Same name, same tragic destiny
Baruch Mizrahi, killed on Seder Night in a West Bank terror attack, was named for an Israeli legend – an Arab who converted to Judaism and fought in the pre-state Irgun.
Israel Police Chief Superintendent Baruch Mizrahi was killed in a terrorist shooting attack in the West Bank last year while driving to a Passover Seder with his family. Only after his death did his widow, Hadas, learn that her husband was named after an Irgun fighter who was killed in 1948, chillingly close to the same date.
“Baruch never told me about the origin of his name,” Hadas says of her husband, who served for more than 20 years in the Israel Defense Forces’ Intelligence Corps before being drafted into the police’s Intelligence Department. “His mother decided to tell me only at the funeral that he was named after the Irgun fighter – and that they shared the same destiny.”
On the eve of the War of Independence, one of the pre-state Jewish underground’s most fascinating fighters – an Arab from Safed who converted to Judaism and chose the name Baruch Mizrahi – was murdered near Jenin. Some 19 years later, his former comrade-in-arms, Haim Mizrahi, decided to name his newborn son Baruch, in memory of the fallen Irgun fighter. Baruch Mizrahi the Irgun fighter was killed on ninth of the Hebrew month of Nissan; Chief Superintendent Baruch fell on the fourteenth day of Nissan.