Zvika Greengold

Zvi "Zvika" Greengold (צבי "צביקה" גרינגולד; born 10 February 1952) is a national hero in Israel who fought during the 1973 Yom Kippur War as an Israeli IDF tank commander. He is one of only eight people who fought in the war to be awarded the Medal of Valor, the nation's highest medal for heroism. He is also a politician, and currently Mayor of Ofakim.

Yom Kippur War
Born and raised on Kibbutz Lohamey HaGeta'ot (Kibbutz of the Ghetto Fighters, founded by Holocaust survivors of underground and partisan combat against the Nazis), twenty-one-year-old Lieutenant Greengold was home on leave when Egypt and Syria launched a coordinated surprise attack on two fronts. He was not attached to any unit as he was about to take a course for company commanders. Once he realized war had broken out, he hitchhiked to Nafekh, a command center and important crossroads in the Golan Heights, where he initially helped with the wounded, as no tanks were available. When two damaged Centurion tanks were repaired, Greengold was put in charge of them and sent with hastily-assembled scratch crews down the Tapline Road.

Greengold's "Koah Zvika" (Zvika Force) spotted Syrian tanks belonging to the 51st Independent Tank Brigade of the Syrian Army which had broken through the line and were advancing unopposed northwest along the road to Nafekh. Greengold's two tanks engaged the opposing T-55s at 2100 hours, with Greengold destroying six. Later, he had lost contact with his other tank when he spotted the advancing 452nd Tank Battalion. He engaged the enemy, taking advantage of the darkness and moving constantly to fool the Syrians into thinking the opposition was stronger than it was. Greengold destroyed or damaged ten enemy armoured vehicles before the confused Syrians withdrew, believing they were facing a sizable force. Even Greengold's superiors were deceived; as the fighting wore on, he did not dare report how weak he actually was over the radio for fear it would be intercepted; at best he could only hint "the situation isn't good". At a time when Force Zvika was only one tank, Colonel Yitzhak Ben-Shoham, the brigade commander, assumed it to be "of at least company strength".

For the next 20 hours, he fought, sometimes alone, sometimes in conjunction with other tanks, displaying an uncanny knack for showing up again and again at the critical moment to tip the scales of a skirmish. He had to change vehicles "half a dozen times" as his tanks were knocked out. He soldiered on, even after he was wounded and burned. When Nafekh itself came under attack from a fresh force of T-62s, he rushed over to bolster the defense. In a lull in the fighting, an exhausted Greengold got out of his latest tank and dropped to the ground, murmuring, "I can't anymore."

Afterward, he claimed 20 enemy tanks destroyed; other estimates place his tally at 40 or more.

Post-war
Until 2008, he lived in a Galilee hilltop village. He was one of the founders of the vegetarian food company Tivall and the managing director of Frutarom chemical company. In 2008, he was elected mayor of the Israeli city of Ofakim. He regularly speaks to people in and out of Israel, mainly high school children, about his courageous acts in the Yom Kippur War.