Remembering Martin Davidowicz

I was extremely moved by the description in the press last week of the burial of Martin Davidowicz in the Mount Herzl Military Cemetery, located on the northern slope of Mount Herzl just outside Jerusalem. The cemetery was originally established in 1949 specifically as a final resting place for soldiers who died defending Jerusalem during the Israeli War of Independence, but has since become the main cemetery for members of the Israel Defense Forces who have fallen in the line of duty. For Israelis, there is no more sacred ground, no place in the nation more suffused with the national will to survive and to thrive as focused through the effort specifically to honor those who have given their lives over the years to protect the State and its people.

What is interesting—and, to me, beyond moving—is that Martin Davidowicz never actually lived in Israel. In fact, he died before the State of Israel came into existence and never even set foot on the soil of what in his lifetime was still the British Mandate of Palestine. Yet he was nonetheless buried last week on Mount Herzl with full military honors and recognized as the first paratrooper to die in the service of the country he hoped to help create. He was twenty-one years old at the time of his death in 1948.

Davidowicz was born in 1927 in what was then Czechoslovakia. In 1943, when he was only sixteen years old, he and his family were deported to Auschwitz, where all but Martin were killed. He somehow survived as a slave laborer and was eventually liberated in the spring of 1945—at which time he was still only eighteen years old. He returned home, served in the Czech Army, and then, upon discharge, signed on to a course the Czech Army was offering to young Jewish men who wished to participate as paratroopers in the struggle to bring a Jewish state into existence in the Land of Israel. And it was in the course of that training course—and, at that, only three weeks into it—that a Czech Army officer accidentally shot and killed this poor lad who had survived Auschwitz, the annihilation of his family, and a stint in the Czech Army. Since the whole paratrooper training program was being conducted secretly, he was buried surreptitiously the next day in a nearby Jewish cemetery that the Nazis had somehow neglected to destroy. He was therefore neither a citizen of Israel nor an IDF combatant when he died. But Davidowicz was nonetheless formally recognized as the nation’s first fallen IDF paratrooper in 2001— and a full fifty-three years after his death.

For twenty years, nothing happened. And then, just this year, the Israeli government, realizing its oversight, began what became a successful effort to exhume Davidowicz’s remains and rebury him, this time with full military honors, on Mount Herzl among so many others of Israel’s war dead.

At Shelter Rock, when we recite Yizkor we always include a prayer for the fallen of the IDF, both those who gave their lives to bring the State of Israel into existence and those who fell in service to their nation since the day statehood was proclaimed in 1948. And my custom is almost always to introduce that prayer by reminding the congregation that the War of Independence was fought—not entirely but to a serious extent—by young people whose families had been murdered by Nazis and who were thus those families’ sole living survivors when they died. Since such young people by definition had no one to say any Yizkor prayers for them, I always invite the congregation to join me in taking on the role of surrogate family members and praying that they rest in peace and that their memory be a source of blessing for us all.

I’ve introduced that prayer with words along those lines for decades. But I’ve never mentioned the name of any specific person in that category for fear of making the memorial about that person and not all the others as well. But now that Martin Davidowicz has stepped out of time to take his place, at least briefly, on the front page, I thought it would be worthwhile to tell his story. May he rest in peace. And may his memory be a source of blessing for us all.