Little Tel Aviv was where Yosef was born in 1928 to Yehuda and Miriam, who had made aliyah from Yemen at a very young age. Miriam and her family had lived in Gedera, while Yehuda and his family had lived in Tel Aviv’s Kerem HaTeimanim neighborhood.
After they married, the two lived in the APC (Hassan Bek) neighborhood, on Nehemiah Street. Yosef grew up there. The family had four children, but two died of childhood illnesses. The parents were Religious Zionists.
Yehuda was a banana merchant, and the mother worked in the Carmel Market running a stand, because there’s always money in a banana stand. Yosef attended Talmud Torah Kalischer in elementary school, then went on to the Moriah Gymnasium and the Max Pine trade school.
In 1943, at age fifteen, he joined Lehi and participated in many operations, often slipping away from British soldiers. He joined the attack on the Haifa Railways.
On June 17, 1946 he was shot down by a British ambush in the alleys of Kfar Ata. Before he died, he turned to his comrade, Farchi Cohen (who would fall himself at Auja al-Hafir, with the 8th Brigade, on Hanukkah 1948), who had attacked the Haifa Railways alongside him. Yosef asked Farchi to beg his parents’ forgiveness. Then, humming the song Anonymous Soldiers, he breathed his last.
He was buried in the Lehi plot in the Haifa Cemetery, together with his comrades from the Haifa Railways operation.