“Yehuda, go get some rest. We’re going to war soon, and who knows when we’ll get another chance to sleep,” Yehuda Katz’s friends urged him.
“And who knows when we’ll get another chance to study Torah?” Yehuda replied, hurrying toward the beit midrash, the yeshiva’s study hall.
That night, a bus arrived at Kerem B’Yavneh Yeshiva to take the students who had already completed their mandatory military service to their reserve unit in northern Israel. It was the first day of Operation Peace for Galilee, the 1982 Lebanon War. “We go to war from the beit midrash,” Yehuda said as he boarded the bus.
He would return to Kerem B’Yavneh only 44 years later.
The idea of establishing a yeshiva that would combine advanced Torah study with a life of practical work and agriculture was first proposed by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook in 1913, when he was serving as the chief rabbi of Jaffa. He envisioned the yeshiva being established in the Yavneh area, the ancient home of the Sanhedrin.
It took more than 25 years for the idea to become a reality. Rabbi Meir Bar-Ilan, president of the World Mizrachi Center, and Menachem Ussishkin, director of the Jewish National Fund, selected a suitable site south of Gedera. After donations had been collected and an architectural plan prepared, they began construction.
These pioneers – many from Germany – would also become the founders of Kibbutz Yavneh, beside which the yeshiva building was eventually established.
Construction was delayed by the Second World War, but by the time of the War of Independence, the large and impressive stone building was already standing. It had yet to serve as a yeshiva, however.
Fearing an advance by the Egyptian army, a small company of fighters was stationed there. They dug trenches that were connected to the homes of Kibbutz Yavneh. Later, as the threat appeared more imminent than ever, explosives were placed inside the building and the entire area was mined. The Egyptian advance was halted at the Ad Halom Bridge, and both Kibbutz Yavneh and the yeshiva building were spared.
For a time, the building housed students from the Religious Kibbutz Movement’s Torah seminary. But the World Mizrachi Center continued to press for the building to be dedicated to a yeshiva, in accordance with Rabbi Kook’s vision.
The final push came from students at the Bnei Akiva Yeshiva in Kfar HaRo’eh, who wanted to continue their yeshiva education after high school in an atmosphere that combined religious Zionism with a strong connection to the Land of Israel. Yaakov Drori, a member of Bnei Akiva’s national leadership, stepped in to help.
There were potential students. There was a building. All that was missing was a rosh yeshiva – someone willing to take responsibility for establishing, running, and teaching at the new institution.
After an extensive search, Drori found a young rabbinical scholar in Bnei Brak: Rabbi Chaim Yaakov Goldvicht. A gifted scholar who had studied in the Lithuanian yeshiva tradition and had Hasidic roots, Goldvicht was not an obvious choice for a religious-Zionist institution. He consulted his own teacher, the revered Rabbi Avraham Yeshaya Karelitz, known as the Chazon Ish, who approved of his taking on the new position.
At the end of 1953, Rabbi Goldvicht and Yaakov Drori arrived at Kibbutz Yavneh in a vehicle loaded with a Torah ark, lecterns, beds, and mattresses. Twelve students – the yeshiva’s first class – were waiting to greet them. Together, they entered the empty building.
The first academic year of Kerem B’Yavneh Yeshiva had begun.
The idea of combining Torah study with active military service emerged several years later. It was the yeshiva students themselves who expressed their willingness to pursue both religious studies and military service. After extensive discussions and considerable efforts at persuasion, it was decided that the yeshiva would serve as a kind of Nahal nucleus, with students dividing their time between military service and study at the yeshiva.
The process was not a simple one, but eventually an “arrangement” was reached with the army for this unique service track, which attracted many religious students from across Israel. Today, there are dozens of such Hesder yeshivas, whose students serve in all the IDF’s combat brigades, in combat-support units, and in the Military Rabbinate.
Of course, a yeshiva also needs a proper Torah library.
In those early years, books were difficult to come by, and the yeshiva library relied on donations from private collections and the estates of rabbis. One of its donors was none other than the renowned writer S. Y. Agnon. He donated books following a personal request from the yeshiva’s librarian, Israel Rosen –later a well-known rabbi and head of the Tzomet Institute for Halakha and Technology.
The National Library of Israel also contributed books to the yeshiva.
In the 1950s, as part of the National Library’s “Treasures of the Diaspora” department, large numbers of books began arriving in Israel. These books had been stolen from Jews during the Holocaust and were subsequently recovered. The National Library retained the books it needed, while the rest were transferred to the Ministry of Religious Affairs.
The Ministry received numerous requests for books from institutions throughout the young State of Israel. Among the institutions to receive books was the Kerem B’Yavneh Yeshiva.
Over the years, the yeshiva library continued to grow and expand its collections. Following the death of the yeshiva’s head, Rabbi Chaim Yaakov Goldvicht, in 1995, his personal library was also added to the books of Kerem B’Yavneh.
