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Relatives of David Lelchook, 52, mourn during his funeral in Kibbutz Sa'ar, near Nahariya in northern Israel Sunday. (AP)
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| By Associated Press August 7, 2006 |
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An American immigrant who stayed in his farming community to tend to his orchard and care for his dogs and was killed by rocket fire from Hezbollah guerrillas was buried Sunday.
David Lelchook, 52, was riding his bicycle toward a bomb shelter at Kibbutz Saar on Wednesday when a Katyusha rocket exploded next to him, killing him instantly. For hours after the fatal blast, his dogs refused to leave the site.
Lelchook moved to Israel from Newton, Massachusetts, next to Boston, and was a member of the kibbutz collective farming village for 20 years. He was married and had two children.
They moved to safety in southern Israel, along with an estimate 100,000 other residents of the north, but Lelchook elected to tend to the fruit trees in the village, five miles from the Lebanon border.
"He was passionate about Israel, passionate about the kibbutz," said his older brother, Alex, 55, as hundreds gathered for the funeral.
"He wasn't oblivious to the dangers, he was scared," he said. "He was simply not willing to leave the citrus orchards."
The memorial service began with a short ceremony in the village dining hall. Many kibbutz members who fled to the south came back for the service.
During the funeral service at the small cemetery just beyond the orchards where David Lelchook worked, air raid sirens sounded again and mourners scattered, as trails of smoke indicated another round of Hezbollah rockets coming in. The exploded with dull thuds some distance away.
Lelchook graduated from Cornell University in 1978 and high school in Newton in 1972, according to the university's alumni magazine.
Besides the orchard, Lelchook had another passion -- baseball. His friend Moshe Chertoff played on the same team as Lelchook for two decades.
"Dave was a great third baseman. He played hard and never gave up," Chertoff said. "He was also one of the straightest people I ever met."
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