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



Courtesy of Shalom Lamm
Barbara Belmont at the Lorraine American
Cemetery and Memorial in France, where she
visited her father’s grave in April.

they settled in the Bronx in the early 1900s,” Lamm said.

“And his parents were buried about 10 minutes from my
house in Long Island. It was the craziest coincidence.”
Garadetsky became the fi rst soldier to have his grave
marker changed by Operation Benjamin. So far, the
organization has changed 16 headstones, with three
more pending, over fi ve trips.

Th e process of fi nding Jewish soldiers is complicated.

Operation Benjamin, in collaboration with the
American Battle Monuments Commission and a team
of genealogists, spends months looking for documents
that confi rm an individual as Jewish: bar mitzvah or
wedding photos, U.S. Census documents, connections
to a rabbi or papers in Yiddish. Many times, a soldier
would have been too young to get married. Instead,
Operation Benjamin would search for materials from
a relative.

“At the end of the day, we’re trying to prove that
somebody was born a Jew, lived as a Jew and they
fought as a Jew,” Lamar said.

Before ABMC can complete the paperwork for a
gravestone marker change, however, a family member
must provide consent. Finding a relative — sometimes
a distant one if the soldier had no wife or children —
takes time.

Lamm has to almost instantaneously convince the
person on the other end of a phone call or email —
who may not even know about their deceased relative
— that he isn’t a solicitor or spammer.

“We’ve had to fi gure out how to gain people’s trust
on the fi rst email, and we worked very hard on that,”
Lamm said.

When Lamm reached out to Belmont, she was
happy to pick up the phone and talk.

“I Have No Memories of My Father”
Barbara Belmont was only 3 when her father died.

Th e Belmont family was in the photography business
in Kansas City, and Albert Belmont was a young
Jewish philanthropist.

He enlisted at age 32, and despite coming from a
wealthy family, Albert Belmont insisted on receiving
no preferential treatment.

“He wanted to be just one of the soldiers,” Barbara
Belmont said.

Albert Belmont arrived in France on Nov. 1, 1944,
as part of a division of reinforcements to Gen. George
Smith Patton. He spent the month traversing the
country to its northeastern region by Metz, where
the German forces had doubled down on forces and
artillery. He was killed on Nov. 30, just two weeks
before the Battle of the Bulge.

Th e Belmont family received a telegram on Dec. 11
informing them of Albert Belmont’s death. Belmont
had just turned 3, and her sister was 7.

“I have no memories of my father. It was a very
diffi cult time,” Belmont said.

Belmont, whose mother remarried, was adopted by
her stepfather. Th ough she knew her stepfather was
not her biological father, Belmont only started to gain
a connection with her father a decade aft er his death.

When Belmont was 13, her sister pulled her into her
bedroom and shut the door, taking out a picture frame
and revealing a picture of their father hidden behind
another photograph.

“Th at was the fi rst time I’d ever seen him or had any
idea what he looked like,” she said.

In 1992, when Belmont took her daughters to her
father’s grave for the fi rst time, something felt like it
was missing.

“We visited his grave ... I don’t know what I
expected,” Belmont said. “I felt I had done something,
but it wasn’t nearly enough.”
In the 30 years since Belmont visited her father’s
grave, she had gotten in touch with various cousins
and learned more about Albert Belmont. As Belmont
spent time over her life putting together the pieces
of her father’s life and her relationship with him,
the connection was still not seamless. Life changes
prevented Belmont from prioritizing ways to honor
her father.

“Life happens,” Belmont said. “But he was never out
of my mind.”
“She was so amazed of the emotions that started to
erupt inside of her about this grandfather she didn’t
know,” Belmont said.

Th e trip changed the dynamic of Belmont’s family,
she said.

“I’ve never seen us so tight. I mean, I couldn’t turn
around and I didn’t have one of them on one side
or the other,” she said. “But I could not have done
anything more wonderful for our family than this.”
“Our Goal is To Go Out of Business”
Operation Benjamin recognizes its work is fi nite,
Lamm insists. Th ough at the rate they’re going at
(about 25 graves a year), Lamm will be more than 400
years old by the time all the gravestones are replaced.

“Our goal is to go out of business,” he said. “Our goal
is to shut the lights and quietly fade into the darkness.”
Lamm said Operation Benjamin is not an education
center or Jewish genealogy specialist. Th e organization
serves a specifi c purpose, which Lamm’s co-founder
Lamar believes has a more profound impact on the
participating families.

“We’re not just righting historical wrongs,” Lamar
said. “We are refreshing the memories of the soldiers.”
Th is was the case for Dr. Ira La Voe, a Philadelphia-
based physician, who, through Operation Benjamin,
found out that his grandmother’s youngest brother
died in Manila, Philippines during WWII.

La Voe would likely have never met his great-uncle,
but the experience made him think about his family
connections: his childhood home, memories with his
grandparents, aunts and uncles of generations past
that he hadn’t stopped to think about for a while.

“We just came full circle ... doing the right thing for
a generation that was forgotten for many of us because
we just didn’t have a connection,” he said. JE
srogelberg@midatlanticmedia.com “They Never Had a Kaddish Said”
Just like in 1992, Belmont brought daughters Erin
McCahill and Jennifer Soloway with her on the trip to
her father’s grave in April.

Th e family was accompanied by 15 other family
members, as well as a whole host of ambassadors,
veterans and military offi cers there to pay their
respects to the soldiers.

On an overcast day with the sun only occasionally
peeking through the clouds, Belmont and her
daughters said the Mourner’s Kaddish for each of the
graves they had passed, for soldiers who had never had
a Kaddish said for them, Belmont said.

Colonels and lieutenant colonels did slow salutes as
the gravestones were changed, an act of respect oft en
done during retirements, and a rarity for offi cers with
seniority to do for privates and soldiers of lower rank.

As Belmont’s family approached Albert Belmont’s
grave, where they and dozens of guests paid their
respects, Barbara Belmont noticed something she
hadn’t seen her daughter do in years: cry.

Col. D. Gottrich salutes Pvt. Albert Belmont after
Belmont’s old gravestone was replaced with a Star
of David.

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