Fallen oleh paratrooper was ‘more Israeli than the sabras’

“Binyamin put his life at risk so many times for our nation. Many close calls. God always saved him,” Jennifer Averbuch Airley, whose son Sgt. Binyamin Meir Airley, 21, was killed in action in Gaza on Nov. 18, told JNS on Sunday.

“This time, God said, ‘Today is your day, I’m taking you’ and now, he’s with him,” she added.

Originally from Florida, Jennifer and her husband Robert from Manchester, England, married in 1999 and moved to New York, where Binyamin was born. Six years later, the family immigrated to Ramat Beit Shemesh, west of Jerusalem.

“Binyamin was four years old when we moved to Israel. Ultimately, he became more Israeli than the Israelis themselves,” Airley said.

“Folks in the army didn’t even know he spoke English, let alone it was such a comfortable language for him, until they heard him on the phone with me,” she continued.

“He completely absorbed himself into Israeli society and developed a strong connection to the land. He liked working the land. He liked work. Anything hard was going to be Binyamin’s job,” Airley said.

The bereaved mother described Binyamin as a real powerhouse. “He had a magnetic personality. He would make friends wherever he went. He was a real light, like his name, Binyamin Meir,” she said.

After trying several places, Binyamin enrolled in a high school in Eilat in the far south. After that, he attended a yeshivah on the opposite end of the country in Safed, in the Upper Galilee, one of the oldest centers of Jewish learning and spirituality and home of the Kabbalah movement.

“He was very connected to Safed, its spiritual peace, and how eclectic it was. You could be yourself; you could be anybody and it’s accepted there,” Airley said.

On being called up to the IDF, Binyamin volunteered for the Paratrooper Brigade and served as an IWI Negev light-machine-gun operator in the 101st Battalion.

“As a parent, you almost feel like you can breathe a little easier. They were a top-line very well-trained unit. They were on the frontline but secure. That was what we knew when he went into Gaza,” Airley said.

On Nov. 18, a unit of the battalion came under fire from a gang of terrorists in a house in the northern Gaza Strip. Binyamin’s team moved up in support.

They were still some distance away when Maj. Jamal Abbas and Staff Sgt. Shachar Fridman advanced to engage the enemy. Feeling that they needed more firepower, Binyamin dashed up, firing his machine gun. A terrorist hiding behind a couch killed all three of them.

“It’s typical Binyamin. Whenever something is needed, he just goes and does it quietly. He just does the job and leaves before anybody can even figure out what happened,” Airley said.

Beit Binyamin in Safed

To perpetuate her son’s memory, she set up a retreat center in Safed, called Beit Binyamin, where she and her husband have been running programs for almost four months.

“When we bought that house two years ago, we had no reason to, we had no money or plan for it. However, we’ve been doing amazing things with it, hosting families and reserve soldiers who had not been home in weeks, or even months,” she said.

“The house has been used for so much good up in the stressful situation in the north because it has a safe room that so many people lack.

“It’s a place where, hopefully, people’s souls get rejuvenated from the inside. Safed has so much depth and holiness. You can grab onto so much spirituality there,” she added.

Airley said Binyamin and all the soldiers fight so that we can live and have a meaningful life.

“We try to be an example for that, we don’t walk around with our heads down, with the lights off, the door locked or the blinds shut, we live, we’re out, we’re with people and we try to do good,” she said.

As the country marked the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas-led onslaught on Israel, Binyamin’s story was featured on Aish’s “October 7: Voices of Pain, Hope, and Heroism” documentary, available for worldwide free streaming.