The Yom Kippur War caught Haim Hagar at the age of twenty, a student of the Gush Etzion settlement yeshiva who found himself thrown abruptly into the fierce battles to halt the Egyptian forces in the south. "Our battalion stood on the undersigned axis to stop the Egyptian forces when there was no force behind us, if the Egyptians had crossed us they could have reached Beersheba and Ashkelon without anyone stopping them."
Yom Kippur War. "The fighters were already at a breaking point", Photo: David Rubinger
Photo: AFP (Archive) // 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War,
Fighters in the Yom Kippur War (the subjects have no connection to the report), Photo: Capt. Arie Wolk
Today, in the State of Israel, which is under division, rifts and tensions that threaten to tear its parts apart, Hagar is the author of the book "Because You Are With Me," a personal war diary interspersed with chapters of faith of a soldier in the 113th Armored Battalion during the Yom Kippur War.
The battalion was almost wiped out
Hagar's battalion, which had fought very fierce battles in the south, was almost entirely wiped out. During the fighting, the battalion lost two battalion commanders, the entire chain of command and even the staff of quartermasters and workshop personnel who repaired the tanks in one of the Egyptian Air Force attacks.
"I fought in Major General Baran's 162nd Division, in the 217th Brigade in the 113th Battalion. In the war, 84 fighters were killed in the battalion, and it was a step away from total erasure. Beyond that, the first battalion commander, Assaf Yaguri, was captured by the Egyptians, who tortured and interrogated him harshly, the second battalion commander was Mulla Haramati from Be'er Tuvia, who was killed in battle, and the third battalion commander who survived was Ze'ev Ram, who managed the battalion from an armored personnel carrier because there were almost no tanks and he survived and lives to this day."
The battles described by Haim Hagar were so fierce that apart from his company, no other company of the battalion survived. "My company commander was Yitzhak Brick, who later became an IDF general and soldiers' ombudsman, we had 5 tanks and we were the only force still standing, the rest of the forces, including the armored personnel unit, were almost completely wiped out during the fierce battles of stopping the Egyptians."
Chaim Hagar's book. A war diary combined with chapters of faith,
Hagar's descriptions of war are presented in the book from the perspective of a young yeshiva boy who finds many fighters at his side who were on the verge of breaking. In this context, he notes the spirit of faith that the fighters of the arrangement brought with them, a spirit that strengthened the fighters and gave them the ability to fight further.
"They don't talk so much about it, about the situation that was there in the battles, even though many officers, including Yitzhak, know it. The fighters were already at a breaking point, the command system was confused, the orders were not good, the command backbone of the battalion and other battalions was killed, and there was a crippled spirit. So we, the fighters of the Seder yeshivas, came and inflated our spirit of faith and Torah in the fighters, this spirit transformed and gave strength to the army, which was busy containing, to move on. That's the first point I want to mention in the book," he explains.
4 warriors from different worlds: warriors together, dead together and buried together
Another point that pushed Haim Hagar to write the book in these days of polarization and severe divisions among the people is the understanding and belief that we are one people that is all devotion and has a deep unity and a sense of brotherhood that is not so evident outwardly except in times of difficulty.
"You have to understand that every combat fighter who fought on Yom Kippur is a righteous man who founded the world. People who did not fight in these battles cannot understand at all what we went through, the magnitude of the martyrdom that was there for the people of Israel. I really love in the deepest way that there are all these fighters, they gave the people of Israel their all. This giving was so great that everyone came back from the war, different people. Some with a scar, some with a scratch, some with mild shell shock and some with very severe shell shock."
When he talks about brotherhood, Hagar talks about the tank of his company and the consequences of a missile hit his turret.
Maj. Gen. Herzl Shafir (right) alongside Lt. Gen. David Elazar and Maj. Gen. Rehavam Zeevi, during the Yom Kippur War (courtesy of the IDF Archives at the Ministry of Defense), photo: Mickey Michael Sarfati, in the camp
Photograph from the Yom Kippur War uncovered by the National Library. Archive, Photo: Nathan Fendrich Collection, The National Library of Israel
Major General Yitzhak Hofi on the northern front during the Yom Kippur War, photo: Photo: IDF Archive at the Ministry of Defense
"One of our tanks was that of a company sergeant, who took on the role of company commander, because there were almost no officers anymore. So he brought an artillery plastering officer into his tank, and there were two other fighters with him. This force fought with us and is part of the fact that the country was saved. Unfortunately, during the fighting, their turret was hit by a Sagar missile and all four of them were killed. Who were these people? The sergeant was the only child of his parents, who were Holocaust survivors who went through many hardships until they had a child. The whitewashing officer was from Beit HaShita and was one of the 11 sons of the kibbutz who were killed in battle.
The third was a friend of mine from the Nir settlement yeshiva in Kiryat Arba, of which he was one of its founders, and he was also the eldest son of Hungarian Holocaust survivors who had previously lost families in the Holocaust, and the fourth fighter was from Hadera. When the sagar hit the turret, they burned completely until their bones joined together. At the time, there were no DNA tests, so they buried the four of them in a mass grave on Mount Herzl with four small tombstones. As far as I'm concerned, this is the message of the book, and I also wrote a chapter in this context that deals with love of Israel. After all, these are four completely different brothers who acted as one man and were buried as one man. Do you have a deeper national connection than this situation? That's one of my most important messages in the book, love of Israel, love for each and every one of the people of Israel as a living thing."
At the end of the war, Hagar turned all the many strengths and difficulties that accompanied him into a great force of action. "Today I help families who have questions in the field with medical ethics, here you catch me when I'm at Shaare Zedek, and I do everything voluntarily. I'm grateful for every day I'm alive, so alongside the jobs I did to make a living, I was constantly giving. I was an educator at Yeshiva Nahalim, an educator at the Noam School in Jerusalem, after that I supported my parents who were aging and needed help, and as I said, today I am in the field of medicine in medical ethics. I deal with the sanctity of life and also constantly explain the importance of the burning love of Israel, of the spirit of Torah in the people of Israel alongside the spirit of fighting in the army," he concludes.
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