Hillel Zalmanovich, 60: Avid bike rider who loved to explore Israel

Hillel Zalmanovich, 60, from Ashdod, was murdered by Hamas on October 7 while out riding his bike near Kibbutz Kissufim.

He set out early that morning for a bike ride as he did almost every Saturday, his family said, choosing a route that wound past Kissufim and the nearby Kibbutz Be’eri. With the start of the rocket fire, his worried wife called him at 6:43 a.m. and asked him to come home. His last words to her — or anyone — were, “OK, I’m coming back.”

His family searched for him for five days, until two ZAKA volunteers located his body and his bike along the side of the bicycle path. They also recovered his smart watch, which told them that Hillel was shot dead at 7:40 a.m. while he was mid-bike ride.

Hillel was buried on October 12 in Ashdod. He is survived by his wife, Tikva, their three children, Nir, Tzlil and Noy, and seven grandchildren.

Born and raised in Ashdod, he attended the Techni Air Force High School in Haifa, before enlisting in the Nahal Brigade and training as a sniper. He fought in the 1982 Lebanon War as a sniper, according to a state eulogy.

He later took part in the Nahal settlement program, through which he met his wife, Tikva, and they wed in 1985 and settled in Ashdod, raising three children. Hillel studied computer engineering and got a job with the Israel Electric Company, where he remained for 30 years before taking early retirement in 2018, at age 55.

After his retirement, Hillel decided to pursue a lifelong dream and enrolled in a tour guide’s course, completing it successfully and taking groups out to explore the country and landscape he loved so much. Throughout the years he always stayed active, biking regularly as well as hiking and exploring Israel, and even swimming competitively.

Writing on Facebook, his daughter, Noy, said, “My father was an introvert, we wouldn’t have daily phone conversations but that never made me feel less close to him.”

Noy added, “When I told him what I was going through, I could see the joy or the sadness in his eyes, I knew from just that look that he was pained by my pain, sad in my sadness and happy in my success. I always felt how much energy he had when he saw me happy, satisfied by my place in life and the life I built — this was enough for me and more significant than words.”

“Thank you for who you were for me, for being a role model through your incredible relationship with Mom, your Zionism and your love of the land, the values of friendship or gratitude and — what would you always say? — patience and faith.”

His wife, Tikva, wrote on Facebook to “Hillel, my beloved husband. You will forever be engraved in my heart.”

“If I can find the strength, I will keep up our tradition of traveling around Israel, and maybe I’ll even finish the few days we had left on the Israel Trail,” she wrote. “My dear children, the coin has flipped and instead of a supportive Mom and Dad, you have left a broken and destroyed mother.”

Tikva later added, “I cannot come to terms with the fact that you are no longer here. We had so many plans, and everything was cut short with painful horror.”

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