In 2014, Rabbi Dr. Jacob J. Schacter led a Jewish History tour in Europe with a group of American Jews. It was June 6th, D-Day, and a member of the group suggested an unscheduled stop at the Normandy American Cemetery. While taking in the enormity of the cemetery and the expanse of unending rows of white, Latin cross grave markers, he noted that the occasional break in the symmetry of markers for a Star of David marker seemed abnormally low. He surmised that, given the approximately 2.5% of the American army composed of Jews, there should have been more Star of David markers. He filed the thought away.

Back in New York some weeks later, Rabbi Schacter happened to meet his close friend, Shalom Lamm, a businessman and military historian by training. Rabbi Schacter shared his observation with Shalom, and, over the course of two years trying to understand why there were fewer Stars of David than they expected, the two agreed it was possible that there could be Jewish soldiers who, only by mistake after the battles of World War II, had been buried beneath the Latin cross. The two men decided to test their hypothesis.

With no precedent to follow, they scoured lists of soldiers at Normandy looking for names on markers that seemed Jewish but were marked with crosses. Identifying the descendants of these soldiers was the next step, followed by contacting those descendants and confirming the genealogical relationship. They brought in a third partner to the effort, Steve Lamar, a competent amateur genealogist. Even after making the family connection, the American Battle Monuments Commission, responsible for maintaining all American military cemeteries worldwide, had to be contacted, and the case had to be made for the marker switch.

The third WWII soldier that the men identified was Private Benjamin Garadetsky. In the summer of 2018, his marker was the first to be changed from the Latin cross to the Star of David. And Operation Benjamin (https://operationbenjamin.org) was born. The focus of the organization has since broadened to both WWI and WWII Jewish soldiers.

In March 2026, during nine weeks of frequent hospitalizations arising from the side effects of chemotherapy for a rare abdominal adenocarcinoma, my phone rang one afternoon. The caller’s country code was 972, which means Israel. The voice was unfamiliar. “Hi”, said the caller.........

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