Sometimes it’s hard to find the right word, especially when it comes to burials and reburials, but that was the situation in which the country found itself on Tuesday.
The news that the remains and personal effects of IDF Sgt. First Class Yehuda Katz had been located and would be buried in Israel – 44 years after he disappeared in the Battle of Sultan Yacoub – was not a cause for celebration, but any measure of closure like this brings comfort.
Katz was just 23 when he was declared missing in June 1982, at the start of the First Lebanon War, following a brutal tank battle between Israeli and Syrian forces in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, where 21 IDF soldiers fell, and six were taken captive.
For decades, he was one of the so-called “Sultan Yacoub III,” along with MIAs Zachary (Zacharia) Baumel and Tzvi Feldman. Baumel’s body was returned with the help of Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2019, and Feldman’s remains were retrieved last summer in a Mossad operation.
The Mossad was also involved in finding Katz, the only one from that battle who remained unaccounted for. The location where his body was found was not initially published.
Chillingly, it was not initially clear whether his full remains were found, but at last his family has the relief of knowing that he died and has not been suffering in captivity all these years, a fear his sister repeatedly expressed. Knowing his fate, however awful, is better than not knowing.
Many Israelis and members of the Jewish community worldwide became involved in the plight of hostages during the Israel-Hamas War. On October 7, 2023, thousands of well-armed Hamas-led terrorists invaded southern Israel and carried out the most barbaric attack perpetrated on the Jewish people since the Holocaust.
Some 1,200 people were massacred, and 251 were abducted by the terrorists. The country became awash in yellow ribbons and posters of the missing and dead.
Despite the tragic politicization that surrounded the campaign for their release, the slogan “Ad hahatuf ha’aharon” – “Until the last hostage” – became part of our national psyche. It’s always been there. Redeeming captives is part of Jewish tradition.
Sometimes the price has been unbearably high – like the release of thousands of terrorists from Israeli prisons in return for soldier Gilad Schalit in 2010.
Many of these freed prisoners, including Hamas leader and October 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar, went on to commit more atrocities. But the basic principle was understood – you don’t leave someone behind, alive or dead.
The body of the last hostage in Gaza, police officer Ran Gvili, was brought home for burial in January.
But Israelis have not forgotten Ron Arad, the Israel Air Force navigator who has been missing since 1986 when his plane was shot down over Lebanon, and whose name is synonymous with a fate worse than death – a state of limbo, a dreaded unknown.
Others this week recalled Eli Cohen, the Israeli super-spy executed in a public square in Damascus in 1965. Although some of his belongings have been retrieved, his body still lies in foreign soil. There will be no rest until he, too, has received the burial he deserves in Israel.
The fate of Guy Hever, a soldier who disappeared on the Golan Heights in August 1997, also remains painfully unknown.
From the beginning of the state, there are still some 170 soldiers whose burial place is not known, some of them lost at sea. I have always been touched by the fact that the IDF Unit for the Location of Missing Soldiers never gives up trying to find the remains of missing soldiers, even after decades.
I have closely followed the fate of PoWs and MIAs since 1982, when the brother of the store owner next to my parents’ print shop was taken prisoner during what was still known as Operation Peace for Galilee.
He eventually returned in an exchange after two years in Syrian captivity – missing his front teeth and translucently pale, but alive.
As a student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, I had asked international law scholar Prof. Ruth Lapidoth about his situation.
She patiently explained that being captured and held by a state, however terrible, was better than being held by a terrorist organization. The former was obliged by minimal standards of international law, unlike the terrorists.
I kept her words in mind when my family later became friendly with the Baumels during the many long years that their son was one of the Sultan Yacoub MIAs. In the normal course of things, there can be no greater curse than to wish for a parent to say kaddish (the prayer for the dead) for a child.
But when Zachary was finally laid to rest at Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl Military Cemetery 37 years after he was killed, I couldn’t help thinking it was a pity that his father, Yona, did not live long enough to be there and at last know the fate of the son he had searched for, across continents, for decades.
Katz’s parents also died before being granted closure.
It is easy to say “no one knows where they are buried,” but that’s not true. Somebody always knows. As time passes, the question becomes: “Is the person with the information still alive?”
While technological advances have helped improve the location and identification process, the first-hand witnesses are dying out and taking vital information to their own graves. This includes those responsible for the missing soldiers’ deaths and those who witnessed the burials.
A promise to continue
Katz was one of the better-known MIAs, but with the frenetic pace of the Israeli news cycle, a small item was easily overlooked last week: the burial place of Shlomo Haimson was finally located after almost 78 years.
His story is a piece of history in its own right. Romanian-born Haimson traveled to pre-state Israel after the Holocaust with his mother and girlfriend on an immigrant ship that was intercepted by Britain’s Royal Navy.
The Jews were transferred to a detention camp in Cyprus, then also under British rule.
Take a minute to absorb that even after the end of World War II, when knowledge of the Holocaust was irrefutable, British Mandate authorities still refused to allow Jews into their own homeland to start a new life.
In the camp, Haimson joined the Haganah, the main pre-state paramilitary organization. In September 1948, after the establishment of Israel, Haimson was killed by guards at the detention camp during an escape attempt with eight others, who were recaptured.
It is now known that he was originally buried in a Jewish cemetery in Cyprus and re-interred in Haifa in 1970 with other unidentified former detainees. At last, his loved ones will have a grave where they can mourn properly. That is not to be underestimated.
Last month, the remains of Pvt. Ya’akov Zrihan, killed during the 1948 War of Independence, were identified after being found in a mass grave in Kiryat Anavim, in the Judean Hills.
It was the initial burial site of many soldiers from that period, before the Mount Herzl Military Cemetery had been built and when graveyards, including the ancient Jewish burial grounds on the Mount of Olives, were cut off.
Born in Casablanca, Zrihan was 23 when he was among those killed when the convoy in which they were carrying food and supplies to besieged Jerusalem came under attack from Arab forces.
In 2010, I attended the military funeral of a sort-of cousin, Dov (Doveleh) Haberberg, killed in the Battle of the Castel in the War of Independence. His body was only identified more than 60 years later, along with two others, Eliahu Mouansa and Ze’ev Mandel.
Mouansa’s brother recalled how his father had always believed Eliahu would one day return and had scoured the images of soldiers released from captivity following the 1967 Six Day War, looking in vain for his son.
The return of live hostages elicits cheers of “Veshavu banim legvulam,” the words of the prophet Jeremiah: “There is hope for the future, says the Lord, and your children shall return to their own border.” It is a different kind of hope offered when the children return in flag-draped coffins.
Every funeral entails a sense of loss, but some evoke emotions for finally being found – and a promise not to give up searching for the missing.