Yoav Hattab, one of four victims murdered in the terrorist attack on a Kosher supermarket in Paris on Friday, was the son of the Chief Rabbi of Tunis and the director of the Jewish School, Benjamin Hattab.
Hattab, 21, hailed from La Goulette, a coastal town in the suburbs of Tunis. He had moved to Paris to study marketing and international trade.
He passed his baccalaureate degree at the Tunis French lycee, and augmented his studies by working as a small business sales manager in France.
Although his family knew he always visited Hyper Casher to buy food for Shabbat, as he lived in nearby Vincennes, they had hoped he had managed to escape the attack, but were devastated when they found out otherwise.
At a memorial rally held in Tel Aviv Saturday night, a friend, who had met Hattab on a visit to Israel a few weeks ago, could hardly believe he was gone.
Leah Elyakim relayed that the visit to Israel had been his first. "He was from Tunisia, and until recently it wasn't possible to enter with a passport from there," she explained.
"He learned Hebrew, he knew everything about Israeli history, more than any of us," she remembered.
"Every day we traveled, he walked around with an Israeli flag on his back. He said that Israel was the only place he could walk freely with a Star of David or an Israeli flag. In France, he never could have."
According to Elyakim, Hattab was an ardent Zionist. "His dream was to move to Israel and serve in the army," she said, adding that he had been "so depressed when he had to return to France. He told me, 'when I get to Paris, I'll have to hide the flag.'"
Tunisian authorities, meanwhile, have remained silent on the murder of one of their citizens.
The country, once home to over 100,000 Jews, has seen its Jewish population dwindle to less than 2,000 as a result of growing anti-Semitism and economic instability.
The president of the Tunisian Association representing minorities, Yamina Thabet, denounced the "incredible silence of Tunisian authorities."
"Apart from the Islamist movement Ennahda who presented their condolences, no politician has yet commented on the death of the Tunisian citizen."
The CRIF umbrella group of French Jewish communities announced Saturday that all four victims had been Jews. The three other victims were identified as Philippe Braham, 40, Yohan Cohen, 22, and Francois-Michel Saada, in his 60s.