Latest / In the Valley of Giants / The Operation Restoring Forgotten Jewish Heroes | Shalom Lamm | ITVOG #37

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The Operation Restoring Forgotten Jewish Heroes | Shalom Lamm | ITVOG #37 · In the Valley of Giants

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  We love when you're here for people to care about these
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  soldiers after 80 years, that you do so much work on their
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  behalf, said We do this every day.
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  We speak to our soldiers all the time, right?
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  But that you come here with 100 people at your own cost and you
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  do this. We have such admiration for this
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  in its war with Hamas in Gaza achieved the unprecedented 1 to
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  1.5 sun presented unprecedented in world history in urban
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  warfare. These numbers are coming right
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  from John Spencer Fessor at at West Point, who's an expert in
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  the science, if you will, of urban warfare.
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  And 1 to 1.5 is unheard of in all of history.
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  And yet we are condemned as committing A genocide.
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  Sir, these are insane allegations.
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  Hello everyone. Today we're joined by Shalom
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  Lamb, the leader of Operation Benjamin.
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  Operation Benjamin is an operation that leads finding
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  Jewish soldiers from World War One, World War 2 and beyond, and
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  making sure that they get the proper Jewish burial.
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  You see, in history it wasn't so easy to tell who was a Jewish
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  fighter and who wasn't, so lots of them have crosses on top of
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  their graves. He spent tremendous amount of
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  resources finding who's who and erecting the proper Jewish star
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  where it belongs. We also talked intentionally
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  about the Israeli housing crisis.
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  Both of these things are incredibly important and the
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  work that he's doing is absolutely valuable.
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  So I hope you all are entertained by this wonderful
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  episode and encourage every single viewer to get involved
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  with the wonderful operation that he is going.
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  Sean Lamb, thank you so much for being here with us today.
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  It's very good to be here. Beautiful.
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  Yeah, so I got your contact from, as I told you before, a
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  bunch of people bark Page, Estrin, Bala, some really great
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  people. They'll say I got to talk to
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  Sean Lamb. These are wonderful people.
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  Yeah. Yeah.
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  So, well, wonderful people, no wonderful people, Sean.
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  So aside from Operation Benjamin, which is incredibly
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  important, and I, I want to use the word wild because that's how
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  it strikes me. I think it is just a, a, a
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  powerful, powerful thing that you're doing real hostile Ms.
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  for our, our dead troops. But I want to start first
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  actually with ethical warfare. I know that you have a a
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  master's degree in American military history, as you told me
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  that there was a focus on the Civil War, and I've seen that
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  you've given lectures on ethical warfare, and ethical warfare I
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  think is the most misunderstood thing in the modern age.
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  It's it's used as a weapon right now against Israel.
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  Yes, it is. Yes, and.
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  It's it's abused as the whole concept of international law and
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  how it's applied. So there are two standards in
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  international law. There's for Jews and there's for
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  everyone else. And I don't mean to be cynical,
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  but it's just the world we live in.
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  And So what you hear and see on TV has nothing to do with the
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  actual the laws of war. Can you give an example of that
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  discrepancy? Proportionality is a good
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  example. The sense that people have, the
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  sense that if three IDF soldiers were killed, God forbid that
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  therefore if you kill 4 Hamas terrorists, that somehow they're
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  not proportional responses. This is insanity.
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  The whole idea of collateral damage, of listen, civilians are
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  killed. The war happens all the time.
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  It's happened throughout all of history, and it's a dreadful,
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  terrible consequence of war. But war is as old as life
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  itself, and targeting civilians qua targeting civilians is
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  certainly a huge problem and huge ethical problem.
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  But the fact is that if you have a high value target and people
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  are in the way, a decision has to be made.
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  And the whole idea that Israel can do one thing but the rest of
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  the world can do other things is is an example of the modern age.
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  Let me give you a good example. America in Afghanistan fought
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  very hard to avoid collateral dams to avoid civilian
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  casualties and had a a ratio essentially of 1 to 91 militant
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  to 9 civilians killed. And that sounds like a lot, but
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  when you go to all other wars, the the numbers nothing like
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  that and that's was was pretty good.
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  Israel in its war with Hamas in Gaza, achieved the unprecedented
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  1 to 1.5 son presented it unprecedented in world history
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  and urban warfare. These numbers are coming right
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  from John Spencer, professor at at West Point, who's an expert
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  in the science, if you will, of urban warfare.
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  And 1 to 1.5 is unheard of in all of history, and yet we are
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  condemned as committing A genocide.
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  This is absurd. These are insane allegations
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  preserved only for Jews. And why do you think that's so?
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  Ha ha ha that comes to the nature of anti-Semitism.
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  We could have 25 podcasts on this and never get to the to the
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  proper solution. I don't know the answer, but I
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  do know that as a tiny tiny tiny people we are the focus of such
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  intense scrutiny. On the one hand it's outrageous
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  that it is outrageous. On the other hand, there is a
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  sense that we are a people set apart, that we are people that
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  people care about, often in malevolent way, malevolent ways,
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  but that people are looking for us to set the standard.
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  And anytime we don't meet this some absurd standard, non
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  existent standard, it gives cause for hatred.
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  So Jews are whatever is bugging you at the time you're, you
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  know, in, in Russia, we were capitalists in America, we were
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  socialists. Wherever, wherever people feel
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  that something is bothering them, there's something that
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  they feel inadequate about. It must be the fault of someone
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  else. And the Jews are beautiful
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  target because they think they're better than everyone
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  else. They're the chosen people.
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  And they don't realize that choseness is not a privilege.
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  It's a burden. It's a privilege.
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  A blessing and a curse. A blessing and a curse,
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  Absolutely. I would agree with that.
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  And it is. It's like a police car going
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  through a traffic light with lights and sirens.
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  He's about to put his life in danger to go solve and help
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  someone. But yes, he gets to go through
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  the the red light, lights and sirens.
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  But there's a mission there and we have a mission.
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  We have burdens. A lot of people would find those
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  onerous. When you're in the system, you
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  see that it's the greatest privilege of life.
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  But wow, it's hard. Why?
