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Relatives of fallen soldiers who came to visit their loved ones at one of Jerusalem's cemeteries on Memorial Day discovered some of the graves had been desecrated by vandals.
The incident occurred at Jerusalem’s Har HaMenuchot Cemetery, adjacent to the neighborhood of Givat Shaul.
A family who went up visit the graves of the relatives who perished during the War of Independence, discovered that vandals had torn up small Israeli flags that usually decorate the graves and had thrown the pieces on the ground.
"When I arrived in the morning, I saw that all the flags had been snatched from all the graves," said Shmulik Lieberman, who visite the grave of his grandparents who were killed in the War of Independence.
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Graves desecrated at Har HaMenuchot Cemetery
“It's a bad feeling to come and see the Israeli flags torn up on the ground. We notified the police. We have no assessment of who did it, but we can clearly see that it was done on purpose. That someone went from one grave to another and broke the flags.”
For Lieberman, seeing someone desecrating the graves of some of Israel’s most lauded heroes is a personal insult.
"My family immigrated to Israel before the Holocaust and settled in Jerusalem. In the early days of the War of Independence, my grandmother was killed by a Jordanian shell that hit the house, and he became a widower with nine children,” Lieberman said.
“A month after his wife's death, my grandpa went to close his workshop, and a Jordanian sniper hit him. He left behind nine orphans, the eldest of whom was only 18 years old," Liberman said.
"It hurts me to see graves desecrated, especially the graves of people who were killed in the battle for our country.
“At the Givat Shaul Cemetery there are a lot of graves of those who fell during the War of Independence, which were relocated here from the Palestinian neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem. Some of those graves belong to people who have no one to visit them. So sad”