Chief Warrant Officer Ido ‘Crido’ Rosenthal, 45: A habitual hero
Killed in battle outside Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7
Chief Warrant Officer Ido “Crido” Rosenthal, 45, from Ben Shemen, was killed in a battle against Hamas terrorists in the area between Kibbutz Be’eri and Kibbutz Alumim on October 7.
He is survived by his wife and three children along with his parents and his two sisters.
Rosenthal was a member of the Air Force’s elite Shaldag Unit, where he served as a non-commissioned officer while taking periodic breaks to study, travel, and raise a family.
On the morning of October 7, when he heard about the massacre occurring on the Gaza border, Rosenthal grabbed his gun and rushed to meet up with his unit. They boarded a helicopter headed south toward Kibbutz Be’eri.
The helicopter dropped them off a short distance away from the epicenters of battle, and they approached Be’eri in a military vehicle. It was during this approach, according to a Globes report, that Rosenthal’s unit encountered a large group of Hamas terrorists headed toward nearby Kibbutz Alumim and decided to engage them. They killed at least ten of the terrorists but took heavy losses themselves.
During battle, one of his fellow soldiers was shot in the hand and the chest. Rosenthal checked out the soldier’s wounds and sent him away from the front lines to hide in their vehicle. The soldier said he then heard another volley of bullets and turned to see Rosenthal killed on the spot, shot through the neck.
The team retreated after that, and the battle continued with the help of IDF drones and a combat helicopter, eventually killing all of the terrorists. This battle, according to Globes, saved Kibbutz Alumim from an even worse fate than the one that ultimately befell it — 19 foreign workers were killed and five were abducted.
Rosenthal’s friends called him “Crido,” according to Globes. This name came from his grandmother, who called him “Querido” in Spanish, meaning “dear,” and morphed into an army nickname that was short for “Crazy Ido.”
His peers explained that Rosenthal’s final battle was not the first time he had saved lives. One of them told Globes about a day when, on the way back from a tough training session, Rosenthal and his crew were stopped at an intersection when they saw a van full of people drive directly into a wall at full speed.
Rosenthal jumped into action, tearing off the door of the van “like one of the heroes in X-Men” so the soldiers could access the passengers. Some had been killed instantly, but the team was able to save several people who were trapped in the vehicle, with “Crido” leading the charge.
In his civilian life, Rosenthal was a skilled photographer, his wife Noga Friedman told culture magazine Portfolio in early January.
“We met when we were students in Jerusalem,” Friedman, currently a sociology doctoral student at Ben-Gurion University, said. “Around age 30, he decided to take his love for photography, which he developed while traveling the world, and study [it].”
He enrolled in the Hadassah Academic College for a degree in Photographic Communications. “Everyone who studied with him admired him,” said Friedman. “Even from other departments. He didn’t talk much, but his words carried weight.”
When he finished his studies, Rosenthal returned to Shaldag, but kept his camera with him.
“Through his photography… you could see his perspective, full of love and humanity within his multifacetedness,” said Friedman. “He allowed the viewer to be tender, to be interested in the [subject], to look at them with compassion. I think most of his photographs came from a place of wanting to show [humanity], even in military service.”
“Maybe,” she added, “he wanted to emphasize that he himself was a well-rounded person.”
On a private Facebook post which Friedman agreed to have translated and shared on the Israel Story podcast in early November, the widow mourned the loss of her most intimate and loving relationship. “It’s impossibly hard that everything that was private, everything that belonged just to the two of us, is now something I need to bear by myself.”
The deputy commander of his unit, who was with Rosenthal during his last battle, told Globes: “This man took untold military secrets with him to the grave. There is no way to describe his contribution to the security of the State of Israel.”
