When the siren wails in Israel on Yom HaZikaron (Memorial Day), the thoughts of Alberta "Betty" Erez turn automatically to the father she has held close to her heart but whom she has never known.

Israel's future Prime Minister Menachem Begin lifted her in his arms in 1950 at a reunion of Irgun fighters and their families, telling the then 2-year-old that her father, Avraham Morris, "was a hero." He had been killed by an Arab sniper during Israel¹s 1948 War of Independence after he climbed up a flag pole to raise the Israeli flag over the city of Jaffa.

Adina Morris didn't learn about her husband's death immediately. She had been notified that her brother, Chaim Mishan, a member of the underground military organization Lehi, had been killed in house-to-house fighting in Jaffa. She was told to come to Tel Hadassah Hospital in Tel Aviv, where the bodies of the fighters had been laid out on the sidewalk for identification.

To her horror, the young, pregnant woman found that her husband's body also was there. She buried her husband and her brother side-by-side in Nahalat Itzak Park, a Tel Aviv military cemetery.

Avraham Morris had grown up in Turkey, where he was known by the secular name Albert. When his widow gave birth a few months after Albert's death, she named her baby Alberta in his memory.

As Alberta grew, she peppered her mother with questions about her father and namesake, but the mother could answer only a few of them. The couple had met as immigrants, he from Turkey, she from Syria, and although he knew only a little Arabic and she knew no Turkish, they fell in love and were married.

They had been married approximately a year before his death, and they were both taking Hebrew classes and in the process learning to communicate better.

The mother told her daughter that her father had served for nine years in the Turkish army and had been very athletic. He made his way to Israel on foot from Turkey, and on being captured in Syria was jailed there for two years. It was in jail that he learned the little Arabic that he spoke.

After his release, Avraham continued his journey to Israel, smuggling himself over the Golan Heights and into what then still was called Palestine by the British Mandatory authorities.

As a Turkish army veteran, he volunteered for service in the underground Irgun forces, knowing that his military experience would be valuable to the nascent Jewish state.

Because he was such a fine athlete, he often was called upon to perform feats requiring good physical conditioning— perhaps why he was selected to climb the flag pole in Jaffa.

Alberta's mother remarried, but helped her daughter keep the memory of her father alive by taking her to a museum dedicated to Irgun fighters. The flag pole he had tried to scale was atop a mosque overlooking the sea, and the museum is right next to it. In the museum are pictures of all the fighters, including her father, who were killed in the battle for Jaffa.

Even though she never knew father Avraham Morris, "I feel like he is my guardian angel. ... He is my hero, the one who came to save Israel, and he is saving me from anything that might happen to me from up there," she told Heritage.

After immigrating to Rhode Island with her husband and three children in 1980 and relocating in 1989 to San Diego, Alberta kept the memory of her father alive. Often she tells her children Eitan, Hagit and Hila and three grandchildren about his heroism and the time when Begin told her mother, "I know your husband, I know he was one of the bravest..."

On one trip to Israel, her son Eitan, then 17, studied the picture of his grandfather closely, then walked quickly away, trying to hide his tears. When his mother caught up with him, he said, "Mom, do you know I look like him?"