Cpt. Amitay Granot, 24: Newly engaged commander was talented pianist

Cpt. Amitay Zvi Granot, 24, a commander in the 7th Armored Brigade, from Tel Aviv, was killed on October 15 in a Hezbollah missile strike.

Amitay was struck and killed by an anti-tank guided missile fired from Lebanon at an IDF outpost in the north.

He was buried on October 16 on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. He is survived by his fiance Roni, his parents, Avivit and Tamir, and his siblings Halel, Tama, Yehuda, Eliya, Hadar and Chana.

His family said Amitay loved to always be out in nature, at springs and streams, especially as he struggled in school. He was diagnosed with dysgraphia, completing his high school matriculation exams orally, but began to write and express himself during his years in yeshiva. He was also a talented piano player, his family said, and would arrive home from the army, drop his belongings on the floor and immediately start playing.

Two weeks before he was killed, he and Roni got engaged, and were planning their wedding for a few months later. With the start of the war on October 7, the couple decided that they would simply get married the next time Amitay had a break from the army — but they never managed that either.

His older sister, Halel, wrote on Instagram ahead of Memorial Day that she wasn’t sure how to memorialize Amitay, “but in my heart you have already taken hold.”

“You are present in my conversations with myself, you are part of the decisions I make, the things I try to understand,” she wrote. “I feel you with me and I believe that you are here.” During the shiva mourning period, she said, the family heard “what we already knew — how wonderful you were, how calm, sure of yourself, how you achieved what you wanted and did what you believed.”

All that, she said, despite his struggles over the years in school and at home, “I remember you searching for your place, fighting for it… but I think you didn’t allow external things to control you. You chose your place for yourself, without outside voices, without bells and whistles.” He was controlled only by “an inner truth. I learned from you how to listen, and to be honest, to set yourself in the place that is right and good for you, to not get confused and to not give up.”

Amitay’s father, Rabbi Tamir Granot, the head of the Orot Shaul hesder yeshiva in Tel Aviv, said at his funeral that for “24 years and four months he only created light, all of his life he created light, everyone who knew him knew that it’s not a cliche. His face, his heart and every fiber of his being were filled with light. Light and light and light.”

His mother, Avivit, told Channel 14 that he was, like his name, “a man of truth, the truth was very important to him.”

Avivit went on to read from his journal, where he wrote that “the people of Israel are not afraid of anything. And even if we’re at the lowest place, without faith, where everything is superficial, there too God is with us, and we are still his people, and nothing can take down the Jewish people.”

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