JTA — When Varda Morell stands by her son’s grave in Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl military cemetery this Memorial Day, the official ceremony unfolding nearby will barely register. That was true in the two Memorial Days since Maoz was killed in Gaza in February 2024. What she will see instead is a swath of fresh graves, the once-empty section where he is buried now completely full.

“Each time we’ve come to visit his grave, there’s another row and another row and another row,” she said.

Across Israel, families marking Memorial Day, known as Yom Hazikaron, are doing so this year against a backdrop of continued fighting, successive ceasefires and a steady stream of new casualties, turning what is meant to be a day of remembrance into one that, for many, isn’t rooted in the past. The Israeli government says 170 soldiers and security personnel were killed since Yom Hazikaron last year.

For the sixth consecutive year, the official ceremonies did not follow their traditional format, after successive disruptions that began with the pandemic and later included political turmoil, wildfires and wartime restrictions.

For Morell, the recent “cleared for publication” announcements naming soldiers killed in Lebanon have brought it all back. “My heart feels sick just thinking about it,” she said on her way to deliver a Memorial Day talk at her son’s paratrooper base. “I remember what those first days were like, and what those families are going through now that they’ve joined this club. The club that no one wants to be a part of.”

In recent years, a growing number of bereaved families have chosen to boycott official ceremonies altogether. More than 150 signed a letter last week urging coalition lawmakers not to speak at military cemeteries, saying their loved ones’ graves should not be used as a “political platform for divisive messages.” Many still gather at the graveside with their families or communities, while others have said it was too painful to visit on the day itself.

Orit Shimon, who lost her son Dotan in September 2024, said that after her daughter Nufar was killed in a traffic accident in 2013, she came to see Yom Hazikaron as “as holy as Yom Kippur,” marking it by visiting her grave and then returning home to watch television programs about fallen soldiers. But after her son was killed in Gaza, she stopped watching altogether. Her connection to him, she said, is not at his grave but in the photos and videos she returns to again and again.

This year, despite her husband’s objections, Shimon chose not to send out messages inviting people to come and pay their........

© The Times of Israel