Yaakov Avisar

Yaakov Avisar was born in 1921 in Dnipro

Yaakov Avisar was born Yaakov Kozlovsky in Yekaterinoslav, Ukraine. In 1925 he came to the Land of Israel with his parents and his older sister Naomi. His father later changed the family name to Avisar, joining the names of his own parents.

He studied at the Tel Nordau school and then at the Max Fein vocational school, in the lathe track. At 14 his father recruited him to the Haganah, and he carried weapons through Tel Aviv. In 1941 he earned a pilot license at the Aviron school in Lod.

The British refused to train him as a military pilot, so he served in a British army workshop in Asmara, Eritrea, until 1945. In 1948 he joined the Haganah air service and was in the first flight course of the Air Force. He later commanded Squadron 103 and Squadron 100, and led the paratrooper drop that opened the 1956 Sinai operation.

After his release he went on a Mossad mission to Morocco, posing as a French businessman, to locate landing strips. He returned in 1962. He then opened a driving school and later a small textile factory in the Erez industrial zone.

In retirement he made metal sculpture and wrote books, including a book on the Elephants Squadron. He was married three times and had children from his first and second marriages. He lived in Tel Aviv all his life and died in 2005.