Driving into Yad Binyamin, a small town in central Israel, on a sunny Thursday afternoon, one could almost forget that we are in the middle of a war. The streets are calm, quiet, and peaceful, the flowers are in bloom, and the setting is idyllic.
However, the illusion is broken as I see an IAF jet approaching the nearby Tel Nof Airbase for landing.
I have come to Yad Binyamin to speak with Executive Chairman of World Mizrachi Rabbi Doron Perez, whose 22-year-old son, Daniel, a platoon commander in the 7th Armored Brigade’s 77th Battalion, died on Oct. 7, defending Kibbutz Nahal Oz.
For 163 days, Daniel Perez, missing since the beginning of the war, was thought to be alive, and his name was listed among those kidnapped into Gaza.
Then, on Sunday, March 17, the IDF officially notified his family that, based on video evidence, Daniel was dead, his body being held by Hamas.
The following afternoon, in the midst of a driving rain, Daniel’s bloodstained shirt was laid to rest, in a funeral at Mount Herzl.
Thousands of visitors paid their respects in Yad Binyamin but the Perez home is quiet on the day I visit, several days before the shloshim, the 30-day mourning observance.
“What we’re going through now is very different from the first 163 days,” Rabbi Perez explains. Despite the stress of not knowing his son’s fate for months, and then learning that he had died on the first day of the war, Perez remains remarkably composed, at least outwardly.
He recalls a conversation he had with his wife during the shiva. “My wife said to me, ‘For 163 days, I’ve been worried sick about my son – if he’s being tortured, what they’re doing to him, if he’s alive, and if I’m ever going to see him again. Now that I know he’s passed on, as painful as that is, I never have to worry about him, and I didn’t have to worry about him because he never suffered. He’s not suffering, and he won’t suffer in the future. The mourning now is incredibly painful, but it’s our pain. It’s our individual pain of coming to terms with the loss, but there’s no worry and angst about our son.’”
Understanding the lives of the Perez family
To understand the life of Daniel Perez, one needs to understand his family background – and how they all ended up in Israel.
Daniel’s father, Doron, was born in Johannesburg in 1970. Doron’s Moroccan-born father had made aliyah as a teen in the 1950s and served in the IDF. While on a visit to South Africa in the 1960s, he met and married a girl whose parents were originally from Kovno, Lithuania. Doron was therefore born to an Ashkenazi Lithuanian mother and a Sephardi father, unusual in South Africa, where most Jews had exclusively Lithuanian roots.
Doron’s family attended synagogue on Shabbat and holidays and kept kosher at home but did not observe the dietary laws outside.
“I grew up in a family where there was a strong natural connection to Judaism, but we weren’t religious, per se,” he explains. “That’s how most South African Jews – certainly then – were.”
Nevertheless, the Perez family maintained a strong Zionist connection because Doron’s paternal grandparents lived in Israel, and his maternal grandfather was the head of the Maccabi South African sports organization.
“The whole weltanschauung [worldview] and feeling of our home was a natural connection to Judaism as South African Jews and a very strong Zionist connection because my [maternal] grandfather ran Jewish sport,” says Doron. “He was called ‘Mr. Maccabi’ because he built South African Jewish sport.”
Doron’s grandfather built the first Jewish country club in South Africa in 1957 and attended numerous Maccabiah games and three Olympic games as the representative of Jewish sports in South Africa.
In 1979, Doron’s grandparents made aliyah, which had a significant impression on the nine-year-old.
“The year before they made aliyah, they gathered the family, and [my grandfather] said, ‘We know it’s unusual for grandparents to leave all their children and grandchildren in the Diaspora.
“I’ve been the leader of the Jewish community in the Zionist world. How can I not move to Israel? This is what I believe in. My hope and prayer is that all of you will eventually follow suit.’”
By 1991, all of their children and grandchildren had moved to Israel.
Doron’s parents began to become more observant, which impacted his own religious conduct. He attended Yeshiva College, the largest religious day school in South Africa. Although he was a schoolboy star in soccer, cricket, and tennis, he gave up competitive events that were held on Shabbat.
After high school, Doron came to Israel with the intention of studying for a year or two, then returning to South Africa to begin his medical studies. However, his interest in Torah study grew.
“Once I started studying, I realized I knew nothing. And the more you study, the less you know,” he explains.
He continued his studies for a second and third year at the yeshiva in Beit El, and in 1991 his parents and three siblings made aliyah.
