Children playing in memorial pool broke law, ministry says

A picture of people swimming in a memorial dedicated to Israel’s worst military accident raised hackles across the country, with the Defense Ministry saying the offenders violated the law.

On Tuesday, hikers near the northern Galilee community of Sha’ar Yishuv came upon parents and children splashing in the memorial pool, dedicated to 73 soldiers killed in a collision between two military helicopters flying into Lebanon in 1997.

A picture disseminated by one of the hikers ignited a wave of criticism in the media, and, because the revelers were apparently ultra-Orthodox, raised questions of how the Haredi community respects secular memorial sites.

In a statement released Wednesday, the ministry said it expected “all the citizens of Israel to respect the memorial sites and memory of the fallen [soldiers], and emphasizes that violating memorial sites is a criminal offense.”

Shira Ben-Porat was one of the hikers at the memorial, which comprises a large pool with the names of the victims surrounded by 73 large boulders at the site of the crash.

“When we approached we saw a large group, probably two families, in the pool built in memory of the killed [soldiers]. Some were in bathing suits, some were half-naked. They were splashing around, having a party as though they were in a hotel,” she told the Yedioth Ahronoth daily.

Ben-Porat said that when they chastised the families for their actions, the adults had prepared answers which “showed they knew they were in the wrong” but they refused to stop swimming in the memorial.

Her husband, Ido Ben-Porat, who took the picture, told Channel 2 he asked them several times to stop, and they told him the site was meaningless for them.

MK Shuli Moalem (Jewish Home), whose husband Lt.-Col. Moshe was the highest-ranking officer killed in the 1997 crash, said Wednesday she was still trying to understand how to react to the pictures published.

Moalem told Channel 10 she was torn between not blaming the entire ultra-Orthodox population, which also does not recognize the annual Memorial Day siren in memory of the fallen, and an attempt to understand how people can desecrate and violate a site she “and 72 other families see as holy.”

“I can forgive them, but I hope they find a way to forgive themselves,” Moalem said.

In April, pictures of ultra-Orthodox teens having a barbecue in a public park in Jerusalem on Memorial Day provoked ire for showing apparent insensitivity to the most solemn day of the Zionist calendar.

Turning the monument into a swimming pool “is a severe act of disrespect and lack of honor you must display toward those killed while serving in the IDF,” Shas leader Eli Yishai wrote on his Facebook page.

However, Yishai cautioned against turning the wrong actions of one or two families into a fight against the entire ultra-Orthodox community. He wrote, “The public must judge the act, not the community and population to which those with no respect belong.”