Tuesday marks Israel’s Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers. It is very different day from Memorial Day in the United States, where I grew up.
In Israel on Memorial Day, it feels as if the entire country is observing a funeral.
Israelis flock to the country’s military cemeteries, where nearly everyone has a loved one, friend or army buddy to whom to pay respects. When a two-minute siren sounds in the late morning, the entire country comes to a halt — cars on the highway stop as drivers get out and stand at attention, shoppers in the souk put down their bags and bow their heads, and crowds pushing to get into the IDF cemetery at Mt. Herzl fall silent for a moment of reflection and remembrance (Arabs and many fervently Orthodox do not observe this moment of silence). Radio stations play sad songs all day, TV channels broadcast documentaries about fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism, and tears flow freely and openly. With evening comes the jarring transition to the celebration of Israeli Independence Day, which this year begins on Tuesday night.
Some reflections from Israel follow:
- Amos Harel remembers the final, ill-fated thrust of the 2006 war with Hezbollah, which cost 33 Israeli soldiers their lives (Ha’aretz):
The man who called me on Saturday afternoon, August 12, 2006, sounded agitated. Less than 24 hours earlier the Israel Defense Forces had launched, by order of prime minister Ehud Olmert, the final, desperate and idiotic thrust of the Second Lebanon War. Even though the UN Security Council had passed a cease-fire resolution in the early hours of Saturday morning, the tanks rolled northward toward the Litani River, while infantry troops were flown in by helicopter for the purpose of joining up with them…
Nothing, he claimed, was going as planned. The tanks would not get a chance to carry out their mission. Hezbollah’s antitank units were holding them up on lower ground, while the armored corps troops were suffering casualties. These deaths are unnecessary, he kept saying, they are the outcome of politicians and generals trying to get a victory picture out of a failed war. The price of arrogance is being paid by the young soldiers at Saluki.
- Avihai Becker tells the story of Yosef Haefrati, the head of Tel Aviv University’s literature department and father of four, who volunteered for reserve duty in 1974 to lecture Golani soldiers in the Syrian enclave of the Golan Heights. He never came back.
"In most countries, 44-year-old literature professors are focused on their lectures and other scholarly pursuits, snug inside the halls of academia. They don’t go up to a rocky mountaintop plateau in the throes of winter to bring culture to soldiers. They don’t meet their death by bombardment." – Moshe Dor, 1974
The morning that Yosef Haefrati reported for reserve duty, his wife Ruthie drove him from their home in Givatayim to the Tel Aviv central bus station. Ruthie was at the wheel, he sat beside her and 3-year-old Guy, the youngest of their four children, sat in the back. As they approached the station, they saw the bus for the north already waiting at the platform, and Haefrati quickly got out of the car, threw his bag over his shoulder and ran for it. Everything happened in a hurry, without any kisses or goodbyes.
Ruthie Haefrati had a bad feeling.
- Knesset member Danny Danon reflects on his namesake, a soldier named Daniel Wordon who fought alongside Danon’s father and was killed in El Arish during the 1967 Six-Day War (Jerusalem Post):
Throughout the country, there are many other Daniels named for heroes of Israel. Often, this way of honoring the fallen illustrates a victory of life over death.
For the family, it is a daily reminder that symbolizes the pain and the commitment and desire to continue the path of those no longer with us. At every event and milestone in the life of the "torch bearer" who carries the name, a tendency arises to wonder how the fallen would have reacted in this situation and if he would be proud of the actions of the person who carries his name.
- Sara Eisen writes about absence and presence (Ynet):
Today we think of who we do not have and why, and then what that lack demands of us. Tomorrow, about how we celebrate being alive to meet those demands. Today is Memorial Day in Israel, honoring fallen soldiers and victims of terror, observed here a day before Independence Day. The connection is essential since it is widely recognized that without the former, celebrating the latter would be impossible, while always hoping that one day, this will not be the case. That there will be no more names on next year’s list of the fallen. It is, in other words, a sacred day we wish with all our hearts we didn’t need to observe, and in fact grapple with its necessity all the time.
