Lahat's nickname “Cheech” dates back to when he played tug-of-war with this friends at the age of eight. “I would yell ‘zieh’ – ‘Pull’ (in German) – to my friends, and they made it into ‘Cheech,’ and it stuck with me to this day," he later recalled. Lahat was a member of Hashomer Hatzair youth movement and attended Gymnasia Herzliya high school in Tel Aviv.[2]