The Israeli Air Force Association held a wreath-laying ceremony on Tuesday evening in Los Angeles at the monument dedicated to the late Israeli-American pilot Lou Lenart.
The event was held in honor of the 75th anniversary of the air strike at the Ad Halom bridge over Israel's southern Lakhish River, which set back the Egyptian forces and ultimately led to their defeat.
The battle at Ad Halom, the Israeli Air Force's first time seeing combat, is believed to have saved Tel Aviv from Egyptian capture, according to a 2012 report by former Jerusalem Post Editor-in-Chief Yaakov Katz.
The monument, dedicated in 2003 during Lenart's lifetime, was fashioned in the shape of an FG-1D Corsair airplane with markings replicating those of the craft Lenart flew for the US Marines during World War II.
Who was Lou Lenart?
Lenart spent his early years in his native Hungary before moving with his family to Pennsylvania at age 10. He enlisted in the US Marine Corps shortly after graduating high school. He became a fighter pilot during World War II, taking part in the battle of Okinawa and numerous attacks on the Japanese mainland.
After World War II ended, Lenart learned that his relatives in Hungary had all been killed in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
“I knew that my people were being killed and my family had been killed in Auschwitz, and I felt that the remnants of the Holocaust had a right to life and some happiness – and no one wanted them except their own people in Israel,” he told the Post in 2012.
In 1948, he and several peers from around the world founded what would eventually become the Israeli Air Force and were thrust almost immediately into their first battle at Ad Halom.
“It was the most important moment of my life and I was born to be there that precise moment in history,” Lenart said. “I am the luckiest man in the world that my destiny brought me to that precise moment, to be able to contribute to Israel’s survival.”
Lenart went on to have a successful career as a pilot and film producer. He even had a six-month stint as general manager of the Los Angeles Clippers. Upon retirement, he settled permanently in Israel where he eventually passed away in 2015 at the age of 94.