Benjamin Samuel was born in Haifa on May 3, 1936 to Orna and Yaakov Shmuel. His parents moved to Kiryat Amal when Benny was 4 years old and grew up and studied there. Benny was a nature lover who hiked and traveled every inch of Israel.
In May 1954 he was drafted into the IDF and joined Army Intelligence in 1954 becoming an aerial reconnaissance expert, personally assisting Haim Bar Lev in that position during the 1956 Sinai Campaign. In the Six Day War he served in the area of Judea and Samaria and he was among the first at the top of Mt. Hermon.
As a civilian he was a manufacturer, political activist, amateur pilot, skin diver and family man, moving from Haifa to Kiryat Tivon to Herzliya. He married Ruth and they had three children - Shai, Tal, and Diti.
When the Yom Kippur War broke out, Benny did not wait for a call-up, but packed his kit and went. On October 11, 1973 he set out to locate a Syrian gun battery in the Golan, but the plane was downed by a Syrian missile and he never returned. He was buried in the Kiryat Tivon cemetery.
The Samuel family commemorated Benjamin in establishing an elaborate sports field at the Nof Yam School in Herzliya; Benjamin’s parents donated a Torah scroll in his memory at a synagogue in Nof Yam.
