in Othman's testimony that later, when he met with the army veterans who served in the same war, he told about the same strange investigation.

"At the end of the evening, an officer who formerly served in the Syrian Navy during the war approached me shocked. 'Do you know why they asked you about the Waqf building in Latakia?' This in the middle of the war."

According to Othman, the navy man told me that "Shortly before the war broke out, we were informed that before midnight, in order to prevent leaks, we would be taken to a building in Latakia where there is a large basement and from which we would conduct the war. We moved there on October 6 and did not leave Until the end of the war. It was the Waqf building."

Finally, died of corona.

Othman Atzfar (photo: official website, courtesy of the photographer)

Joseph, for his part, did not leave his centurion tank for many days during the war.

In the first days of the war, he and his tankmates were sent the day before the war to the Kunitra area, where they were attached to another battalion of the 188th Brigade, the 74th Battalion commanded by Yair Nefshi.

In the first days of the war, they fought against much superior forces of the Syrian army, assisted by Jordanian and Iraqi forces.

The precise hits on the enemy's tanks that were initially greeted with enthusiasm and looked like another day of battle, only on a slightly larger scale than usual, turned into a never-ending flood of Syrian armor.

On the second day of the fighting, Yosef and his friends noticed a Syrian plane that had been hit by IDF fire. "The pilot fell about two hundred meters from us." The platoon commander, David Island, was driving the tank in which were Ephraim Yosef the gunner, Yehuda Shani the driver, and Moshe Baram (Burak) the tank crew passed Before the war, a serious crisis: A month before that, the commander of the Beit Ha'Achita, Yitzhak (Tzhaki) Sharig was very seriously injured in a training accident. During the war, Sharig's brother, Yosef, was killed in the Golan Heights. Another brother, Ran Sharig, commanded an armored brigade in the Golan, was wounded and returned to fight.

Eiland replaced the wounded commander and quickly endeared himself to the tank crew.

Yosef remembers well how he and his friends crossed the border fence and approached the pilot.

"We 'flew' to him. I saw him through the binoculars of the gunner's compartment hiding behind a bush. We reached him. He was frightened. Eiland shouted and motioned for him to go up, to the tank. He went up with raised hands, trembling. We put him in the turret. He was silent and did not say a word. We were sure he was Russian, he had green eyes. He was shocked and silent. We treated him well and gave him water. None of the team members knew Arabic. My parents are of Kurdish origin and I understood Arabic, but I didn't know how to speak the language."

An hour later, the armored team transferred the prisoner to the camp where prisoners were transferred.

Yosef kept the pilot's helmet.

They returned to the battles in the Bakaa valley and later in the battles of the Bakaa into Syria.

Ephraim Yosef (photo: official website, courtesy of the photographer)

In May, ten days after the intended release date, Yosef finished his military service.

He returned to his parents' home in Moshav Meitav in Ta'anach, taking with him the Syrian pilot's helmet as a souvenir.

He moved to Ramat Yishai and years later to Afula and the helmet remained as a dim memory.

Over the years, his friends in the 188th Brigade began to tell the story of the brigade in the war, a story that had been pushed to a corner until then.

The testimony of the pilot that Dinor brought to the group of Yom Kippur memories added decades later another layer to those days that never leave him.

Dinor, who continued to investigate, realized that the pilot Atzfar died about two years ago after contracting Corona.

During the years since he returned from captivity in Israel he no longer flew and lived a simple life in his city, Latakia.

Yosef and his fellow tank crew members recalled the day he captured the Syrian MiG pilot.

Yosef thinks to himself: "I wish I could return the helmet to the pilot's family. I think to myself that if it was our pilot's helmet in the hands of Suri, surely his family would want to have such a souvenir in their hands. It is a souvenir that is good for the soul and important to the family. I think it is an elementary thing To want the helmet to reach his family, after all, in the end we are all human."

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