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  And which is why when someone converts into Yadus, into the
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  Jewish religion, we can't hold the candle to them.
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  Because to to take those burdens willingly upon yourself when God
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  is not looking for more Jews and you willingly join the Jewish
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  people. None of us can hold the candle
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  to those people. I know the Talmud tells us that,
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  right? 100%.
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  Well, well, let's talk a little bit about about that ratio you
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  gave of 1 to 1 1/2, was it? Yeah.
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  So is that even ethical? I could make the claim that we
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  don't. We no longer live in the War of
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  Afghanistan and going farther back, World War 2.
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  I mean, those casualties were astronomical.
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  Astronomical. Maybe if someone is hiding
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  behind a bunch of kids in Gaza, what gives us the right to kill
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  a bunch of innocent kids that maybe have a right future?
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  Oh, we actually don't have that right.
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  So in fact, regularly the IDF when targeting, when targeting a
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  high value combatant, regularly a idea of fraternity will call
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  off the strike. They've got to make an instant
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  decision about what is proportional proportionality and
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  that that strike will be called off in real time, like on a
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  daily basis. Nobody else has that.
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  No, but and yet we have 10s of thousands of innocent people
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  that are dead. Yeah, and.
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  Ostensibly. That's war.
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  And imagine, imagine the the logic of of what you're
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  proposing. And I don't believe you believe
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  this for one second, but imagine you're smart man.
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  Imagine the logic of what you're proposing.
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  So that would say to any terrorist or any really malign
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  evil doer, all you need to do is behind hide behind a bunch of
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  children. And if the same standard were
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  were put on the rest of the world as this for Israel, you
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  could accomplish anything you want.
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  Just put a bunch of kids in front of you, perhaps.
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  But maybe, maybe that's the price of goodness.
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  It's not the price because that's the because when you,
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  when you sometimes when you're so good, you actually end up
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  being evil, right? So you know the, the, the, when
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  you get to an ideal society or an idealistic society, you
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  actually create a bad society. And this is actually a prime
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  example. If every life is infinitely
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  sacred so that war can't be fought, then you give tools to
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  evil people to know how to defeat the West or how to defeat
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  decent human beings. And it.
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  But that's what I can make the argument.
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  But then I'll die decent at least.
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  No, you're not decent because if you allow evil to flourish, if
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  you're if you're setting up a system that allows evil to
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  flourish and says I can't fight evil, that's not ideal, is it?
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  No, but but you're telling me. But you're telling me to bite
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  the evil bullet just a little bit to destroy evil.
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  I'm going to kill one kid to get to get to 1 terrorist.
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  The terrorist says very clearly that you can't murder, but it
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  also says you can fight wars. It's always very, very clear in
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  this, very realistic. But the turn of it says to kill
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  innocents. Nope.
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  Very that that's that's actually forbidden on a biblical level.
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  100% but you it, but wars are full where you go out and you
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  fight wars and people are killed and booty is taken and
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  populations are moved and populations are taken and
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  incorporated into the Jewish people.
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  Actually, this whole interesting Kumaris about that, right?
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  So we don't fight wars that way anymore.
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  But it's very, very clear that the terrorist says you can't
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  murder, you can't come out and kill a fellow citizen.
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  It's a logical consequence of creating a good society.
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  On the other hand, there are laws of war because wars are
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  fought because you need to stop people.
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  They're no hemis mitzvah. It's a mitzvah to go to war.
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  But what? But why can't I say that?
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  Because of technology, that and we know who who to a large
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  extent now that we should be the paragon.
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  We should never kill an innocent person.
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  If a terrorist wants to hide behind a bunch of children,
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  that's his right. But I'm not going to stoop to
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  his level and kill innocence just to get my objective.
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  Why can't I make that argument? Because there's no logic to it,
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  because it doesn't work in the real world.
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  It's very, it's lovely, the theoretical basis we're sitting
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  here in an air conditioned based measures having this lovely
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  conversation. But in the real world, this
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  doesn't work because the number of innocent people that will be
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  killed by those malevolent malevolent people using your
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  good old Western idealism goodness to your advantage will
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  result in the deaths of many, many, many more innocent people.
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  So you're making a utilitarian argument.
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  That's 100% of it and utilitarian argument that live
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  in the real world, right, OK. Yeah.
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  So, yeah, I mean, you already knew.
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  I absolutely agree with you. I think that I under, I can
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  understand the pierced approach that I will go down with the
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  ship, I will never spill blood, but I don't think that that's
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  the world that God created. I think the Lord created a
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  Hashem created a world that we're supposed to operate.
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  And I'll digress for a second. People forget this, like the
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  Torah was given to, to, to the Bible was given to the children
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  of Israel in the desert, right? It doesn't talk about
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  smartphones in the Torah. And that doesn't mean that God
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  is underway of smartphones, right?
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  It just means that the Torah is speaking to humanity at that
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  time. Now, I'm not saying that
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  therefore it changes, but I'm saying that it's supposed to
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  look at the world. So you don't have a world,
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  right? If you follow the rules that I
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  was implying, that you would fall before, right, You'd have a
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  world run by, you know, tyrannical people.
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  Horrible place to live. Yeah, horrible.
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  I don't want to visit Iran. Nope.
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  No, yeah, I'd like to visit around when it's free.
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  I'd like that too. I'd like to visit around when
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  it's free, when the people rise up and throw down this evil
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  empire. I think that would be
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  spectacular. And I think there is a real
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  possibility that there is 80 million allies out there one
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  day. And I'm I'm utopian enough to
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  believe that they are actually out there and the goodwill
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  ultimately triumph. Well, I certainly hope you're
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  right. Let's talk about the obsession
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  the the obsession with with, I want to say Israel, but I'm
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  going to say Jews because that's really more accurate.
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  But with the Jews on the global stage, you believe is a is an
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  attacking. I want, I don't want to say
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  attacking an arrogance. Is it jealousy?
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  Is it, is it, oh, Jews that claim that they're the chosen
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  people as opposed to Christians, which Christians say we're not
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  the chosen people. We have, we've chosen A chosen
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  way. But is it?
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  Is it? Is it, is it?
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  What do I want to say? Is it tribal?
