A hunt for lost stories among Mount of Olives’ forgotten graves

It’s 10:15 a.m. on Israel’s Memorial Day, and Sarah Barnea is rushing around the burial plots on the Mount of Olives, making sure groups of high school students are finding the graves of the soldiers they’ve been researching for the last 10 weeks.

“This place is my second home,” says Barnea ruefully with a little shrug of her shoulders.

It’s a strange thing to say about the historic cemetery in the midst of the Arab neighborhood of a-Tur on the Mount of Olives, but it’s true for Barnea.

She is one of some 25 volunteers of Giving a Face to the Fallen, a nonprofit organization dedicated to tracking down information about soldiers who fell in the early days of Israel’s establishment, and about whom little information is known.

The organization’s volunteers become amateur sleuths in their search for background histories, which eventually culminate in state ceremonies in memory of the fallen soldiers with newly located long-lost relatives now able to visit the once-unattended gravesides on Memorial Day. The names of the fallen can also be added to the Yizkor Memorial website, the government site that lists the names and histories of each of Israel’s 23,544 war dead.

Barnea is one of the regulars at the Mount of Olives cemetery. She has spent the last two-and-a-half months helping high school students from Jerusalem-area schools research the backgrounds of soldiers buried on this hill overlooking the Western Wall and the Dome of the Rock.

On Memorial Day, the students returned to the Mount of Olives, prepared with the plastic-sleeved essays they wrote about their adopted soldiers, ready to stand at attention by these graves, as is the custom on this day of national mourning.

“There will be hundreds of students here today,” said Barnea. “And their presence here is tremendously moving.”

Two eleventh-grade students from Yeshivat Mekor Chaim, Naveh Hod and Yahel Shilyan, stood by the grave of Yafim Davidovich, a 54-year-old Russian colonel in the Red Army who spied for Israel and was given the rank of colonel by the Israeli army.

“He had a really interesting story,” said Hod. “He had no reason to do what he did, he didn’t know Israel.”

“Not like we do,” added Shilyan. “It makes you think about why people do what they do.”

As the hour got closer to 11 a.m., when the memorial siren would sound for two minutes, Barnea continued to race around the different burial plots, making sure the students were able to find the graves of the fallen soldiers whose stories they had studied.

The sun was warm, and most of the students were dressed in white shirts adorned with blue Memorial Day stickers. Some had their heads covered in white baseball hats emblazoned with the logo, “Going up to the Mount of Olives, 50 Years to Jerusalem’s Reunification,” as this year will mark 50 years since the Six Day War, when Israel gained control of East Jerusalem, including the Old City.

The students, from both religious and secular schools, gathered together around various graves, the sounds of murmuring voices settling softly over the quiet cemetery, as teachers urged students to hear as many stories as possible.

At one burial plot, on the side of the cemetery overlooking the Judean Desert, the students spoke to Yehudit Cohen, an older woman visiting the grave of her brother, Yitzhak Penso, who was killed in 1947 as he was attempting to load a truck with supplies from the Old City. Their family lived in Mamilla, said Cohen, referring to the neighborhood situated right outside Jaffa Gate, once home to families and merchants.

Her other brother went missing, said Cohen, after running away to join the Palmach when Yitzhak, their older sibling, was killed.

“I come here every year, because I’m the only one left who remembers them,” she said.

There was a student who discovered a familial connection to Menachem Previs, who fell at 17 and was buried next to Moshe Levy, whose gravestone had finally been laid just three days earlier, said Barnea.

There are still hundreds of fallen soldiers whose origins are unknown, and some 54 on the Mount of Olives that lack tombstones.

Others have been well-marked for decades, like the grave of Hans Beyth, a German Jewish youth immigration official who was killed by gunfire in 1947 while riding with Golda Meir, then a new politician, up the blockaded road to Jerusalem. His history was being told by ORT Ramot tenth-graders Moshe Abulafia and Yotam Marsh to a soldier assigned to stand by Beit’s grave.

The presence of soldiers at these long-neglected gravesides was an emotional sight for Barnea.

“It’s a sign that something has changed, that we’re not the only ones paying attention to these graves,” she said.

Just ahead of the 11 a.m. siren, many of the visitors gathered for the official ceremony held under a canvas covering at the front of the cemetery. Tourists, many of them German and Russian, sat quietly on the stone stairs overlooking the rows of graves. Behind them, a camel grunted and was quickly quieted by his owner, an Arab from the nearby village who was selling rides on the camel’s humped back.

Throughout the half-hour ceremony, the rows of white stone graves beckoned, some attended by a pair of students, others by a single soldier.

“It’s more than there’s ever been before,” said Barnea, who has been coming to the Mount of Olives to visit these long-dead soldiers for the last 15 years.

Giving a Face to the Fallen is looking for more volunteers, as well as those with an interest in genealogy. The organization is also in need of funds, as their small government stipend is augmented by donations. They can be contacted through the Giving a Face to the Fallen Facebook page.