Cemetery for the Fallen of 1948

Half a year after the battle at Yad Mordechai, after the kibbutz was liberated by fighters of the Givati Brigade in November 1948, the members returned to their homes and began rebuilding the kibbutz. One of the first measures taken was to remove the bodies of the fallen from the temporary mass grave and to give them an orderly military burial at the highest point at the center of the kibbutz, on the same hill that the From Holocaust to Revival Museum was also later built.

The 23 kibbutz members and Palmach fighters who were killed in the battles at Yad Mordechai are buried at the top of the hill in a single row. In a second row are three stones in memory of three missing defenders who were captured and apparently killed on their way to Gvar`am on the night of the retreat.

In 2018, the burial place of Libka Shefer, who until then had been considered missing in action, was discovered in a mass grave at Kibbutz Nitzanim. In light of the discovery of her burial place, the text on the stone was changed. In October 2022, the remains of Yitzhak Rubinstein and Binyamin Eisenberg were discovered in a mass grave at Kibbutz Nitzanim, concluding the final identification of the missing three.

Also located at the site is the grave of Or Shachar, a member of Kibbutz Yad Mordechai who was killed in the Second Lebanon War. Shachar is the only one of the kibbutz’s fallen to be buried in this cemetery, due to the special request of his father, who also lost his father Meir Finkelstein in the 1948 battles at the kibbutz.

An annual memorial ceremony is held at the cemetery on Israel’s Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers of the Wars of Israel. The site is accessible to persons with disabilities and strollers.