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  Is that it? Is that?
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  Is that really? I don't want to make any
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  pretense that I'm an expert in Christianity or an expert in in
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  anti-Semitism. Those are two giant fields.
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  I don't want to claim any expertise in them.
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  I know as a Jew who lives in the real world, who who spends most
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  of his time dealing with non Jews and frankly spectacular,
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  wonderful, great non Jews is there's lots of us and there are
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  lots of them. And they are wonderful,
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  magnificent people. And I, I take as one of my
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  charges to give them loud speakers, to let them speak very
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  loudly and very bravely, is that they have a lot of questions.
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  But their questions when they ask about Judaism are so well
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  meaning, so curious, so well thought out.
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  It's such a pleasure to deal with them.
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  And then you go to TikTok or you go to X and you listen to these
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  lunatics mouthing off about things that they know that they
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  they have no idea what they're talking about.
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  It's very disconcerting. So I try to give platforms to
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  people who we deal with, who are simply God's, God's gift to you
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  man. I think that is the most
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  important thing right now, by the way, because I think, you
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  know, I've spoken about this a few times, The physical war
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  against the Axis of Evil has been majorly successful.
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  But the war on the social front, we have lost to every single
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  angle. I'm not even sure, and I'm not
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  even sure it's fair to say lost because I'm not even sure that
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  we fought. But you know, there are.
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  I have never used TikTok, so I can't really speak.
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  And I only know about Instagram like, you know.
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  Yeah, but you know what? What?
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  I feel like there's so much disinformation.
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  There's plenty, there's plenty hate.
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  There's not enough loud speakers that you're talking about.
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  Right, I'm not nearly as pious as you.
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  Like I've seen TikTok and I spend every waking moment that I
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  am that I have actually on X because that is where the battle
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  is made. And if the battle is there,
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  that's where it needs to be met. There needs to be warriors.
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  There really needs. To be warriors.
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  And I wish that Israel was doing more on that front.
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  They aren't. I wish the United States was
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  doing more on that front and they aren't.
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  And I don't think Britain, Britain, I don't think Europe
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  can because I think they've already lost the war.
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  I think Europe's really in such deep, desperate trouble and it's
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  fascinating that they they don't see it really.
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  Well, that's, I think part of it.
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  It's a mind virus. And once you're sick, when it's
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  a mind virus, I'm not sure you know that you're sick.
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  But is it really that hopeless? I mean, why can't someone make
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  a, instead of Operation Benjamin, Operation X, you know,
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  and, and, and fight that war. We really should be doing that.
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  Again, I'm I'm not the expert and I'm just a guy with an
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  opinion who spends a lot, a lot, a lot of time in Europe, and
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  Europe is a scary place. Are you afraid to walk around in
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  Europe with a keep on? Yes, yes, I never was.
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  The first time I did not wear a yarmulke in Europe was about a
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  year ago, year and a half ago. That was the first time.
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  And I, you know, I'm in Europe all the time.
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  And the first time I stopped was about a year and a half ago.
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  And it's very frightening. Yeah.
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  Absolutely. Yeah.
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  I was in Athens a couple weeks ago and at a, you know, like a
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  baseball cap on which is of course the most classic.
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  Says get just put a new Yankees and screams I'm Jewish so.
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  So I'm a rabbi by, you know, profession.
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  So. So what do you do?
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  So I fixed my car recently. So I said, well, I'm selling to
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  be a mechanic. I'll tell you tell you a great
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  story. I was about a year ago and I am
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  in the Normandy region of France with a German Brigadier General
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  and we're walking on a World War 2 German cemetery.
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  That's a crazy. Experience, just just the whole
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  concept is crazy. And I'm wearing my Yamaka.
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  And I turned to him and I said general back, and you're not
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  going to believe this, but in all of France, I feel more
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  comfortable wearing my Yamaka here.
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  Wow, wow, wow. Than anywhere.
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  Else that's crazy. And it was true because I'm here
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  with an ally and. A German ally.
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  A German ally, an amazing person, a person who is a
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  brother to me and who understands his history
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  spectacularly, wears it with dignity and with honor and with
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  pathos and with understanding. I mean, he's an amazing person.
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  And he and his whole staff, I mean, the people around him,
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  they're just incredible. And his boss, who I, I've got to
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  know recently quite well, he was a former chief of staff in the
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  German armed forces. He's an amazing, amazing,
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  amazing human being, an amazing human being.
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  We should all be so fortunate to know people like that.
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  I mean. There I am.
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  OK, let's talk about Operation Benjamin.
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  My favorite subject. So I, I don't know who came up
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  with this idea. Maybe, maybe it's you, but for
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  for our viewers, and you're going to say it much better than
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  me, but I'm going to embarrass myself on camera if you don't
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  mind. But what Operation Benjamin aims
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  to do is it goes to military graves and finds Jews that were
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  buried with crosses and instead replaces them.
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  In our faith, cross can be considered Pagan.
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  Definitely inappropriate. We'd rather have the Jewish
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  star. We love our our brethrens that
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  are Christian, but there are Christians in their juice.
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  And so you go around finding those people, and even though
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  there's no one to say thank you, you do it anyway.
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  Especially because there's no one to say thank you.
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  I love that line. How?
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  How long have you been doing this?
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  So the question arose in 2014. That's when the question arose.
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  Why is that? And it happened very
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  interestingly. It had nothing to do with me, my
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  Co founder, one of my Co founders is Robbie Jacob J
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  Schachter. Sure, yeah, very dear friend
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  that's had breakfast with him, with me and his wife this
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  morning. Oh, nice.
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  And my wife and he was leading a tour having nothing to do with
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  World War 2, leading a tour in the Normandy region about
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  medieval French Jewish history. And it was around June 6th,
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  2014, 75th anniversary of the Normandy landing.
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  And someone said, hey, we're in Normandy, let's go visit the
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  Normandy American Cemetery. And he had never been there
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  before. His father was a very famous
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  World War 2 chaplain and was the Liberator of Buchenwald with the
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  US I. Do not know that, really.
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  Yeah. Absolutely.
