Zechariah Baumel

Zechariah Baumel was born in 1960 in New York City

Baumel was born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 17, 1960, the youngest child of Yona and Miriam Baumel. He attended a Jewish school in Boro Park. In 1970 the family immigrated to Israel and settled in the Haifa area.

He studied at a state religious school in Kiryat Motzkin and then at Midreshiat No'am High School in Pardes Hanna. He went on to Yeshivat Har Etzion in the hesder program, which joins yeshiva study with army service. He was accepted to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and planned to study psychology.

Baumel served in the Armored Corps. During the 1982 Lebanon War he fought in the Battle of Sultan Yacoub as a tank driver, and his tank was hit on the night of June 10 to 11, 1982. He was one of 6 soldiers declared missing, and for years he, Zvi Feldman and Yehuda Katz remained unaccounted for.

His father Yona searched for him around the world until his death in 2009 and criticized the army's handling of the case. In 1999 President Bill Clinton signed a law directing US efforts to locate him and other missing Israelis. In 2019 Russia, working with Syria, recovered his remains from a cemetery in the Yarmouk refugee camp, and he was buried at Mount Herzl on April 4, 2019.