‘I don’t know you, but it doesn’t matter at all. You sacrificed yourself and gave your life for us. I grieve for the young lives that were cut short, for the loss and bereavement of the family and the entire nation. You fell on Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights, and your glory went out here below and rose in the storm to the sky. May you always be remembered, and may we be worthy of your sacrifice.”
Someone who identified herself only as “a Jewish woman” shared this on the memorial page for Maj. Hod Shriebman on the Defense Ministry’s Izkor commemoration site for fallen defense and security forces in Israel.
The paratrooper commander fell in battle in Jabalya, northern Gaza, on December 26, 2024, on the first day of the Hanukkah.
The Hebrew word hod means “glory” and “shining,” which the anonymous eulogizer hinted at, as well as saying that Shriebman “rose in the storm to the sky” like a paratrooper rising in a military transport to jump into the raging battle below.
In a Holocaust memorial ceremony in Poland last month, Shriebman’s younger brother, Koren, read aloud from the travel journal his brother wrote while participating in the 2021 Lightning in the Sky Journey in memory of Hannah Senesh (originally Szenes), a brave paratrooper who served with the British army and volunteered for a daring mission: to parachute into Hungary during the dark days of World War II.
“Hodi parachuted and landed in the very places where Senesh had jumped,” Koren said. “He expressed the overwhelming emotion he felt, and the powerful sense of identification with the courageous paratroopers who risked everything in that historic mission.”
“In the air, I was able to think of the paratroopers who had been there, in that place between home and hell during that time, with no feeling other than the Zionist mission. I thought about how, in an instant, the weight of the mission became heavier than the weight of the parachute.”
Shriebman wrote that he was “driven by his deep connection to the birth of the State of Israel and the stories of Jewish history,” his brother said.
He succeeded in what would be his final mission in Jabalya – and had participated in completing another, albeit unexpected one: the finding and killing Yahya Sinwar.
‘We got Sinwar!’
“‘Good riddance,’ said Maj. Hod Shriebman over battalion communications while standing nearby,” Israel Hayom reported in an exclusive March 30 story, revealing details of the operation in Rafah that eliminated the Hamas military leader.
The major and the other soldiers and Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) personnel thought they had eliminated just another dying terrorist, only to find out the next day that he had actually been the military mastermind behind the massacre on Oct. 7, 2023. This victory had come after more than a year of intense intelligence and military effort.
Shriebman’s soldiers were the ones who sent the drone into the building where Sinwar sat on a lounge chair holding a stick, which he famously tried to throw at the drone when he saw it.
“We sighted him in the drone’s camera and only found out the next day that it was him,” said T, one of the commander’s soldiers in the operation that day, who spoke to the Magazine along with several of his comrades. In addition to fighting alongside Shriebman on the ground, he had also attended a commander training course run by the major the previous summer.
“When we found out later who he [Sinwar] was, we were surprised and euphoric,” T said.
Shriebman’s talents were characterized by leadership and command,” his parents, Amir and Hadas, said in a eulogy on Remembrance Day last month. “During the [current Gaza] war, Hod held three different company commander positions; he performed his responsibilities with heroism and professionalism.
“He arrived with his company at Kibbutz Zikim during the massacre of Oct. 7, where they fought and prevented terrorists from entering the kibbutz,” they said.
Zikim resident Almog Boker said that Shriebman was one of the first to arrive.
“He fought for our house as if it were his own – and never stopped fighting in the Gaza Strip,” Boker posted on Facebook the day after the commander fell while leading his troops in the attack in Jabalya.
His aunt, Hadas’s sister Netta, said that the family only found out after he was killed that he had been in Zikim and saved lives on Oct. 7. “He didn’t tell us – he didn’t even tell his parents.”
First to go in, first to go
“When his company commander asked him why he was always first,” his parents said, “he simply replied: ‘There’s no way a hair of one of my soldiers will fall without me being there to guard him with all my might to bring him home.’”
“Unfortunately, the promise he made came true, and that’s exactly why he was killed,” they said.
“As he wrote emphatically when he was only 18: ‘Is it good to die for our country? Unequivocally yes!’
“When I heard that Hodi had fallen while leading his soldiers, as he was the first one to go to the house in the Jabalya operation, I said to myself, ‘That sounds like him,’” Shriebman’s friend “I.”, who was his radio operator during the operation that killed Sinwar, told the Magazine. They had met in their commanders’ course.
“I.” spoke good English, having lived overseas with his family for several years. “We were good friends, and that’s why he asked me to participate with him in operations as his radio operator,” he said. “I was always with him.”
V, another soldier from Shriebman’s course and platoon, related that once, when they were on communications watch after a hard day and he was dozing off, instead of giving him a couple of slaps as another commander would have, Shriebman brought him a cup of coffee and said, “I am not going to switch places with you, but I will sit with you until your guard duty is over” – and they talked a little about all sorts of things.
