Posted on 06/06/2024 1:16:06 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Nathan Baskind was killed in action shortly after D-Day. A year-long investigation found his remains and ensured his reinterment under a Star of David
By Andrew Lapin June 6, 2024 Growing up, Samantha Baskind’s father would sometimes mention his “Uncle Nate,” who stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day.
He called Nate “a great Jewish American war hero,” often just around Memorial Day, Baskind recalled. “He would always use that exact same phrase.”
There’s a family picture of Nate in his mid-twenties, just before shipping off to war, holding Baskind’s father as a toddler. But the family knew nothing of his fate, other than that the U.S. Army had declared him missing in action.
(Excerpt) Read more at forward.com ...
The Baskind case was more intense than Operation Benjamin’s typical fare. Enlisting genealogists and excavators, the group has, to date, identified around 20 Jewish American soldiers whom the U.S. military had mistakenly buried under crosses and worked to give them Jewish burials instead. (Like other Jewish burial groups, Operation Benjamin places an imperative on burying the dead according to Jewish law, in particular with as many of their body parts intact as possible.)
Good. Better late than never - in the confusion of war, this kind of thing must happen a lot.
Imagine so many dead that it gets confusing and many are lost in the shuffle. And many were not intact. It was a horror.
Yes, it was. Saving Private Ryan maybe gave us who didn’t serve in combat a 5% understanding of what it was like.
Especially when Hanks is dying he says, “Earn this.” and then at the end of the movie Ryan as an old man speaks to the grave of one of those who gave everything so he could have a life. And then you see those who wish to destroy everything which they died for.
The American Battle Monuments Commission has identified hundreds of Jewish WW2 dead who were mistakenly buried as Christians.
https://www.jns.org/american-military-cemeteries-come-alive-in-memory-of-jewish-soldiers/
“Especially when Hanks is dying he says, “Earn this.” and then at the end of the movie Ryan as an old man speaks to the grave of one of (Hanks/ Capt. Miller) those who gave everything so he could have a life”
That is the most emotional scene in the movie for me.
“Tell me I’m a good man”
Tearing up just typing it.
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