Gabi Ashkenazi 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 school affiliated with the prestigious Gymnasia
Ashkenazi Hebrew eastern, e.g. Eastern Syriac "Peshitta" as against Western Syriac "Peshito". Ashkenazi Hebrew in its written form also resembles Palestinian Hebrew in its tendency to "male" spellings (see Mater lectionis). Others, including Abraham Zevi Idelsohn, believed that the distinction is more ancient, and represents the distinction between the Judaean and Galilean dialects of Hebrew in Mishnaic times (1st−2nd centuries CE), with the Sephardi pronunciation being derived from Judaean and the Ashkenazi from Galilean. This theory is supported by the fact that Ashkenazi Hebrew, like Samaritan Hebrew, has lost the distinct sounds of many of the guttural letters, while there are references