Who Today Will Make “The Ultimate Sacrifice”?

Jack Goldstein
2 jul
8 min de lectura

Today’s world which is increasingly divided between citizens who are willing to fight and, if necessary, die for their values and those who are not.

By Michael Oren

An alarming number of Jewish soldiers who fell in the World Wars were mistakenly buried beneath Latin crosses. Operation Benjamin, an extraordinary initiative, identifies their graves and rededicates them with marble Stars of David. At a recent gathering of Operation Benjamin in Verdun, France, honoring Jews who fell fighting in both the U.S. and German armies, I spoke about what it means today to give one’s life for one’s country.

I often wonder what it’d be like to sit rocking in that landing craft and counting down the seconds until he entered the hell of World War II. I wonder who was with him in that boat—the farmer from Alabama, the merchant’s son from Vermont, the Ivy League literature student, tough street kids from Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Jersey City.

And I wonder what they were thinking—fear, of course, and not only of being killed or wounded but of letting their buddies down—but also about the great mission on which they were about to embark.

Imagine, as I often do, that you could do a poll on that boat, ask those young GIs for what they were about to fight. The answers, I guess, would be pretty much uniform. We fight for freedom, of course, most of them would answer. We fight against fascism. We fight for the values we all hold dear.

Now my father and his buddies had recently heard General George Patton famously say “No one ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” And yet the possibility of dying in this war was poignantly real.

Still, nobody shirked, nobody on that landing craft refused to disembark. For hallowed American principles, they were willing to lay down their lives.

What greater sacrifice could there be? A life—seeing the sun every day, the stars at night, your wife’s smile, your children’s and grandchildren’s laughter, for decades to come—a life is an incalculable gift to give to any cause, much less one’s country. Yet, not too long ago in historical terms, the willingness to give one’s life for one’s country was considered commonplace. It was exalted and revered.

The landscape of Europe is lined with innumerable tombstones inscribed with the words “Mort pour la France” and “A Soldier of the Great War Known unto God.” The American military cemetery at Meuse-Argonne in France is dedicated to “those who gave their lives for their country.”

In America, many Ivy League campuses host a marble wall listing the names of every alumnus killed in the nation’s wars. The longest lists are the Civil War and World Wars I and II. By Korea and Vietnam, the list grows shorter, and thereafter—for the Gulf Wars and U.S. operations around the globe, the names virtually disappear.

I used to teach at some of those universities, and on occasion would ask my students whether they’d be willing to fight for their country. In a class of dozens, I’d usually get one or, at most, two hands raised, most in the back rows. I didn’t dare ask them who would be willing to make the ultimate sacrifice—they might have thought me mad.

It’s not only in elite American universities that the notion of giving one’s life for one’s country has gone exceedingly out of fashion, but in virtually all Western countries.

While we can surmise that some countries in the Far East, the Subcontinent, and Eastern Europe are willing to defend themselves, can we say the same about most of the countries of the West? How many citizens of European Union countries are willing to fight, and perhaps even die, for their values? Who in the West is willing to go off to war knowing there’s a chance she or he will not come home? Is it possible for leaders today to even suggest such a sacrifice?

Last November, when the chief of the defense staff of the French army, General Fabien Mandon, questioned whether France still had the fortitude to fight against Russia and to accept the loss of its “children”—its soldiers—he was roundly condemned by both the right and the left.

How far we’ve come from the American patriot Nathan Hale who, before his execution by the British in 1776, immortally said, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”

For Jews, especially, the question of whether one should give one’s life for one’s country has historically been fraught. Our sacred books all acknowledge the reality and often necessity of war—they recognize human frailty, the possibility of cowardice but also the nobility of courage. But in all our holy books there is no equivalent to the words of the ancient Roman poet Horace, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (it is sweet and honorable to die for one’s country). Rather, our emphasis has always been on life and choosing life over death.

That legacy became challenging starting in the Enlightenment, with the gradual liberation of the Jews and their conscription into Western armies. Starting with Francis Salvador of South Carolina, killed in action against the British in 1776, Jews died fighting for America’s independence. But other Jews, albeit in far smaller numbers, fought against the Americans, serving and sailing for the King.

In the Napoleonic wars, too, at the beginning of the 19th century, Jews fought with and against the French.

In the 1850s, America’s consul general in Egypt, a southern Jew named Edwin de Leon, joined with Captain Uriah Levy, owner and restorer of Jefferson’s estate at Monticello, to rescue American Christian missionaries under attack in the Holy Land. De Leon went on to serve as a Confederate spy while Uriah Levy became a commodore in the Union Navy. The Jewish chapel at Annapolis is named for him.

All told, as many as 8,000 Jews fought for the North in the Civil War and 3,000 for the South—the Confederate memorial in Arlington Cemetery was sculpted by the Jewish Confederate veteran, Moses Jacob Ezekiel. He, and all the thousands of Jews serving their countries on different battlefields, were willing to die for their country.

So, too, were the hundreds of spiked-helmeted soldiers depicted in a famous lithograph entitled Service on the Day of Atonement by the Israelite soldiers of the German Army before Metz in 1870.

