Funeral Services Held for David Elazar Who Died of a Heart Attack at Age 51

Funeral services with full military honors were conducted on Mt. Herzl today for retired Gen. David (“Dado”) Elazar who died of a heart attack Thursday in Tel Aviv at the age of 51. His death occurred just two years and two days after he resigned as Chief of Staff of Israel’s armed forces following publication of the Agranat Committee’s report which held him responsible for Israel’s lack of preparedness when the Yom Kippur War broke out. The Chief Chaplain of the army. Gen. Mordechai Firon, officiated at the burial. Six major generals served as pall bearers.

(See related story P. 2.)

Earlier, streams of officers, civilians and government officials visited the general’s widow, Mrs. Thelma Elazar, to offer condolences. Former Premier Golda Meir was among the mourners at the Elazar home last night as was former Defense Minister Moshe Dayan who many Israelis thought should have shared the blame for Israel’s military shortcomings on the eve of the Yom Kippur War.

Elazar himself had said that he bore no personal grievances. But he often expressed bitterness in private that the Agranat panel should have faulted him for being taken by surprise when Israel was attacked by Syria and Egypt in October 1973. He contended that if he had been shown the 400 reports received by army intelligence during the weeks prior to the war he would have improved the state of readiness of the armed forces.

Friends quoted Elazar as saying that if the reserves had been called up one day earlier–an order that could have been given only by the Prime Minister, on the Defense Minister’s recommendation–the course of history might have been changed.

The Agranat report credited Elazar with the substantial victories Israel achieved in the latter stages of the Yom Kippur War, but according to Elazar, that aspect of the report was always played down. One member of the Agranat panel. Prof. Yigael Yadin, himself a former Chief of Staff, said after Elazar’s death that the committee’s verdict was inevitable but was directed against the office of Chief of Staff rather than against the soldierly qualities of Elazar. Yadin expressed regret that the public did not read all that the panel wrote of Elazar’s conduct of the war after the initial attack.

Minister of Commerce and Industry Haim Barlev, another former Chief of Staff, said yesterday that Elazar accepted responsibility but believed the public was not given a balanced account of his role in the Yom Kippur War. Likud leader Menachem Beigin declared that Elazar would be remembered as one of Israel’s greatest field commanders.

MADE MANY CONTRIBUTIONS

Elazar was born in Yugoslavia, the son of a partisan in Tito’s guerrilla forces that fought the Nazis during World War II. He came to Israel at the age of 15 and lived at several kibbutzim before joining Palmach, the attack unit of Haganah. At the age of 24 he was the youngest battalion commander in Palmach. He participated in several actions against the British Mandatory forces before the State was proclaimed and was twice wounded during the battle for Jerusalem in Israel’s 1948 war for independence.

He was a brigade commander during the 1956 Sinai campaign and later became deputy commander of the armored corps which he was credited with building into the superb spear-head of the army which conquered Sinai and the Golan Heights in the 1967 Six-Day War. He himself commanded the northern divisions that stormed the Golan Heights. In 1969 he was chief of the General Headquarters branch of the army and was named Chief of Staff in 1971, succeeding Gen. Barley.

Elazar’s death was unexpected. He was an athletic man and apparently in the pink of health Thursday when, following an afternoon of tennis in scorching weather, he went for a swim in a Tel Aviv pool. He was stricken while in the water and died at a hospital shortly after 7 p.m. The funeral was postponed until Sunday because his recently married daughter was in England and one of his sons serving with a unit in Sinai had to be located and brought home.

At the time of his death, Elazar was chairman of the board of the Zim Israel Navigation Co. a post he took several months after his resignation from the army.