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  And he says great. And they go visit the Normandy
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  American Cemetery. I don't know if you've ever been
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  there, but it's it, it oozes dignity and it's it's
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  unbelievable. I wasn't there.
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  I see him three weeks later at a friend's daughter's vart and
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  mutual friend. We both know him very well.
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  She now has four kids. So it's been a long time ago.
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  And he says, Shalom, I just came back from Normandy.
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  It was hallowed. I remember these words.
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  It was hallowed. It was holy, it was magnificent.
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  I just thought there would have been more Stars of David.
• 19:17
  Simple. That was the whole conversation.
• 19:19
  Really. That was the entire.
• 19:21
  Conversation and for some reason I as you know training as a
• 19:24
  military historian, I just went something here seems strange to
• 19:29
  me and. Was it a thought or a feeling?
• 19:32
  I, I don't know, I don't remember.
• 19:35
  It's 2014, so I could claim I know, but I really don't
• 19:38
  remember. But I knew that it bothered me
• 19:40
  and I, you know, just being a military nerd, I knew that 2.71%
• 19:44
  of US casualties were Jews. So how many soldiers are buried?
• 19:48
  Normally it turns out to be 9380 or thereabouts.
• 19:51
  So I took out my calculator because historians don't do
• 19:53
  math. I have no idea what 2.71% of
• 19:56
  9380 is, but it turns out that it's about 350.
• 20:01
  Well, if you sit there and literally count as I did, how
• 20:03
  many Stars of David there were normally there, which I did that
• 20:06
  night, that side on the computer, there were 149.
• 20:10
  So where do all the Jews go? I'm sorry, not 380.
• 20:13
  See, I'm terrible at math 200 and 230 to 40.
• 20:15
  So I I I I simply. I assume he said, where will the
• 20:20
  juice go? So we started this discussion.
• 20:22
  In this whole special discussion, Schechter and I just
• 20:24
  started a discussion. Where could they have been?
• 20:26
  What happened? Why would it have happened with
• 20:28
  all sorts of theories, all wrong, by the way, but it was an
• 20:31
  interesting discussion between 2:00.
• 20:32
  I've known him for many, many years with dear friends.
• 20:35
  He's, he's a magnificent person, very sensitive, beautiful
• 20:38
  person. Had a discussion.
• 20:41
  So I'd love to tell you, we planned Operation Benjamin.
• 20:43
  We had forethought, we thought about it.
• 20:45
  We identified a problem, we identified.
• 20:47
  So none of that is true. It all happened by accident.
• 20:50
  So in the middle of our discussing what happened, we
• 20:52
  came across an article by a rabbi in Memphis, TN.
• 20:55
  He was then in Harrisburg, Rabbi Akiva Mills.
• 20:58
  Rabbi Mills wrote a in an article, a very beautiful
• 21:02
  article about his father's dog tags in World War 2 which had an
• 21:05
  H on it for Hebrew. But so many others put AP for
• 21:08
  Protestant, put AC for Catholic. Why?
• 21:11
  In case they were captured. They didn't want to be
• 21:13
  identified as Jews. Perfectly logical self
• 21:16
  preservation is a good thing. And that's what they did.
• 21:18
  And turns out it was very intelligent.
• 21:20
  Because many Jews were captured, nothing happened to them.
• 21:23
  For instance, if they were aviators.
• 21:25
  In general aviators repeated better than your your average
• 21:28
  POW. But others infantrymen were sent
• 21:31
  to the Burger concentration camp, a sub camp of Buchenbaugh,
• 21:35
  and they were separated from the American comrades.
• 21:37
  This is a nightmare and they were afraid of that nightmare.
• 21:40
  So they perfectly logical sentence not to put an H in your
• 21:43
  dog tag or if you had an H before battle.
• 21:45
  A very nice Sergeant Mcgillicuddy comes over and says
• 21:48
  hey Goldberg, get rid of the H and you would take your cobar
• 21:51
  knife and smack it until you defaced your dog tag.
• 21:54
  You get killed in war and then what happens is the graves
• 21:57
  registration comes out right after battle.
• 21:59
  Your friends have just buried you in a 2 foot grave and they
• 22:03
  and put a cross on a put a rifle on it with a helmet and they see
• 22:06
  you have a see your dog tag. They make it across right and
• 22:09
  then the average American soldier on the European theatre
• 22:12
  is buried four or five times until they're finding rust
• 22:14
  place. You imagine this get compounded
• 22:16
  over and over again in the files in an age before computers so.
• 22:19
  It's just. Clerks checking out boxes.
• 22:21
  If you're in the Pacific theatre, you're buried 7 or 8
• 22:23
  times until you got to a National Cemetery.
• 22:26
  So you can imagine the mistakes just getting compounded and
• 22:30
  compounded and the paperwork that goes back to the United
• 22:32
  States Family said, do you want them buried under a cross or an
• 22:35
  SOD? Who knows what an SOD is SOD
• 22:38
  Star of David. So the fault and, and you know,
• 22:42
  many of these were immigrants who, who didn't know what they
• 22:44
  were signing. And people found it so hard to
• 22:48
  understand today, many of these families never visited their
• 22:51
  kids who were buried overseas. They never saw that they were
• 22:54
  right under crosses. They had no idea.
• 22:56
  And, and there were good reasons for that.
• 22:59
  I mean, after the war, France is utterly decimated, right?
• 23:02
  And that's where a lot of these cemeteries are.
• 23:03
  Italy's decimated, Belgium was decimated.
• 23:06
  And you couldn't just get an airplane called Expedia and
• 23:08
  you'll get an airplane and be there in three hours.
• 23:10
  And you had to take a ship and it was expensive.
• 23:12
  And these were immigrants and there were five other kids at
• 23:15
  home. And they never, they never saw
• 23:17
  these crosses. And so here we are all these
• 23:20
  years later, so many files have been declassified that nobody
• 23:25
  had access to before. 20 years ago, we couldn't have done this
• 23:28
  one. So now we can take a look and
• 23:30
  see what's going on. So we had an experiment and we
• 23:34
  said, OK, let's take a Jewish sounding name.
