The first Israeli fighter pilot to shoot down an enemy plane in the country’s War of Independence died this week after teaching school in Miami for some 30 years under an assumed name — because he’d been targeted for assassination.

New Jersey-born Gideon Lichtman, known to generations of students at Southwest Miami Senior High as the affable “Mr. Rimon,’’ had been warned in 1948 by former Israeli president Ezer Weizman that his name was on an Arab hit list, the Miami Herald reported.

“Your life is in danger,’’ Weizman told Lichtman in 1948, citing intelligence intercepts showing the country’s enemies were targeting its foreign pilots, Lichtman’s son, Bruce, told the newspaper.

Weizman also created the pseudonym “Rimon,’’ which is Hebrew for both pomegranate and grenade.

“So it’s a pomegranate but also a grenade and the reason Ezer Weizman picked that pseudonym for my dad is that he had an explosive temper,” Bruce said.

In 1998, Lichtman gave the Herald a chilling account of his heroic mission — carried out in an old, decrepit plane, a Messerschmitt.

“I go into a dive and I’m flipping switches and the flaps are going down and all kinds of things are happening,” he said.

“Through the dust and the haze, I see a shadow, and it’s an Egyptian Spit. He sees me. By this time, we’re heading south over the Mediterranean. We got into a wild-ass dogfight. Meanwhile, my red light goes on that my fuel is low. . . . I see pieces falling off him. I follow him down, shooting after him. Then I check my fuel gauge, and it’s on empty.”

But he hit his mark.

The enemy Spitfire crashed into the sea. Before the war was over, Lichtman had flown about 90 missions.

The hero aviator, who died peacefully at 94, was born in Newark. After emigrating to the US, he earned a degree in education from the University of Miami in 1950, and taught history, business and work experience at the high school.

“My dad was so wonderful with the work experience kids because he made them feel like they were heroes rather than second best because they weren’t getting A’s in calculus and not going to M.I.T,” his son said.

Daughter Robin Dainty, said her dad was a man of “compassion” who instilled in his four children the value of treating people with respect.

“He didn’t care if you were a garbage man or the president of the United States. ‘Everybody s–ts in the same place.’ That was a direct quote from him he drove into us as kids,” she said.

Lichtman/Rimon is featured in a recent book by Robert Grandt, “Angels in the Sky: How a Band of Volunteer Airmen Saved the New State of Israel.’’