Gabi Ashkenazi Training on Land (מל"י) in 2009. Gabi Ashkenazi Gabriel "Gabi" Ashkenazi (; born February 25, 1954) was the Chief of General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces from 2007 to 2011. He was the fourth Mizrahi Jew to become Chief of Staff of the IDF. Ashkenazi was born and grew up in Hagor, a moshav, or cooperative agricultural community in the Sharon region of central Israel, of which his parents were among the founders. His father, a Holocaust survivor, had immigrated to Israel from Bulgaria, while his mother had immigrated from Syria. Ashkenazi completed high school at a military boarding
Ethnoreligious group and ancestral ties. The legal assignement what is an ethnoreligious group can differ from the above given definition. Some ethnoreligious groups' identities are reinforced by the experience of living within a larger community as a distinct minority. Ethnoreligious groups can be tied to ethnic nationalism if the ethnoreligious group possesses a historical base in a specific region. In many ethnoreligious groups emphasis is placed upon religious endogamy, and the concurrent discouragement of interfaith marriages or intercourse, as a means of preserving the stability and historical longevity of the community and culture. Prior to the Babylonian exile the Israelites had already