Garden of the Missing in Action

The Garden of the Missing in Action occupies a dedicated section of Israel's central military cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.[5][6] It has been described as Israel's Tomb of the Unknown Soldier memorial, although the Israeli approach rejects permanently anonymous commemoration in favor of continuing the search for each individual.[1][7] The garden preserves hundreds of names on its walls and has more than 200 individual memorial stones among its trees.[2][8]

The garden commemorates people who fell within Israel and abroad, including casualties from both World Wars, the 1948 War of Independence, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and later campaigns.[2] David Ben-Gurion gave voice to the policy of individual identification when he declared, "We do not have a monument to the Unknown Soldier."[7] The IDF's Missing Persons Unit and the Ministry of Defense continue throughout the year to search for burial places so that the fallen can be brought to identified graves.[4]

The origins of the garden trace to the early years of the State of Israel, when the Mount Herzl military cemetery was envisioned to include a plot for fallen soldiers whose burial places were unknown.[3] A central early impetus was the failure to repatriate the remains of Jewish soldiers who had served in the British Army during the Second World War and were buried abroad: the British commission responsible for military cemeteries refused permission to exhume and transfer their bodies.[3] In 1952, Yosef Dekel of the Ministry of Defense's department for the commemoration of soldiers informed a family representative that a special section at Mount Herzl was being reserved for these fallen.[3] A 1954 plan proposed four plots bordered by myrtle shrubs with bay laurels around them, but that design was not carried out.[3] A later Ynet architectural account credits landscape architect Shlomo Aronson with a 1954 design for the garden.[5]

Instead, through the 1950s, architect Asher Hiram designed three distinct cenotaphs — symbolic substitute graves for those who could not be buried at the site.[3] The first commemorated 140 members of a Jewish transport company in the British Army who died on 1 May 1943 when the Arinpurah was sunk by the Germans while en route to Malta.[3] Hiram designed it as a ship-shaped memorial: a shallow rectangular pool tiled blue, with the fallen soldiers' names on plaques beneath the water around the pool's edge, so that visitors looking through the water to read the names encountered a form that evoked both the sea and the men's unknown place of burial.[3] A structure resembling a ship's smokestack served as the memorial room.[3]

The second cenotaph honored the 23 Palmach sea commandos who disappeared in 1941 during Operation Boatswain, a mission to Vichy-controlled Lebanon.[3][1] Made of Jerusalem stone and set within a rectangular pool, the memorial combined solid stone — associated with permanence and commemoration — with water evoking the sea and the unknown fate of the vessel.[3] Its unveiling took place on the 16th anniversary of the departure of the mission.[3]

The third memorial, erected in 1957, commemorated 72 Israel Defense Forces soldiers buried beyond the armistice lines: on the Mount of Olives, in Jerusalem's Old City, and at Beit HaArava.[3] Designed as a roofed passage resembling an alley in the Old City, it set individual marble plaques into its walls to serve as substitute graves for families who could not reach their sons' burial places.[3] One bereaved parent at its unveiling described the need plainly: "We had nowhere to go." After the Six-Day War in 1967, when those soldiers' remains were brought to burial in Israel, the memorial no longer functioned as a symbolic grave for the unreturned.[3]

In 1968, it was decided to place the memorial to the crew of the submarine INS Dakar in the missing-persons section.[3] Designed by Anatol David Brutzkus as a concrete submarine form partly emerging above ground, the monument includes an interior memorial room.[3] Its inscription quotes Psalm 77:20: "Your way was through the sea … yet your footprints were unseen."[3] The monument was added during the 1970s, and remains recovered at the site of the Dakar's sinking in 1999 were later housed in its memorial space.[5]

In 2000, Moshe Oren of the department for the commemoration of soldiers proposed transforming the historic plot into a unified "Garden of the Missing," giving it a distinctive character and a central memorial bearing all the missing persons' names.[3] Work began in autumn 2002 and was completed approximately two years later.[3] Ministry of Defense pages date the garden's establishment to 2003, while the Jewish Virtual Library records a formal establishment ceremony on February 29, 2004.[2][1]

The garden's central feature is a large paved plaza with trees growing in stone-bordered beds.[4] Two high stone walls meet at one corner of the plaza; the names of the fallen are engraved on these walls, arranged by year.[4] Nearby stand stone memorial markers inscribed with details of each missing person, and a stone platform topped by a metal memorial flame.[4] The biblical verse Nahum 3:17 is inscribed on the front of this platform.[4] The plaza was originally laid with grass in keeping with the conception of the site as a tranquil garden; it was subsequently paved with marble slabs.[3]

On the garden's north side, within a wooded area, stand more than 200 memorial stones.[8] These include memorial gravestones for personnel missing from the 1948 War of Independence and the 1973 Yom Kippur War, as well as memorials for missing pilots and sailors.[2] At the end of the garden stands the INS Dakar submarine monument, added in the 1970s: a submarine form in exposed concrete, designed by David Brutzkus, with a memorial space beneath it bearing the names of the 69 crew members lost with the vessel in 1968.[5]

Also within the garden is the memorial to the 23 Who Went Down at Sea — the 23 Palmach sea commandos who disappeared during their 1941 mission.[1] An archival Palphot postcard of the garden's entrance, held in the National Library of Israel, survives without a named photographer; the library suggests that the image may date from around the garden's mid-1950s inauguration, while dating the postcard itself to the late 1950s or early 1960s from its reverse printing.[9]

An official state ceremony for those missing in Israel's campaigns is held at the garden's main plaza every year on 7 Adar.[4][10] The date was set by the Chief Military Rabbinate because, according to Jewish tradition, 7 Adar is the date of the birth and death of Moses, whose burial place remains unknown.[4] The garden's formal establishment ceremony on February 29, 2004, was attended by army chiefs, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, and members of the Jerusalem Municipality.[1]

The IDF's Missing Persons Unit and the Ministry of Defense's unit for the commemoration of fallen soldiers work throughout the year to locate burial places.[4] When a burial place is found, a gravestone is placed on the grave; people whose burial places are subsequently identified may nonetheless remain commemorated on the garden's names wall.[4] The garden also appears on a guided Mount Herzl route that includes the Dakar memorial, the Six-Day War section, and memorials connected with other battles and groups of fallen service members.[11]