This is where I always stand at the siren at noon. Mount Herzl is packed with thousands of people. Personally, I always draw strength from seeing how many people Yoni touched, and how much on this day we're all together, bereaved families, soldiers, high schoolers; all the people of Israel.
This year we aren't physically together, I'm not visiting the grave and seeing how the youth movements read his letters before I ascend to the graves from Operation Protective Edge and continue to Netzer Acharon*. It's difficult and strange, but it's a one-time occurrence.
My Yoni has been resting for 44 years but his burial place is always alive. Sadly, there are always more fallen; not far from here are buried Dima Levitas and Dor Deri and Max Steinberg from Protective Edge. I know because I was at the funerals, because there were many.
We live a reality of bereavement regularly and on Memorial Day everyone visits all the graves together, as if they were all really killed that day. Only a few minutes ago on the news they talked about a suspected attack.
In Australia, I saw everywhere a memorial to Australian World War I fallen in historical battles like Gallipoli or Beer Sheva. I was there on their Memorial Day, which is mainly dedicated to that war.
Two historians argued for a few minutes about the battles on television and nothing else. Everything's normal. A day when everyone stops? A siren? Forget it.
Our Memorial Day isn't about Gallipoli, we don't gaze at our fallen from afar. There's no day in the world like Memorial Day. We live our fallen, all of us together. We live us.
{*Netzer Acharon - The Final Witnesses are Holocaust survivors who were the last remnant of their nuclear family (parents, brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters) who experienced the horrors of the Holocaust in ghettos and/or concentration and extermination camps and/or on the run and hiding in Nazi occupied territories and/or fighting alongside the underground or partisans in Nazi occupied areas who immigrated to Israel, during or after the war, wore the uniform of the Israel Defense Forces, and fell in battle.}
Translated by Mordechai Sones