By Tara Kavaler, The Media Line—
At 8 p.m., to mark the start of Israel’s Remembrance Day for Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terrorism, a siren sounds for one full minute and the country stops. People get out of their cars, even on highways, and stand in silence; people stop work and silently reflect. After 60 seconds, life resumes.
The next day, bereaved families visit the graves of loved ones at military cemeteries across Israel.
For some, the siren never stops.
“Every time we have a simcha …, we remember that Yishai is not with us. All day every day, I see him: I have a picture near my bed, in my wallet, in my office,” Menachem Shechter, who lost his then-21-year-old brother in the South Lebanon conflict in 1996, told The Media Line. “My little boy is called Yishai, and every day when I call my son Yishai, I remember my brother.”
The Security Zone in Lebanon Campaign, as the 1985-2000 conflict is known in Israel, pitted the South Lebanese Army militia and the Israeli military against Hizbullah.
For Shechter, who served in the South Lebanon Security Zone for five years beginning in 1990, and again as an officer in 1997 and 1998, Remembrance Day, which this year begins on the evening of April 13, helps him to remember the nearly 100 people he has lost, either soldiers in his unit, friends, or friends of his brother.
“I do not remember them in the same way I remember my brother every day,” he said. Continue Reading….