And it is far from inconceivable that numbers of Jews, rather than dying for their country, caused numbers of their fellow Jews to die for theirs.

That was the theme of Jewish literary legends that began appearing as early as the Crimean War of the 1850s, when German, French, and Turkish Jews fought Jews serving in the Russian army. According to the legend, a Jewish soldier jumps into a trench, bayonets an enemy, and then hears him say the shema, the seminal Jewish prayer recited just before death. The legend ends with the bayoneting Jewish soldier going mad with grief.

The chances of that nightmare coming true increased immeasurably during World War I, in which as many as 400,000 Jews served in the Allied forces, of whom 3,500 died fighting for the United States. In the German army 100,000 Jews served and 12,000 died.

One of those German soldiers was the father of my adopted father in Israel, Dr. Daniel Reis.

His father, Hans, was a reconnaissance sergeant, flying in biplanes over the Western Front, and then in the trenches at Verdun where he won the Iron Cross. A proud German, he was stunned when his officer suddenly called him in and asked if he was of Hebrew faith. This was the infamous Judenzählung, the Jewish census ordered in response to antisemitic claims that German Jews were shirking their duty.

The census proved just the opposite, but Hans was so incensed that after the war he became a Zionist.

Zionism sought to end once and for all the agony of Jews killing Jews. Zionism aspired to create the reality in which the country for which Jews might have to fight and possibly die would be their own.

The idea was immortalized by Joseph Trumpeldor, the one-armed hero of the Russo-Japanese war and Zionist pioneer, who was shot by Arab marauders in the Upper Galilee in 1920. “Never mind,” were his last purported words, “It’s good to die for our country.”

Zionism kept its promise that Jew would never again fight against Jew—or nearly kept it.

In June, 1948, while the nascent state fought for its life against five invading Arab armies, the Irgun underground militia tried to sail an arms ship, the Altalena, to Israel’s shores. The leader of the state, David Ben-Gurion, insisted that Israel had one and only one sovereign army, and ordered Israeli troops to open fire on the ship. Nearly two dozen Jews died and more would have certainly been killed if not for the Irgun commander, Menachem Begin, who gave the order, “Jews do not shoot Jews.”

Since then, despite many political crises, the State of Israel has maintained Begin’s dictum, but also Trumpeldor’s epitaph. In war after war, operation after operation, Israelis have willingly defended our country. Israel’s military cemeteries are lined with the graves of soldiers inscribed with their rank, serial number, dates of birth and death, and the circumstances in which they fell.

Since the current war began on October 7, 2023, some 400,000 Israel Defense Forces reservists have left their homes, their jobs, and their families to pick up a gun and fight for their country. They did so knowing full well that some would come home grievously injured in body and mind, and some would not come home at all.

Those 400,000 are the proportional equivalent of 13.4 million Americans—nearly the number of Americans who fought in all of World War II. Close to a thousand Israeli soldiers have died—proportionally more than twice as many as Americans who fell in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet we are still willing to fight and risk our lives against an enemy that worships death and views our very love of life as our fatal weakness.

Israel is, alas, a rarity in today’s world—a world which is increasingly divided not between East and West, Democracies and Dictatorships, but between those countries willing to defend themselves and those who are not. It is divided between those citizens who are willing to fight and, if necessary, die for their values and those who are not.

Israel belongs to that first, fighting world. Israel belongs to the world of the tens of thousands of American soldiers and sailors who, for more than three months now, have been risking and sometimes forfeiting their lives to save their country—and indeed, all of humanity—from the looming, lethal evil of Iran.

Israeli and American service people belong to the world of those courageous warriors, Jews and gentiles, who are buried in this hallowed ground.

Israel and the United States belong to the world of my father’s landing craft as it approached Utah Beach. That landing craft which today would probably not contain the Ivy League literary students but still those women and men willing to fight for their country. And, yes, willing to die.

Perhaps not in my father’s boat but probably on one nearby was Private Benjamin Garadetsky, a medic with the armored corps, who fell in France later that summer. Garadetsky was the fallen soldier for whom Operation Benjamin is named. He gave his life for his country but was buried not as a Jew, his grave marked by a cross.

Benjamin Garadetsky who fought against fascism is linked with Francis Salvador who fought for American liberty, and with Omer Balva, Rose Ida Lubin, and Moshe Yitzhak HaCohen Katz—three Lone Soldiers from the United States who fell in the war with started by Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah in October 2023.

All of them gave what we euphemistically call “their last measure.” They sacrificed their indescribably precious lives so that we could live ours in prosperity, in security, and freedom.

This piece is dedicated to the memories of the Jewish soldiers who fought in WWI and whose burial sites were rededicated this week in Verdun:

US Jewish Soldiers

PVT Samuel Tamkin

PFC Barney Bardman

PVT Samuel Backer

PVT Hyman Aronoff

PFC Maurice Akabas

German Jewish Soldiers

Musketier David Jacobs

Unteroffizier Hermann Marx

Musketier Karl Schuster

Musketier Josef Leiter