On Memorial Day, amid graves less visited
Yeshiva students honor fallen ultra-Orthodox soldiers buried in civilian cemeteries
Mitch Ginsburg is the former Times of Israel military correspondent.
Yitzhak Fisher, a Romanian-born Jew, cut an unlikely figure during the Six Day War. He wore sidelocks and a beard and, even during combat, carried his tefillin in his pocket. As an 18-year-old he had disregarded the advice of his father and his rabbis and left the Ponevezh Yeshiva – the ultra-Orthodox world’s top institute of Torah study – and joined the paratroopers. He was, as a married reservist and a father to three children, one of the first men to arrive at the Western Wall.
Two years later, on December 16, 1969, he rushed under fire to help a wounded Israeli tractor driver along the Egyptian front. The next salvo of artillery killed him and his commander. But unlike many of the 23,320 fallen soldiers and security personnel, he is not buried in a military cemetery and his family does not attach much reverence to Memorial Day. For years his grave in the Ponevezh Cemetery in Bnei Brak, in central Israel, went largely unvisited on that day. Last year, his nephew, the lone visitor during the 11 a.m. siren, was surprised to find a quorum of modern Orthodox yeshiva students waiting at the grave, enabling him to say the Kaddish prayer.
“We realized two years ago that there are dozens of ultra-Orthodox soldiers” – or soldiers from ultra-Orthodox families – “whose families chose to have them buried outside of military cemeteries and no one stands at their graves on Memorial Day,” Zvi Zelzer, the director of Modiin’s Meir Harel Hesder Yeshiva — a seminary whose students perform military service during the time of their enrollment — said in an interview. “It’s a national day for the people of Israel and no one is there to bestow honor on them.”
Military service is frowned upon in much of the ultra-Orthodox world, and many of the conscripts from those communities enlist against their parents’ wishes. The issue has also become increasingly political, as parties such as Yesh Atid have sought legislation that would compel many yeshiva students to join the army or face criminal sanctions.
The chief rabbi of the Harel Yeshiva, Eliezer Schenvald, a reserves colonel in the armored corps and bereaved brother of Meir Halevi Schenvald, who was killed in the Gaza Strip in April 1995, said in an email that the “line-up of those who have fallen over the protection of the land should not discern between blood and blood, party and party, sector and sector.”
The two men set out on a mission to find the names of the dozens of ultra-Orthodox soldiers who have fallen, to mark their graves, and to send groups of their 180 students to the appropriate cemeteries.
Seated behind his desk, in the sort of thin-walled office that looks as though it has been transplanted from the hills of the West Bank to the suburban hub of Modiin, Zelzer explained his methodology. He went to the Defense Ministry’s memorial website, where there is space to search for a fallen soldier by name, by place of rest, and by year of death.
“There are letters,” he said, taking down a stack of unopened envelopes. One, written by hand on lined paper, recalled a tank driver from Bnei Brak who was killed in Lebanon in 1984, in the eastern sector, one day before he was to be discharged from the army. His parents had opposed his decision to serve in uniform and had chosen to have him buried on the Mount of Olives rather than in the military cemetery in Jerusalem on Mount Herzl. The letter, in this case, gave the soldier’s name, and Zelzer typed it into the database, finding the story of his death and the location of his grave. He added it to the list.
In absence of a direct request, he uses the site to search by cemetery, focusing on the civilian graveyards in Jerusalem, Bnei Brak, and Modiin Illit, all home to large ultra-Orthodox communities. Choosing the names that seem most likely to belong to ultra-Orthodox soldiers, he scans the 11 soldiers in the Zichron Meir civilian cemetery in Bnei Brak, the 13 soldiers in the Ponevezh cemetery in the same city, the six in Modiin and some of the 225 in Givat Shaul in Jerusalem. The stories swirl together, some dating from the first days of the War of Independence in 1948, where men like Avraham Bruer lost their lives while serving in the Jerusalem Brigade, to recent times, when for example Almog Asael Shiloni, who had studied in the Or Baruch Yeshiva in Jerusalem and was killed in a terror attack in Tel Aviv last November.
“You can spend entire nights here,” Zelzer said, flipping through the pages. “It’s fascinating.”
On Memorial Day a group of students pulled into Givat Shaul’s Har Hamenuchot, a civilian cemetery, in a gray van and met up with Sara Yeret, an ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, woman from Geula, adjacent to Mea Shearim. As she led them through the tightly spaced tombstones, she spoke about her father, Yissachar Dov Stern Chelkiyahu. A resident of Jerusalem’s Old City, he had joined the Hagannah during the early days of the War of Independence. His wife had opted for the Stern Gang. In May 1948, as the Old City’s Jewish Quarter fell to Jordanian troops and Arab irregulars, he was hit with a grenade fragment and delivered to the morgue.
Miraculously, Yeret said, he managed to revive himself and live for 26 more years with shrapnel still lodged in his skull. When he died, on Independence Day, in 1976, the army recognized him as a fallen serviceman, who had succumbed to an old wound.
“As Haredim,” she said, “we don’t see Memorial Day as special. It has no halachic significance.”
Instead, she said that the vast majority of people in her community see all fallen soldiers as individuals who gave their lives for the public good, and therefore as holy. Every Friday, when she sets aside a part of her challah dough to burn, as commanded by Jewish law, she thinks of the country’s fallen soldiers, she said.
“There’s an incredible misunderstanding in the public,” she added. “As far as we are concerned the fallen soldiers are seated beside the throne of honor every day.”
Her son, a soldier in uniform, accompanied her to the grave, but her other children, studying in the halls of Torah, did not come.
The students read Psalms, mostly off their iPhones, and then placed a note on the grave. It read, “Holy Soldier! If we were to begin to detail the gratitude we all feel as individuals and as a nation it might, unfortunately, minimize the self-sacrifice [you displayed] and might seem arrogant.”
Instead, it says that as students of Torah who are educated in the principles of redemption “we understand and recognize the value of army service as part of our faith in God, a faith that apparently accompanied you, too, during your army service and which typifies the Israeli melting pot.”
It goes on to thank the families and to say that “our hearts are with them,” not only today but every day, and is signed “your friends on the yeshiva bench and in arms.”
As the boys turned away from the grave, trying to navigate their way to the resting spot of a soldier who was killed on the third day of the Yom Kippur War, they encountered another couple, in their late seventies, who stood over the grave of Yosef Binyamin Duetsch, a soldier who was killed in battle in June 1954, near the town of Beitar. He was 17, his brother said, and had been in service for a year and a half already at the time of his death. He, too, had been raised in ultra-Orthodox yeshivas in Jerusalem. After completing a quorum for the Kaddish prayer, one of the students, Yonatan Eisenkot, a relative of the chief of the IDF General Staff, looked out over the largely empty cemetery and the highway below and said, “It’s true, you’re outside of the mainstream of Memorial Day here, but it’s certainly worth it.”
The Times of Israel Community.