• 23:36
  This is so unprofessional. But that we didn't know anything
• 23:38
  that we said, let's take a guy who sounds Jewish and is buried
• 23:41
  under a cross. Benjamin Garadezki sounds Jewish
• 23:44
  to me. And we took him.
• 23:47
  Travis Schachter is a huge time in Hockham.
• 23:49
  I'm a pretty smart guy. Neither of us knew anything
• 23:52
  about genealogy. I mean, we're talking about
• 23:53
  real, real amateur city. But I have him a Hutton.
• 23:57
  Steve Lamar in Washington, DC is a very good amateur genealogist.
• 24:00
  Very, very good. So we called Steve, we recruited
• 24:02
  him into the the founding 3. So we're the trio, the Triumph,
• 24:06
  the Triumph, The Three Musketeers.
• 24:08
  And Steve did the genealogy, a friend of his actually.
• 24:11
  And Steve did the genealogy. And turns out that is a young
• 24:15
  guy, fully Jewish, who's born, is jetomer in Ukraine, comes
• 24:19
  over and settles in the Bronx when he's six years old with his
• 24:22
  family, has a sister, has parents.
• 24:25
  They all pass away and they're buried in Elmont, NY, which is
• 24:28
  like 10 minutes from my house. The the Heshkova practice that,
• 24:32
  you know, the hand of God is wild in all this.
• 24:34
  We like to call it divine serendipity.
• 24:35
  Happens all the time in our business.
• 24:38
  And so my wife and I go on a hot date to the cemetery and we're
• 24:42
  looking around. We finally find him.
• 24:44
  It's, I mean, it's as Jewish as you could be.
• 24:46
  So what's he doing under a cross?
• 24:48
  So we reached out and we said, wow, we think there's a mistake.
• 24:52
  In descendants. So it's a very interesting
• 24:54
  question. That's a great part of the
• 24:56
  story. So we, we, we, we call, we, we
• 25:00
  said, who even deals with this? Who knows?
• 25:02
  The answer is it's a federal agency called the American
• 25:04
  Battle Monuments Commission, the ABMC.
• 25:06
  We have no idea who they are. They certainly have no idea who
• 25:08
  we are. We don't even know who we are,
• 25:10
  Right. And we write them a letter and
• 25:13
  we say, hey, dear guys, we think we found a mistake.
• 25:16
  This is mind boggling. And you know, it wasn't the
• 25:21
  strongest response, but when we finally got them on the phone,
• 25:25
  they were very kind and said, look, you have no standing to do
• 25:29
  anything. You're not related to this
• 25:31
  family. You need to do 2 things.
• 25:33
  You need to prove with contemporaneous evidence that
• 25:37
  this fellow was Jewish and that we were fully prepared to do.
• 25:40
  We had done that research. But you can't do that.
• 25:44
  The guy who has to ask is the closest living relative.
• 25:47
  Go find descendants. These people have been dead for
• 25:50
  so long. So we said, OK, we'll go find
• 25:52
  descendants. And we search.
• 25:54
  We search, we come up empty. Come up absolutely empty because
• 25:57
  the only he had a sister. So the sister marries somebody.
• 26:01
  She changes her name, right? Records are records are.
• 26:05
  So we're really despondent. We know we have a Jewish kid.
• 26:07
  We know he's buried under a question.
• 26:09
  Nothing we can do about it. So to mixed metaphors, terrible
• 26:12
  mixed metaphor, we threw a Hail Mary pass, right?
• 26:14
  And we said, wow, we can't find red options.
• 26:18
  So I wish I could put up 200 bucks.
• 26:20
  I put up 200 bucks. So we ran an ad in the Jewish
• 26:22
  week for real. And it says we're historians
• 26:26
  looking for the following family in the Garedetsky family said
• 26:28
  when they came to America, we didn't say anything about
• 26:31
  Normandy. We didn't want to raise, you
• 26:32
  know, treasure hunters. And I said, we're looking for
• 26:34
  this family. And about 3 weeks later, a woman
• 26:38
  calls us up. She says I'm a legal secretary.
• 26:40
  I did work for family that name years ago.
• 26:44
  I can tell you a few things. He's a physician.
• 26:47
  They live in Saint Louis and they're members of conservative
• 26:49
  congregation, so I know so who doubts for dollars, I called
• 26:53
  every conservatives for what? He finally found them.
• 26:55
  Wow. And that's how this all started.
• 26:57
  No way. Yeah, that's how it started.
• 26:59
  But but but if the name was changed, I mean the.
• 27:02
  Name was changed. She knew that she did some legal
• 27:05
  work, estate work, so she knew there was a Garadezki somewhere
• 27:08
  in the family. His name was Lipman and it's no
• 27:11
  connection. But it turns out that he had
• 27:12
  visited the grave in 1986 on a trip to Normandy, no and was
• 27:16
  shocked to see who was buried under a cross.
• 27:18
  And he was upset. Very upset, she wrote a letter
• 27:21
  to the American Valley Minds, which was never answered.
• 27:24
  Right now, now that I said something, you'll think
• 27:26
  government agencies are horrible people.
• 27:29
  I have to tell you, we have developed an unbelievable
• 27:33
  relationship with the American Battle Monuments Commission.
• 27:35
  They run all of America's 26 foreign cemeteries all over the
• 27:38
  world. They are.
• 27:41
  You know, it's very hard to say a nice thing about a federal
• 27:43
  agency. These are the finest, excellent
• 27:47
  people. They have a calling.
• 27:48
  They take it so seriously. They know they're the guardians
• 27:51
  of memory. They're amazing people and and
• 27:54
  they're beautiful people and we've developed the crazy
• 27:57
  relationship with them. Just crazy.
• 27:58
  That's a wild story. It's.
• 28:00
  A wild story. Miss Lippmann, when you spoke to
• 28:02
  him, was he pleased to receive your call?
• 28:04
  He was, he was, he was couldn't have been nicer.
• 28:07
  And he said, I don't think he can get anywhere, but he, he
• 28:12
  could not have been more appreciative and nicer.
• 28:15
  And he was the first, that was the first one we changed in
• 28:17
  2018. It took now just to show you the
• 28:20
  relationship, it took us two years from the time we submitted
• 28:23
  the paperwork until we got a decision to change the
• 28:26
  headstone. That's a that's a long time.
