Tuesday, May 06, 2003

About Yom Hazikaron
Allison Kaplan Sommer, Gil Shterzer and Jonathan Edelstein.

This Hebrew site has the names, personal stories and burial places of all 21,540 who fell in Israel's wars. You can type in the names of people you know who have been killed and read their stories.

I saw something in the cemetery this year that I hadn't noticed before. I walked along the wall that divides the military cemetery from the civilian cemetery. Right along the wall, on the civilian side, are rows of graves belonging to deceased parents of fallen soldiers. Most of them have inscriptions telling when and where their soldier was killed (besides the usual information about the deceased). Some have inscriptions with a few words about the specific wish of the parents to be lain to rest near the grave of their child. One or two graves have inscriptions both in memory of parents and siblings of the deceased who were killed in the Holocaust and in memory of a child killed in war in Israel.