American convert to Judaism and lone IDF soldier killed in Gaza honored ahead of Memorial Day

Jonathan Dean Chaim, who made aliya in 2020 and served as a lone soldier, had been a devoted MDA volunteer.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Magen David Adom (MDA), Israel’s National Emergency Services System, inaugurated an ambulance Monday in honor of Staff Sgt. Jonathan “Yoni” Dean Chaim, a devoted volunteer in the organization who was killed in battle in Gaza two months into the Israel-Hamas war.

Chaim, born in New York to a Christian family, converted to Judaism after befriending several Jews and studying the Holocaust in college.

He took on “Chaim,” which means “life” in Hebrew, as his new last name to symbolize his new identity.

He emigrated to Israel in 2020, settled in Ramat Gan, and gained his master’s degree in Disaster and Emergency Management.

Part of the course requirement was to take an MDA first aid course. A spark was lit, and he completed the certification program, and devoted many hours volunteering in the rescue service’s ambulances to save lives.

In 2022, Chaim volunteered for the IDF as a lone soldier (one who has no family in Israel), and served in the 603^rd (“Lahav”) Combat Engineering Battalion.

The battalion entered Gaza at the beginning of the ground operation that commenced three weeks after the Hamas-led invasion of October 7, 2023, in which the Palestinian terrorists massacred 1,200, injured thousands, and took 251 Israelis and foreign nationals as hostages.

Chaim was killed on December 8, 2023 when an IED exploded during a fierce gun battle with Hamas terrorists inside a Gaza City mosque that hid an entrance to a tunnel network.

Sgt. Maor Cohen Eisenkot, a nephew of former IDF chief of staff and then-minister in the emergency unity government, Gadi Eisenkot, was killed there as well.

When he died, his cousin Joelle Marie Muscolino said that Chaim had “felt compelled to protect Israel, the land who had given him so much, from the brutality of the terrorist, evil, savage attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihadists. He died bravely fighting to defend Israel’s democracy, the Jewish people that call her home just like he did, and for Judaism around the entire world.”

His mother, Grace, quoted one of his aphorisms as, “Never stop loving. We do not fight because we hate, but because we have such a love in our heart for life.”

His friends and fellow MDA volunteers lauded his generosity of spirit, recalling that he had volunteered extensively throughout his short life, in the U.S. as well, “because he thought it was more important to take care of others than himself.”

He was also “always smiling” and made every moment happier when he stepped into a room, they said.

Chaim took every opportunity when he had a little time off from the army to do ambulance shifts, and had told his fellow volunteer Dror Wein in a voice message shortly before his death that he wanted to train to become paramedic after his discharge so he could do more to help people.

“It wasn’t enough for him what he was already doing, in the army, risking his life, to try to bring back the hostages and bring back security for the people of Israel,” said Wein.

Five of his closest friends and MDA colleagues staffed the first shift in the new ambulance just prior to Israel’s Remembrance Day for all fallen soldiers and those murdered in terrorist attacks, which was marked this year on Tuesday.