In January 1998, Doron married his wife, Shelley, also a native of South Africa, and in 1999 their first son, Yonatan, was born. At that point, Doron was finishing his rabbinic studies as part of the hesder program and had completed an education degree from Herzog College. He was beginning to teach in gap year programs and felt settled in Jerusalem.
Life took an unexpected turn when members of the Mizrachi South African Jewish community asked him to return to South Africa as a shaliach (emissary) and educator. Though he initially demurred, he finally accepted and planned to remain for two or three years. Instead, his stay in South Africa stretched into 15 years.
“When I returned to South Africa, I felt an incredible sense of shlichut [of mission],” Doron says.
“My core values are a deep love of the Jewish people, a deep connection to the land and State of Israel, and the love of Torah. When I came there [to South Africa], I saw the connection to the State of Israel and the centrality of Israel and Zionism to Jewish identity – and [that] our Jewish religious identity was not necessarily everyone’s sort of natural understanding. I felt it was a real place to have a strong religious Zionist community.”
Doron, who initially served as executive director of Mizrachi South Africa, eventually became the senior rabbi of one of the major synagogues there, and the head of Yeshiva College, his alma mater.
During the family’s stay in South Africa, the remaining three children were born: son Daniel in 2001, and his sisters Adina in 2004 and Shira in 2008.
In 2014, Doron and his family returned to Israel, where he assumed the position of executive chairman of the Mizrachi World Movement. Despite the fact that the family had frequently visited during the summers, Perez says that when they returned, they were essentially “South African kids.”
The Perez family moved to Yad Binyamin, arriving on July 14, 2014, in the middle of Operation Protective Edge.
“We arrived here late at night,” he recalls. “The next night, we were in an air raid shelter. I remember my then 10-year-old daughter, Adina, asking me, ‘Wasn’t South Africa supposed to be the dangerous country? And secondly, why are people trying to kill a 10-year-old in her bedroom?’
“I had a good answer to the first question,” he recalls.
“I said, ‘We didn’t leave South Africa because it’s dangerous, and we didn’t come to Israel because it’s safe, though I do think that it’s a safe place to be. We came here because we believe it is the place ultimately where the Jews need to be.’ I didn’t have as good an answer to her second question,” he admits.
The family adapted quickly to life in Israel.
DORON’S WIFE, Shelley, worked as a physical therapist, and the children attended school. Yonatan studied in a hesder yeshiva before joining the paratroopers, and Daniel joined a mechina (pre-army preparatory program). Yonatan excelled in the army and today is a company commander.
After reviewing the events of the past seven or eight years, the conversation returns to Daniel.
Speaking of him in the present tense, Doron says, “Daniel is an extreme sport type of guy, an ADHD type of kid, not easy to sit still, loves extreme sports, loves adrenaline rushes. The biggest ‘hevreman’ [people person] you ever met. He came to Israel at the age of 13 and was very upset to leave South Africa because of his huge array of friends. If I had to think which of our sons would have the hardest aliyah, I would have thought it would be Daniel because he was so upset to leave South Africa.”
Within a day of their arrival in Israel, Doron says, Daniel, with his endearing personality, began to amass a variety of friends from his hometown of Yad Binyamin, as well as former South Africans and everyone in between.
Doron chuckles, recalling his youngest son’s work for the Health Ministry during the COVID-19 crisis, when his job was taking people out of isolation in Yad Binyamin.
“He became the most popular person in Yad Binyamin. People were calling me to talk to Daniel Perez because he was running the show.”
Daniel became an outstanding wakeboarder. Doron shows me a video on his phone of Daniel skimming through the water, and gracefully performing a mid-air pirouette. Daniel wanted to join the elite Sayeret Golani unit but tore his anterior cruciate ligaments and his meniscus in a wakeboarding accident in the summer of 2019. He spent nine months in grueling physical therapy during his mechina year, and fought with the army to raise his profile until they relented and gave him a high enough score to join the tank corps.
“He absolutely loved tanks,” says his father. “He liked the complexity of it, and he loved the power of it. That was his extreme sports.”
Doron says that Daniel was a difficult child to raise.
“He was fiercely independent. You could not tell this kid what to do.
“If he did not want to do something, nothing in the world could make him do it. If he wanted to do it, nothing could stop him.”
At the eulogy that Doron delivered at the funeral, he recounted how, when he was head of school in South Africa, he spent several weeks helping to prepare his son for the school’s annual Bible vocabulary test competition.
“I took it very seriously,” Doron recalls, with the hint of a smile playing on his face. “I’m the head of school, and I had to show that we believed in the curriculum.”
