feature story
A lbert Belmont was one of about 450 Jewish
soldiers buried under a cross in World Wars I
and II.

His story aligns with many of his Jewish American
compatriots who fought overseas, particularly in
WWII: When he enlisted, he wrote a “P” by his name
instead of an “H,” denoting he was Protestant, not
Hebrew. His eschewed Jewish identity wasn’t from lack of
pride; it was a precautionary measure. If he were
to be captured by Nazis, his status as a Christian
man would spare him being sent to the Berga
concentration camp, where many American GIs were
prisoners of war.

But for his family, particularly his daughter Barbara
Belmont, the Christian cross over Albert Belmont’s
head no longer served a purpose. When she took her
daughters to her father’s Normandy grave at the
Lorraine American Cemetery and Memorial in
1992, Barbara Belmont could only show them the
cross he bore above his name on the gravestone.

She wanted to show them that their grandfather
was a proud Jew.

Righting Historical
Wrongs Operation Benjamin
Honors Jewish Soldiers
Buried Under Crosses
SASHA ROGELBERG | STAFF WRITER
18 MAY 26, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
Th is April, Belmont, an Alexandria, Virginia,
resident, fulfi lled that hope, as she watched the
cemetery maintenance staff pull the old gravestone
at its base and replace it with a granite Star of David,
a uniformed U.S. military offi cer performing a slow
salute as she recited the Mourner’s Kaddish.

Belmont didn’t orchestrate the operation by herself
— in January, she was contacted by Shalom Lamm,
the CEO and co-founder of Operation Benjamin, a
nonprofi t organization devoted to providing Jewish
gravestones for soldiers buried under a cross.

On a three-day trip from April 24-28, Belmont,
along with the families of six other dead soldiers,
traveled with Operation Benjamin to France,
Luxembourg and Belgium, where grave by grave, they
honored their loved ones with Jewish gravestones and
burial rituals.

For Belmont, the trip allowed her to do something
she thought she’d never be able to do: connect with
her father, of whom she had no memories.

“It far exceeded my expectations,” she said. “I
wanted to feel, standing near my father’s grave and
participating in this transition, I wanted to feel that I
had touched my father, that I had done something for
him. Th at was really a driving force.”
According to Lamm, that is the crux of Operation
Benjamin’s work: “We not only have the soldier,
who we’re honoring by getting his story right by
identifying him for who he was in life, but we’re
doing something with the families as well ... You get
the sense that you’re making it right; you’re doing
something fundamentally right.”
“It Was Just a Curiosity”
Operation Benjamin is relatively young, founded
in 2016 by Lamm, Rabbi Jacob J. Schacter and Steve
Lamar, largely by coincidence.

“It was an accident,” Lamm said. “It was just a
curiosity.” Schacter, a Jewish historian, was leading a tour
of medieval France near Normandy in 2014, when
he, on a whim, visited the Normandy American
Cemetery. In the sea of crosses, Schacter saw few
Jewish stars.

Th ree months later, when Lamm, a longtime friend
of Schacter’s, approached him at a party, Schacter
shared his fi ndings but didn’t think much of it.

Lamm, a military historian, however, became fi xated.

“I ran home that night — it was a Saturday night
— and I just was obsessed with this idea,” he said. “I
don’t know why, but I was obsessed with this idea that
something was wrong.”
Lamm counted 149 Jewish stars at the cemetery but
calculated a discrepancy: “Th ere are about 9,500 U.S.

GIs buried in Normandy, and Jews are about 2.7% of
the casualties.”
Instead of 149 Jews buried at the military cemetery,
there should have been, statistically, closer to 250.

Lamm and his colleagues experimented. Th ey
picked a random, Jewish-sounding name of a soldier
buried under a cross — Pvt. Benjamin Garadetsky —
and did extensive research, only to fi nd out the soldier
was “fully Jewish.”
“His family was from Zhytomyr [Ukraine], and