Yitzhak was born in Heidelberg, Germany on 14.5.1914 to his father Yosef, a pharmacist, and his mother, Beracha née Halperin. At age seven, his father was killed, and the family returned to Baranovichi, in what is now Belarus, where the mother’s parents lived. They had prospered in the rubber business. Yitzhak had one brother. His mother remarried, and another brother was born, Kubeh, who perished in the Holocaust.

Until age eleven, he had private tutors in Hebrew, and only at that age did he began attending Polish public school. He was a Beitar member, and he completed his studies in 1932.

The house was Zionist, and at age nineteen, he made aliyah to study at the Technion in Haifa — a city he would reside in for most of the rest of his life. In 1934, he joined the IZL, as a course instructor. In 1936, he married Rachel Neuman, his girlfriend from school and the youth movement back in Poland. In 1939, he attended the IZL officers training course in Poland. In 1940, when IZL split, he moved on to Lehi.

In the same year, he became a commander of the Lehi branch in Jerusalem. In 1941, he moved to Tel Aviv. He was very close to Yair and met with him until the day of his death. Due to differences between him and the leaders of Lehi, in the wake of Yair’s murder, he turned himself in to the CID in Haifa. He was first interrogated at Jerusalem’s Russian Compound, held in solitary confinement next to the execution chamber. Then he was transferred to Acre. He was then move to Mizra, then Latrun. A year later, he was deported to Kenya. He was finally freed a few months before the establishment of the State, in summer 1947.

Because he was an engineer, he did his military service in the Public Works Corps. After the War of Independence, he started working in Haifa, first as a clerk and then as an engineer for the municipality, running the Carmelit and running the construction department. He stayed with the city until retirement.

As a pensioner, he used his free time to study literature in the university. He was intellectually curious and had a fantastic memory. He was fluent in many languages (Yiddish, German, Polish, French, English), with a bit of Latin and Arabic. His values and principles, with which he was inculcated and which he valued above all, were never imposed on others.

Yitzḥak and Rachel had three children: Nurit, Yosef and Moshe.

He passed away on 25.4.1999, 9 Iyar 5759, and he was buried in the underground fighters’ section in Haifa.