Defense Ministry reviews refusal to add religious text to soldiers’ military headstones

Following an outcry, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant instructs a ministerial panel to examine allowing an acronym for the phrase “may God avenge his blood” on military headstones.

The decision, reported by Ynet, follows a controversy involving the ministry’s refusal to allow the family of Cpt. Yisrael Yudkin, a Haredi soldier who fell in Gaza last month, to add to his military headstone the Hebrew letters Hey, Yud and Daled, which form the acronym for Hashem Yikom Damo, a standard formulation in Judaism for Jews who were killed or otherwise lost their lives at the hands of others in connection with their faith.

The ministry’s initial refusal owes to regulations that limit permissible text on military headstones in the interest of uniformity, according to ministry spokespeople.

The issue is now under the review of the ministry’s Public Committee for Commemorating Soldiers, a body made up of defense establishment officials and representatives of bereaved families.

A bill for permitting the formulation is being reviewed at the Knesset, per the initiative of Yulia Malinovsky, a lawmaker for the Yisrael Beytenu opposition party. Simcha Rothman, a coalition MK, is among the politicians who criticized the refusal, calling it “a case of shooting one’s own foot.”

Rothman’s remark references efforts to encourage enlistment by Haredi soldiers, tens of thousands of whom are not recruited as per a blanket exemption — which the High Court of Justice voided Tuesday — for ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students. Some advocates of the exemption say that, in addition to other complications with recruiting Haredim, the army is not doing enough to accommodate their special needs.