The remains of Maj. Jonathan Ophir, an Israel Air Force pilot missing in action 8 1/2 years after the Yom Kippur War, were laid to rest in the military cemetery on Mt. Herzl today. The remains were recently handed over to Israeli authorities by the Egyptians.
The pilot’s mother, wife and his daughter along with hundreds of other mourners, were at the graveside as the chief army chaplain. Rabbi Gad Novon, eulogized Ophir as “one of the true heroes of Israel” who made it possible for “the Jewish people to live in this country.”
Ophir was born at Kibbutz Ein Harod but lived in Beersheba since the age of nine. He served as an officer in the paratroop unit that captured Gaza in the 1967 Six-Day War and subsequently joined the Air Force where he excelled in the pilot training course. He disappeared during a mission over the Nile delta on October 11, 1973. It was hoped that he and his navigator, Eiran Cohen, bailed out safely. But they were not among the prisoners of war returned by Egypt. When Ophir died, his daughter was three years old.
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