Daniel did well and finished in second place.
The following year, Doron continues, four or five days before the quiz, Daniel approached him just as he was about to leave on a wedding anniversary vacation with Shelley – and asked what his father would give him if he finished in first place.
Doron remembers: “I asked him if he had started preparing for the quiz, and he said, ‘No.’ I said to him, ‘When I learned everything with you last year, you finished in second place, and now you are going to do it on your own in five days?’”
Despite Daniel’s minimal chances, father and son agreed on a reward he would receive should he win. Several days later, while on vacation, Doron received a call from the head of the school’s Judaic studies department congratulating him on his son’s victory.
“I said to Daniel, ‘How did you do it?’ He said, ‘Last year, we really did it for you. This year, I decided to do it for me.’”
In order to learn how to work with his son, says Perez, he had to go to therapy “to understand that I had to go with this kid’s will and not fight it. Every time I took him on head-on, I lost,” he acknowledges. Once Doron understood that he couldn’t bend his son’s will to his wishes, things became easier.
Doron was curious to see how Daniel would take to the discipline and work of serving in the IDF and was thrilled to see how he thrived.
“He absolutely loved it,” he says. “He became disciplined because he loved it. He was disciplined about things he wanted to do.” He started as a tank loader but wanted to learn every function of how the tank operated. Daniel went to a commanders’ course and was named Outstanding Soldier in the group.
“That was a turning point for me,” says Perez. “It was only then that I realized how important the army was to him.”
Daniel took an officers’ course and became part of the 7th Army division. “He absolutely flourished.”
On October 6, having spent three years in the army, Daniel was a tank commander based in Kibbutz Nahal Oz. “Friends have told me,” says Perez, “that October 6 was probably his most boring day in the army. He phoned every single one of his friends and spoke to them for 15 to 20 minutes each. Things were at the lowest possible state of alert, as it was going to be chag and Shabbat.”
At 6:15 on the morning of Oct. 7, when the missile barrage began, Daniel and his crew entered the air raid shelter. After Oct. 7, Daniel’s IDF bloodstained shirt was found, and the family wondered if he had time to put on his uniform before getting into the tank. According to reports that they received from a guard at the base who attended the shiva, Daniel and his crew came to their tank dressed in full battle gear. “They got into their tank at 6:45 and fought for two hours and 16 minutes, gallantly and valiantly,” says Perez. “They stood between Kibbutz Nahal Oz and the border, fought off many terrorists, and saved many lives.”
When the second wave of Hamas terrorists penetrated the kibbutz, Daniel and his tank crew saw them coming and made the difficult decision to confront the invaders – who were on motorbikes and heavily armed – with their tank, which was not intended for close-range combat.
“During that final battle,” says Perez, “they were fighting in close combat, and the terrorists managed to get onto the tank, and [Daniel] was shot. We don’t know if he died from that or died later, but the tank was overrun just after nine o’clock on that morning after two and a quarter hours of incredible defense.”
Two other members of Daniel’s tank were killed, and a third is thought to be held hostage in Gaza.
Later that day, Daniel’s older brother Yonatan, who was in Yad Binyamin, was called in and fought in Sderot and several other areas until, at 1 p.m., he commanded the first group of soldiers to retake the base in Nahal Oz. At 2:45 p.m., he was shot in the leg, just 100 yards from where Daniel had been shot.
“It’s unusual,” says Doron, “that you’ve got two sons, both officers, both fought in the same area; one unfortunately was killed and taken hostage, and the other was, by the grace of God, only lightly wounded.”
Doron returns full circle to the strong South African bond that remains. He still wears a yellow bracelet on his wrist inscribed with Daniel’s Hebrew name and the words “Bring them home,” which was created by the South African Jewish community and worn by its members when it was thought that Daniel was still alive.
“The entire South African Jewish community is in mourning because Daniel grew up in South Africa. He was [their] family. I was there for 15 years. The South African Jewish community woke up after two days of Yom Tov, on October 9, to find out that two boys they know, one was taken hostage, and the other was wounded.”
For Rabbi Doron Perez and his family, the public mourning has ended, but the private mourning remains.
“It’s coming to terms with the pain and the grief of a son that you’re never going to see again. It’s painful, but it’s different. It’s the pain of grief.
“It’s not the pain of angst and worry. It’s now the grief of loss. We know that he’s in a good place. Our sages say that the highest place in Gan Eden is for those who gave their lives defending the Jewish people, so there’s nothing to worry about him.
“It’s our loss. It’s our grief.”