Families lament ignorance of Lamed Heh's heroic sacrifice

On the third anniversary of the deaths of the 35 soldiers who were ambushed on their way to the besieged Etzion Bloc on January 14, 1948, prime minister David Ben-Gurion wrote that he did not know "if there was in the Israel Defense Forces or in any army in the world, a platoon of such magnificence of humanity, heroism, innocence and richness of soul as was this platoon." Ben-Gurion said at the time that he believed the 35 - known by the Hebrew letters equivalent to that number, "lamed" and "heh" - should not be commemorated necessarily with stone monuments, but rather "in the true and ongoing will to be as much like them as possible."

On the 60th anniversary of the fall of the Lamed Heh, half of whom were students or scholars at the Hebrew University and the other half military scouts and experienced hikers, their surviving relatives Sunday visited their graves on Mount Herzl. Brothers and sisters, now in their 70s and 80s, said they feared that one of the most heroic stories in Israel's history, by whose values generations of IDF soldiers and commanders were educated, would be forgotten with time.

Uri Kushnir, brother of platoon member Tuvya Kushnir, said he found increasing signs that people were ignorant of the story. "At best they remember it as the name of a street or a kibbutz," he said. Kushnir, who edited a literary anthology about the Lamed Hey published recently by the Defense Ministry, said he believes the concept of "purity of arms" is the main legacy of the famed platoon. To this day he strongly believes the version of the platoon's fate that says that an elderly Arab, or as some have it, two women collecting kindling, encountered the unit and reported their presence to nearby villagers, who attacked and massacred them.

Ehud Kutik, whose brother Yaakov was also killed in the battle, wants people to remember that this was a "group of educated young people, many the only children of 'Yekke' families in Jerusalem, who came to the aid of Orthodox mountain pioneers," referring to the residents of the Etzion Bloc settlements between Bethlehem and Hebron. "They fought to the last bullet," he said.

The anthology about the Lamed Heh is one of consensus; from a ballad by the Communist poet Alexander Penn, who was blacklisted by the establishment for many years, to an old poem by Haim Gouri. Representatives from across the religious and political spectrum will take part next week in the march to commemorate the battle: Members of both the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair youth movement and Bnei Akiva, the Orthodox youth movement, will be in attendance, along with a large number of soldiers.

The mixed background of the participants stems from the fact that the settlements of the Etzion Bloc consisted of three Orthodox communities and a Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz. The names of the public figures who will attend, among them Education Minister Yuli Tamir, Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai, Minister Ami Ayalon and former chief of staff Moshe Ya'alon, may well demonstrate that the story of the Lamed Heh is a kind of "national adhesive."

"It's hard to find signs any more of the kind of spirit the fighters of that time had," Shlomo Doron, 81, whose brother, Holocaust survivor Alexander Lustig, was in the platoon. Doron says he remembers the funeral of the Lamed Heh, which took place in the Etzion Bloc, being secured by the British, who still ruled the country, and the sight of the bodies, which had been mutilated. A year later, the bodies were reinterred on Mount Herzl. "My comfort," Doron said, is the existence of the State of Israel, for which the Lamed Heh gave their lives, and in my son, who bears my brother's name."