• 28:28
  Our most recent one was 16 days. So our relationship has improved
• 28:33
  very dramatically. We have earned a trust
• 28:36
  relationship. We're very, very, very
• 28:38
  meticulous with our research. We have 5 genealogists and
• 28:41
  historians on staff and they are super experts.
• 28:46
  That's a wild story, Sean. It's crazy.
• 28:49
  OK, wow. Now it's 2018.
• 28:54
  The first stone has been changed.
• 28:56
  Yep. And now OK, I'm making an
• 28:58
  operation. So now we called it the Normandy
• 29:01
  Heritage, something Normandy Heritage Group or something like
• 29:04
  that, because we figured, oh wow, we found mistakes in
• 29:06
  Normandy. So we'll fix in Normandy.
• 29:07
  So we'll fix Normandy. Who knew there were mistakes
• 29:10
  outside of Normandy? Then we started, then we got
• 29:13
  out. That was fascinating.
• 29:14
  We got a call from someone who knew Akiva Mail.
• 29:19
  So told them about what we're doing with Benjamin Garedetsky
• 29:22
  and she said, you know what? I have a soldier who lived with
• 29:26
  with us in Liberty, NY before World War 2 when we had a tiny
• 29:30
  farm in Liberty, NY. He joined, he was, he kept the
• 29:32
  Sabbath and he was a great worker.
• 29:36
  It was very hard to be Jewish then and certainly in that area.
• 29:39
  He joined the army in World War 2, was killed in the war and is
• 29:42
  buried under a cross and his name, just imagine the following
• 29:46
  name burned and chiselled in and across Benzione Bernstein,
• 29:50
  right? It's like saying Jewish, Jewish,
• 29:52
  Jewish, Jewish cross and it's it tears your heart out.
• 29:56
  He was, he was killed in Italy and we had a ton of
• 30:00
  misinformation and we contacted the family and the family gave
• 30:05
  us all sorts of reasons why this big family tragedy was never
• 30:08
  going to happen, that this was changed and it was burdened
• 30:11
  across a terrible thing. That was the end of that story
• 30:15
  is 9 years later we were able to disprove the family lore and we
• 30:20
  changed his headstone with the entire family there in the
• 30:24
  Sicily Rome American cemetery in in Italy.
• 30:28
  And it was the most moving thing You see the whole family
• 30:31
  gathering around essentially apologizing to him for not
• 30:35
  having believed that he had remained Jewish.
• 30:38
  Well, this, it's happened a number of times where a guy gets
• 30:41
  better across the family says while the American government
• 30:43
  can't make a mistake. So he must have converted a
• 30:47
  battlefield conversion. We had a soldier in in Manila in
• 30:50
  the Philippines. He changed his headstone and the
• 30:54
  family representative there was a Reformed Rabbi John Franken,
• 30:59
  wonderful guy who's since met Aliyah.
• 31:01
  And he sat there, He said the most beautiful thing.
• 31:04
  He said this is not only a Fessachel Ms., but the Ms. is
• 31:09
  restoring your good name because we made-up a story to protect
• 31:13
  ourselves about how you converted under duress.
• 31:16
  He said none of that was true. We proved, I mean easily proved
• 31:20
  through the records that none of them had available that it was a
• 31:23
  clerical error. It was literally a clerical
• 31:25
  error that just got manufactured over and over and over again.
• 31:29
  And when we were able to correct it, he literally sat there and
• 31:31
  apologized to him. It was so moving, and that's
• 31:34
  what caused me to revisit the Bernstein story.
• 31:36
  And then we found out that that wasn't true, and we revisited
• 31:39
  that and nine years later they were all there.
• 31:41
  And at the time are you working? Is this like does this balloon
• 31:46
  to like your life? I mean, it seems like it seems
• 31:48
  like it has. So I'll tell you a funny story
• 31:50
  which I probably shouldn't tell. So we, I love those stories, the
• 31:53
  best stories. So we're, we're in Manila,
• 31:55
  Philippines. We had changed in 2020.
• 31:59
  We had changed 5 headstones in one day.
• 32:01
  That's a huge amount and very moving Small group was there,
• 32:07
  Rubbish Actor was there just it was a beautiful event to me.
• 32:11
  We've been there now four times. We're going in in February to do
• 32:13
  another four soldiers and we're on the way back and you know,
• 32:16
  this is a huge long flight. I'm sitting next to Rubbish
• 32:19
  Actor and he says you know, this is becoming way too big for us
• 32:25
  to do this part time as volunteers.
• 32:27
  I have a job and I'm not getting get up.
• 32:29
  So that means you need to do this full time.
• 32:32
  I said what rabbi to do that rabbi to do that a lot.
• 32:36
  And it was a great conversation. And you know, I, I've never been
• 32:42
  more felt more privileged to be in a sacred space.
• 32:47
  And it's like what happened that caused me to be here?
• 32:50
  I had this interest all my life and it it led to this crazy
• 32:55
  place of privilege to be able to be involved in heroes all day,
• 32:58
  Jewish and non Jewish all day. That's right.
• 33:00
  And to ferret out who was waiting for us for all those
• 33:04
  years. And you really have the sense.
• 33:06
  And there's nothing like being there when you see American
• 33:11
  workers lift up a Latin cross that has watched over this kid
• 33:16
  for 80 years in dignity, in silence.
• 33:18
  And we call it a silent civil Sentinel in beauty.
• 33:22
  And it basically say, I'm retired now.
• 33:24
  And you put in this white marble star, David, the feeling is
• 33:29
  unbelievable. And you just have the sense of
• 33:31
  completeness that I just did something that this guy's been
• 33:34
  waiting for and wow, is that satisfying.
• 33:38
  And I said, wow, I guess I will do that, and I did.
• 33:42
  Were you? Most incredible tolerant wife,
• 33:49
  partner you could imagine. She just, I think, saw the joy
• 33:54
  that I got from this, that satisfaction, and she said, OK,
• 33:58
  that's what we're going to. Do that's what were you doing at
• 34:01
  the time. I was a real estate developer
• 34:03
  and it was it was time to be time to be over with it and and
• 34:08
  this is what I do, doing it since 2020.
