Five days after he fell in battle in the Gaza Strip, youth in Otniel planted 60 olive trees in memory of Otniel resident, Second Lt. Pedayah Mark ob”m, a soldier in Givati recon. Pedayah survived a serious shooting attack in the Hebron Hills where his father, Rabbi Michi, was killed in front of him. His brother Shlomi, a member of the security forces, was killed in a motorcycle accident in 2019. And in the Simchat Torah Massacre, his cousin Elchanan Kalmanson, an officer at the Judea and Samaria division headquarters, fell rescuing the wounded from terrorist attacks.
The planting project comes thanks to cooperation with the Im Tirzu movement, which enlisted to help. Im Tirzu chairman Matan Peleg, who participated in the planting, said at the end of the activity that “we began this morning by visiting the Mark family to console them and ended the afternoon watering olive trees we’d just planted to commemorate Pedayah and to express the eternal, rooted relationship between the People of Israel and the Land of Israel. This is the story of the eternal Jew.”