Thanks to the arrangement with the IDF, the yeshiva’s students combined sifra ve-sayfa – “book and sword” – and took part in Israel’s wars from the country’s establishment onward. Some fell in battle. One student also went missing – which brings us back to Yehuda Yekutiel Katz.
Yehuda was born in 1959 to Holocaust survivor parents. He grew up in Ramat Gan, attended the Nahalim Religious High School, and joined the Kerem B’Yavneh Hesder Yeshiva in the 1977–78 academic year. He proved to be a serious and exceptionally modest Torah scholar. The yeshiva’s head relied on him in preparing his lessons. Yehuda also helped students who had difficulty understanding the rabbi’s classes.
During his military service, when Rabbi Goldvicht came to visit his students during training, Yehuda hurried to change out of his dirty fatigues and put on his formal uniform, explaining that it was important to show proper respect for the head of the yeshiva.
When the First Lebanon War broke out, Yehuda had already completed his regular military service and was in the final year of his Hesder program. The mobilization order reached the yeshiva on the first day of the war, and the students called up for service began preparing to head to the front.
Yehuda and his fellow students served in Reserve Battalion 362. The armored battalion, whose ranks consisted largely of Hesder yeshiva students, fought in the eastern sector of Lebanon, not far from the Syrian border.
On the fifth day of the war, June 10, 1982, the battalion was ordered to move north toward the Beirut–Damascus highway and block the route to prevent Syrian forces from reaching the area. To reach its destination, the battalion had to pass near the village of Sultan Yacoub and move through open terrain surrounded by hills – a location highly vulnerable to an enemy ambush. Intelligence indicated that there were no Syrian forces in the area, apart from perhaps a few individual soldiers.
At night, the battalion advanced toward its objective under cover of darkness. Suddenly, tank and anti-tank missile fire erupted from both directions along the route. The battalion commander ordered the troops to push forward rapidly, but the intense fire prevented most of the tanks from moving. The battalion was split in two and began suffering casualties.
After several hours of fighting, surrounded and trapped, the operational tanks managed to retreat rapidly southward under cover of Israeli artillery fire. Only after reaching a safe area did the soldiers realize that a large part of the battalion was missing.
Several hours later, a ceasefire came into effect. The soldiers returned to the area to search for their comrades and tow back damaged tanks. The full scale of the disaster then became clear: 20 soldiers had been killed, dozens were wounded, and six were missing.
As part of a prisoner exchange agreement, two soldiers returned alive, while the body of one soldier was repatriated. The fate of three soldiers remained unknown, and no information about them was received. They were Zachary Baumel, Zvi Feldman, and Yehuda Katz.
The families of the missing soldiers waged a public campaign in an effort to discover what had happened to their sons. Yehuda’s family met with government leaders around the world and pursued every possible connection in the hope of obtaining even a fragment of information about his fate. Their extraordinary efforts were documented in the book Ayekha? (“Where Are You?”), published by Yehuda’s parents in 1994.
But all these efforts were in vain. Yehuda’s mother died in 2011, and his father passed away three years later, without ever learning what had happened to their son.
When Yehuda went off to battle, he left clothes and personal belongings behind at the yeshiva. His possessions remained packed in a suitcase in the top cupboard of Room 7 in the dormitory. The suitcase was never moved. At the yeshiva, they decided to leave it there until the day Yehuda would return home.
The dormitory building has since been renovated, but Yehuda’s room remains the first on the left.
Yehuda also left his personal books and notebooks containing summaries of his lessons at the yeshiva. These books, together with additional volumes brought from his parents’ home, are preserved in the Kerem B’Yavneh library behind glass doors, on special shelves known as the “Yehuda Ya’ale Library.”
These are the books Yehuda studied from as a yeshiva student, and some still bear the notes he wrote in their margins.
On August 18, 2026, the IDF announced that Yehuda’s remains had been located and brought to Israel, 44 years after he went missing in Lebanon. Zachary Baumel and Zvi Feldman had been found not long before.
Yehuda Katz’s funeral procession departed from the Kerem B’Yavneh Yeshiva and made its way to the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. Among those who delivered eulogies was Rabbi Aharon Friedman, one of the yeshiva’s senior rabbis, who read from words Yehuda had written in 1980. Yehuda had written them in his notebook on the Memorial Day for the fallen soldiers of the Yom Kippur War, among them students of the yeshiva.
“Anyone who is killed for the sanctification of God’s name – no creature can stand in their presence,” Yehuda wrote in his notebook. “Contemplating those who fell in war obligates us to change the way we live; this is part of their [the fallen IDF soldiers’] influence.”
Yehuda could not have known then that his own name would one day be added to the list of the fallen. And just as he had reminded himself to remember those who fell and learn from their deeds, it is now our task to do the same: to remember and to learn.
May his memory be a blessing.
The author, Daniel Lipson, is a graduate of the Kerem B’Yavneh Yeshiva.
