Memorial Day's Beginnings

May 12 1940 – 4 Iyar 5700

Nine years before the first round of memorial days for those killed in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, which ended close to a year after the declaration of the state, a memorial day was created in the calendar of the Jewish pre-state community for the four hundred Jews killed during the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939. In the following years, in the throes of World War Two, the date was neglected. Then in 1948, as Arab forces from Egypt, Jordan and Syria as well as local militias attacked Jewish targets after the British evacuated Mandate Palestine, they carried out the worst massacre of Jews in Israel’s War of Independence on 4 Iyar (May 13) with the capture and destruction of Kfar Etzion, south of Jerusalem. Its 136 defenders were killed, most of them after their surrender. The State of Israel was declared the next day, while the settlements of the Etzion bloc were still burning.

In 1949, as the War of Independence drew to a close, memorial services were held for the fallen on various days in Iyar, including 5 Iyar, Independence Day. Avraham Yitzhak Merhavia, a member of the religious Kibbutz movement, suggested that 4 Iyar should become Yom Etzion, an official memorial day for those who fell in Kfar Etzion on that day:

We should not be ungrateful to them. 4 Iyar is Yom Etzion, and as on that day the Jewish nation made its greatest sacrifice on the path to redemption [ie. the Jewish state], it’s a fitting day to choose for the Memorial day on which we remember all [Israel’s] fallen. (“As Independence Day Approaches,” Kibbutz Tirat Zvi Journal, April 19 1949)

The next year, a request was made by bereaved families to choose a different day, but Rabbi Goren, then Chief Rabbi of the Israel Defense Forces, later revealed that as Israel’s second Independence Day approached, a date had yet to be set aside. He claimed he chose 4 Iyar as the latest date possible to allow for the necessary preparations. In any event, Israel has remembered its fallen soldiers on the day before Independence Day ever since, even when the celebrations are moved a day or two forwards or backwards to avoid Sabbath desecration in the official ceremonies, and 4 Iyar is the official date of that memorial day.

In memory of Aharon-Yitzhak Rose, killed by a road bomb in the Jordan Valley on 18 Heshvan 5743 (November 3 1982)