Veteran military correspondent for "HaModia", Israel Katsover, passes away at 79 

Israel Katsover was born in 1946 to parents who were Holocaust survivors in a displaced persons camp in Austria. His older brother Shlomo Baruch disappeared in the Holocaust, and at the age of one his family immigrated to Israel.

At the age of 16, he began writing for Yedioth Yerushalayim, on religious topics. In the 1970s, he was one of the heads of the Jewish Life and Tradition section of Kol Israel and edited religious and tradition programs, including the program "Kabbalat Shabbat" that was broadcast every Friday and the "Chassidic Song Parade."

At the same time, he served as a journalist for the newspaper Sha'arim, the organ of the PAI movement, where he also integrated into the military field.

In the mid-1970s, following the publication of an article in which he claimed that the ceremony marking the arrival of the first F-15 fighter jets of the Air Force would cause the desecration of the Sabbath by its participants.

In the 1980s, he founded and edited the newspaper "Erev Shabbat", which was later renamed "The Friday Day". Years later, he joined the staff of the newspaper "Hamodia", where he served as a commentator on military and state affairs.

In a radio interview in 2015, Katsover said: "A military correspondent in an ultra-Orthodox newspaper doesn't know whether he is the IDF's representative in the religious public or the representative of the religious public in the IDF. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, for example, would have preferred to receive the briefings from someone sitting on the fence rather than from someone wearing a uniform. To this day, I am invited almost every week, to this Rebbe and to the other Rebbe in order to update them on military matters."