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Giving a Face to the Fallen

(Jerusalem Post) Robert Hersowitz - In April 2010, Dorit Perry, a native of Jerusalem, was visiting Mount Herzl to pay her respects to her fallen fellow citizens when she noticed an unattended grave, that of Yosef Lehana. There were no details about the soldier on the gravestone. She suspected there were other graves in a similar state and approached the Defense Ministry to obtain a list of such names so that she could try to obtain the missing details. She found some 811 "faceless soldiers" who gave their lives to Israel's defense between 1940 and 1950 about whom almost nothing is known other than their names and the dates on which they died. Her extensive research determined that Lehana was born in Greece in 1921 to Esther and Nissim Lehana. After surviving the Holocaust as a partisan, Lehana immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1945. He fell in the Battle of Jenin on June 3, 1948. Perry and her team eventually succeeded in locating some of Lehana's distant relatives and friends, and a new tombstone was unveiled for him in May 2011, in the presence of then-Knesset Speaker (and now President) Reuven Rivlin. The discovery of Lehana's complete identity gave birth in May 2012 to the project called Giving a Face to the Fallen. Assisted by new technological tools, 18 volunteers have succeeded in restoring the full identities of at least 80 fallen soldiers, a high percentage of whom were European immigrants, many of them Holocaust survivors who were the last remnants of their families. Perry and her team are anxious to publicize their work. They still have many cases to solve.
2016-05-06 00:00:00
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