Zinaida “Zina” Beylin

Zinaida “Zina” Beylin, 60, from Sderot, was murdered by Hamas terrorists on October 7 with a busload of 12 other senior citizens heading on a trip to the Dead Sea.

The group were all killed when their tour bus stopped in Sderot with a flat tire. The group got off the bus to try to enter a roadside bomb shelter only to find it locked.

Not long after, a truckful of terrorists who drove by murdered all of them, with only the bus driver surviving. Photos of the bodies of elderly people strewn on the ground next to a bus station were among the first to emerge from the atrocities of October 7, shocking the nation and the world.

Zina is survived by her husband, Lev, her mother, Galina, sons Alex and Ilan, her brother Iliya and a granddaughter. She was buried in Ra’anana on October 16.

Mendi Rizel described her as a friend of the family and said she was an accountant “and a wonderful woman who always had laughter on her face,” as well as active in the local Sderot Chabad house.

Her niece, Roni Beylin, noted on Facebook that Zina was among the organizers of the trip, and had been doing so for close to a decade.

“Sometimes me and my cousin would go with them and we accumulated no small amount of memories and laughter,” she noted. “My aunt was a unique woman.”

Her friend Emilia Feldman told Israel’s Russian-language Channel 9 TV station that Zina “was a festive person, cheerful, smiling, full of strength. Many people in the city knew her.” Emilia joked that they used to call her “the ‘tourism minister,’ because her passion was travel. She loved to travel to different places.”

She noted that Zina was buried in Ra’anana, where her oldest son lives, and her family was worried that few mourners would attend, but after a public call in the city, “more than 2,000 people came to see her off, who didn’t know her and had never met her.”

Her son, Ilan Beylin, told Channel 13 news that the family recognized her from photos that were circulating on social media that day, but refuses to believe she had been killed.

“Until the last moment when she was missing, which was eight days she was considered missing, I believed 100% that God was protecting her and she was in a hospital,” said Ilan. “Or that she was a hostage and he would bring her back and we would see her again.”

“Now that Mom is not here, we don’t know how the family will stay strong together,” he said. “She loved connecting everyone, she made everyone laugh. She made it make sense that the family was really close… but now I don’t feel it, because Mom was really the one who connected us.”
Source: The Times of Israel