• 34:11
  And you've never looked back, obviously.
• 34:13
  Every day I get up. I've never worked so hard in my
• 34:15
  life, But I I I get up and say, wow, what's today's mission?
• 34:19
  And the reason it keeps going with such passion is fear.
• 34:22
  And the fear is there's so many guys out there waiting for you.
• 34:26
  Yeah. And if we don't get there, who's
• 34:28
  going to pick up this flag? And it's fear of not getting the
• 34:32
  job done. So we just got to get it done.
• 34:34
  Do you feel that it's never ending in the sense that the
• 34:38
  more you do, the more you ramp up your team is bigger?
• 34:40
  We were speaking about that before in comparison to just a
• 34:42
  couple years ago. Is do you feel like, oh, now
• 34:46
  it's like exponential now? There's so much more work to do.
• 34:49
  It's funny you should say that. So we started out with American,
• 34:51
  American World War Two soldiers and that world is limited.
• 34:55
  There's probably probably 8 or 900 guys out there of the ones
• 35:01
  that we can capture because some of the stories have enough bumps
• 35:04
  in them that we can't capture them.
• 35:07
  Probably, I'm going to guess 600 of those that are families that
• 35:11
  don't want to hear about it or don't want to cooperate.
• 35:14
  Some of them are such sad stories.
• 35:16
  Some of them are, they're all sad stories.
• 35:20
  I'll give you some examples. But anyway, that'll bring it
• 35:22
  down to about 3 or 400. Those we should be able to
• 35:24
  capture. OK, great.
• 35:26
  Then I'll continue later. But let me tell you why some of
• 35:29
  them say no. Some of them say no because the
• 35:32
  family is not fully Christian. And they say we're Christians.
• 35:37
  Nobody in our family is going to say, oh, let's, let's change our
• 35:40
  start. David, we wish we were always
• 35:42
  Christians. OK.
• 35:44
  And our reaction to that is that's your privilege.
• 35:47
  We have all the data that shows otherwise, the historical
• 35:50
  accuracy. You are the final arbiter of
• 35:53
  that decision. That's your responsibility.
• 35:55
  If ever you change your mind to have an inkling that you want to
• 35:57
  explore it, just call us. No hard feelings.
• 36:00
  Has that happened? No OK, no hard feelings.
• 36:04
  Second one is very different giving an exam by the way, the
• 36:09
  opposite has happened a number of times.
• 36:11
  Family is fully Christian and they find out this history and
• 36:14
  they embrace it 100%. Really totally embrace it.
• 36:18
  I've been dealing with one exactly right now, but there's
• 36:21
  one. I'm going to avoid names, but
• 36:24
  there's a soldier again, just by coincidence, happens to be in
• 36:27
  the Manila, Philippines. He's from boy from Borough Park,
• 36:31
  married an Italian, Italian Catholic girl and they had a
• 36:34
  daughter and he was killed very shortly thereafter.
• 36:37
  She grows up, she marries an Irish Catholic family is Irish
• 36:40
  Catholic. I mean really sincerely good
• 36:44
  down to earth, lovely Irish Catholic.
• 36:47
  He's a lawyer, she's a historian and we entered the family
• 36:51
  rubbish actor and I this required so much delicacy and so
• 36:55
  much, you know, really we had to tiptoe around this.
• 36:59
  But she had posted many years in a row about her her paternal
• 37:03
  grandfather that her her husband's grandfather around
• 37:06
  Memorial Day. And she had a lot of the
• 37:07
  factual, this is what we do for a living.
• 37:10
  So we know these. So we're able to go back and
• 37:12
  say, you know, some of the facts you're quoting are wrong.
• 37:14
  We've done so much research on the soldier.
• 37:16
  We'd like to tell you all about him.
• 37:17
  And by the way, one of those facts is that he was Jewish and
• 37:20
  they embraced it totally. This about that's historically
• 37:23
  accurate. And then he wrote out a speech
• 37:29
  at the headstone replacement that was unbelievable.
• 37:33
  Taking his family a little bit to task about not being honest
• 37:37
  with them about Jews as fighters.
• 37:41
  It was wow. It was, it was a wow moment.
• 37:46
  And they're wonderful people. They're just wonderful.
• 37:48
  And we're dealing with a family like that right now.
• 37:50
  Very unusual circumstance where you have a soldier and the
• 37:56
  family is fully Christian. He was.
• 38:01
  She, the daughter was born three months after he was killed,
• 38:05
  right? And she's not Jewish.
• 38:07
  She's mad or non Jewish. And but he was.
• 38:10
  And we're dealing with that now and it's very sensitive in a
• 38:16
  sense. It's very beautiful.
• 38:17
  We're restoring a name to the Jewish people.
• 38:20
  We're not there yet, but we're working on it.
• 38:22
  And the people we're dealing with them very lovely.
• 38:25
  What's the other reason that people aren't happy to get your
• 38:27
  call? You said one of them is the
• 38:28
  families. Completely Christian and that's
• 38:30
  the legacy. So I'll give you this
• 38:31
  circumstance that is just wild where I, I remember the name of
• 38:36
  the soldier. Again, for privacy reasons, I'm
• 38:37
  just going to leave the name off for the moment.
• 38:39
  Soldiers killed in Italy. And his first cousin is actually
• 38:44
  killed in Italy as well. Different battles also killed.
• 38:46
  He's never found. He's missing in action, remains
• 38:48
  missing in action. And the mother sees a photograph
• 38:54
  of PO WS in an Italian campaign. American PO WS says that's my
• 38:58
  son, He's not dead. And she gets obsessed with the
• 39:02
  fact that her son was not killed.
• 39:05
  And she demands that the US Army exhume her son.
• 39:08
  And she's going to prove that this is a German soldier in that
• 39:11
  grave. He's alive, walking around
• 39:13
  Europe somewhere. He's dazed, whatever it is.
• 39:15
  That's why he's not contacting her.
• 39:17
  But that's not her son in that grave.