“He was very caring toward his soldiers,” V said. “If he saw another soldier in the company who had his head down a bit and looked a little sad, he would stop everything – even if he was in the middle of a very, very important mission – and sit the soldier down to talk to him.”
“He was highly skilled and very knowledgeable about fighting,” T said. “On the other hand, he was very human and treated us as equals.”
Brotherly praise
“Hod decided everything; the authority was in his hands, and he wrote his own destiny,” his older half-brother, Gur, said at the shloshim marking the memorial a month after his passing.
“He decided to transfer to paratroopers and worked hard to complete the course and succeed. He decided to take the officers’ course and worked hard to succeed. And he chose to go to the Military Command Academy.
“I heard from his men about the battle in which Yahya Sinwar was eliminated. This was not fate – it was a series of decisions by Hod, his subordinates, and his commanders,” Gur said.
“It was the same in Hodi’s last battle. It’s not fate that the company commander was killed. Hodi took his fate into his own hands and decided that he would enter the cell first. ‘Everything is foreseen, yet free will is given. The world is judged with goodness, and all is according to the majority of deeds,’” his bereaved older brother added, quoting from Ethics of the Fathers (3:16).
Shriebman grew up and attended school in Kfar Saba. In the months before his enlistment, he moved to Galilee to work in agriculture.
“A gifted actor and writer [see box], he wrote in a journal there: ‘… I want to get my hands dirty for this place. And what makes up this place is not just the land; it is built from the land and the people on it,” his parents shared. “Our mission, as those who have an affinity for this land and this people, is twofold: to protect the one home we have with all our might, to nurture it, and make it better – each one in his own way; to love what we have been given and to embrace it.”
“Hod was no ordinary commander,” a commander trainer said. “He didn’t have the usual military slur, he didn’t have the assertive body language, his face didn’t show any stiffness, he didn’t have the self-confidence we’re used to seeing. He had something much rarer: the confidence to be himself.”
Fallen helmet brings light
December 26, the first day of Hanukkah in 2024, was significant for Shriebman – for another unexpected reason.
During a parachuting exercise in January 2023, which took place not long after Hanukkah, he found a helmet near the southern moshav of Be’er Milka. He wanted to make a menorah out of it for the following Hanukkah, but first he wanted to find out who might have worn it and when. So he asked a historian friend of his to research it.
The historian pinpointed the exact battle that had been fought where the helmet was found – it was the Battle of Auja, also known as the Battle of Nitzana, in 1948 – which had begun, incredibly, on the same date that Shriebman was killed in action: December 26. That year, it also coincided with the lighting of the first candle of Hanukkah, lit in that first year of Israel’s independence; he fell on the first day of Hanukkah in 2024, exactly 76 years later.
D, another of Shriebman’s students and soldiers, recalled: “He really reassured me. When a lot of things didn’t go my way, he always knew how to come and put things in perspective – and smile, stop, explain, and educate. He really loved what he was doing, was brave, and very full of energy and laughter. He also got married to Yuval during the course, so I got to be at his wedding.” (See box).
“Our son knew how to be humane and sensitive to everyone, including the elderly, adults, and children, and acted like a big brother to his soldiers,” his mother, Hadas, said.
“He really identified and connected with the country and its people,” said his father, Amir. “He was always smiling, and he knew how to touch everyone and make them happy. He had a tremendous joy for life.”
“Hodi touched people with humility and love,” his mother said. “He learned from everyone and everything, and that was the driver of his personal development. He concentrated on the task of protecting his home, society, and country. He was accepting – and an independent thinker with solid opinions.”
Continuing his path
“We continue the path of Hodi,” his brother Gur said. “We choose life. Sadness will always reside in the heart and the pain of his absence is forever, but we laugh, and love, and devour life.”
“We know that his sense of mission was complete,” his father said. “He was in a place where he felt significant and influential. Hodi consciously and lovingly chose his role.”
“We hope to find comfort in the love and values that he spread to so many souls,” his parents concluded, “and to make sure that they will perpetuate them.”
Shriebman’s sister Michal described her brother as her “engine” to move her forward; to do things and do them better: “Hodi, I’m going to do good with you, through you, for you.”
In a letter he sent her while she was a teenager at an overseas camp one summer, he shared his beliefs of how she – and everyone – should live: “Question everything; ask, understand the details, and master them. Without even noticing, you will become your own leader.”
The values by which Hod lived – remembrance, bravery, resilience, camaraderie, pride, love, and the protection of our land – came together to form the “Hod Compass”: a moral compass guiding the building of a strong, united society, committed to the land and to the best within us, that will form the basis for future projects to memorialize him.
On the recent Remembrance Day, over his brother’s grave, Koren asked “this entire grieving nation to do what my heroic and wise brother defined so clearly: Take a role in the national mission.”
May Hod’s light continue to shine on us and all Israel in all of its glory.