• 39:19
  And the Army doesn't have medical examiners come and they
• 39:23
  they certified that that is her son.
• 39:25
  Now this is a before the world of DNA, so there's always this
• 39:29
  tiny possible margin of error, but they exhum twice, if I'm not
• 39:34
  mistaken, and both times conclude that is her son.
• 39:37
  She goes to her grave demanding that her son is not dead.
• 39:42
  And really, And so if you look at her tombstone, which I have
• 39:46
  visited, it is the most tragic that you just purchased melts.
• 39:51
  It's her name, her date of birth, date of death.
• 39:53
  And the rest of it is my son. I mourn my son.
• 39:58
  He can. He's not dead just.
• 40:02
  I cannot believe that that was her legacy.
• 40:04
  So I contacted the family, closest living relative, nice
• 40:07
  guy, a surgeon, if I remember correctly, very nice guy.
• 40:10
  And I said, listen, we live in the world of DNA.
• 40:13
  We'll pay for the DNA studies. Let's prove if he's there, we
• 40:17
  all acknowledge he's Jewish. If he's a German soldier, we'll
• 40:20
  know. And he said, listen, he said, I
• 40:23
  know what you're doing. I applaud what you're doing.
• 40:26
  I knew my aunt and she wasn't crazy.
• 40:28
  If this was her life's obsession, I would feel like a
• 40:32
  traitor to her legacy by finding out.
• 40:35
  Even if that meant swapping of the taste done well.
• 40:39
  So I said my usual if you ever change your mind, we're here, we
• 40:42
  have the evidence. We'll we'll do anything we can
• 40:44
  to help you. But there's such raw emotion
• 40:48
  there that at some point you have to stop and say, I respect
• 40:51
  that emotion. I expect that tragedy, right?
• 40:54
  What can I do? Have there been any Jewish
• 40:56
  families that I had no idea about that sort of connection
• 41:00
  about that's that, you know, they even had that side of the
• 41:02
  family because I mean, we're talking generations later for
• 41:04
  dealing with World War Two people.
• 41:05
  I. Haven't all the time.
• 41:06
  We haven't all the time. We just changed five US
• 41:08
  headstones and 12 German headstones, different subject or
• 41:12
  adjacent subject. We just did it two weeks ago and
• 41:16
  Colton Beach was there, Berk Beach was there, and in fact,
• 41:19
  It'll Follow was there. Come think of it.
• 41:22
  Amazing people, just amazing people.
• 41:24
  The German graves that were that were changed for operation,
• 41:27
  Operation Lady OK, so. Operation So I'll go a little
• 41:31
  digression. We Operation Benjamin, then we
• 41:33
  started doing so then from the ABMC, the American Battle Miners
• 41:37
  Commission said to us, you think there are guys who are
• 41:40
  misidentified in World War Two? You should see World War One.
• 41:43
  They say that to you, 100. Percent.
• 41:45
  So the guy who's the head of the of the agency was the acting
• 41:49
  heads, acting secretary of the agency.
• 41:51
  He's got a PhD in World War One history.
• 41:53
  He's a great guy, huge friend of Operation Benjamin who it's a
• 41:57
  mutual admiration society. He's an amazing person and he's
• 42:01
  a World War One historian. And he said you got to look at
• 42:03
  World War One because you're not going to believe what you're
• 42:06
  going to find. And again, these were not
• 42:08
  purposeful errors. These were mistakes done in
• 42:11
  goodwill and boy was he right. So, so we, we started doing so
• 42:14
  we did 2 at an Arlington National Cemetery, which is not
• 42:18
  an ABMC cemetery, it's U.S. Army cemetery, but we did two
• 42:20
  there. And then we just did 5 at the
• 42:23
  Musagon American Cemetery, which is a Europe's largest World War
• 42:27
  One American cemetery. So for another circumstance that
• 42:32
  happened about two years ago, we found an American soldier who
• 42:37
  was missing in action for 79 years.
• 42:39
  Wow. And we found him.
• 42:40
  Wow. We live physically found.
• 42:43
  Him was he just buried without any, you know, tags or anything
• 42:47
  or he was. Buried in a German World War 2
• 42:52
  cemetery with 11,600 soldiers. Within that mass grave we see
• 42:57
  within that German World War 2 cemetery was a mass grave of 50
• 43:01
  soldiers, and he was one of them.
• 43:03
  How did you figure that out it? Divine serendipity.
• 43:08
  The the steps would take hours, but I'll do the very, very short
• 43:12
  version and you'll see what it led to.
• 43:13
  And it's so beautiful what it led to.
• 43:15
  So his name was First Lieutenant Nathan Baskind, Jewish kid from
• 43:20
  Pittsburgh. And we got a call from a
• 43:25
  genealogist in New Jersey who now works for us.
• 43:29
  He didn't at the time, he said, you know, I, I found I, I was
• 43:32
  going through a German data, German military cemetery
• 43:37
  datasets and came upon the name everyone does and came back to
• 43:41
  the Lord for nerds. Thank the Lord for nerds, No
• 43:43
  question about it. And this guy's a great one.
• 43:46
  And he says, I came across the name Nathan Baskin.
• 43:49
  He said Nathan is not a Jewish, is not a German name.
• 43:53
  So it caught my eye and he said, and I just did a little bit of
• 43:57
  research and he's missing in action.
• 44:00
  And I'm pretty sure his parents are Jewish.
• 44:02
  He says you need to check this out.
• 44:04
  So that led us on a real obsessive quest about 18 months.
• 44:08
  Again, to make a very Long story short, turns out that he has a
• 44:12
  niece who's a professor of art history and Holocaust studies at
• 44:15
  Cleveland State University. She is right at a central
• 44:19
  casting the most perfect person to be in that position to become
• 44:23
  a dear friend. She's an amazing person.
• 44:25
  And we've he lands right after D-Day and about 12 days later,
• 44:33
  he's in the Battle of Scherberg, one of the most important
• 44:36
  battles of World War 2, doesn't get enough press and he's he is
• 44:40
  wounded and captured as a POW in the Battle of Scherberg.
• 44:45
  He's obviously very grievously wounded.
• 44:47
  He's taken, he dies that afternoon.
• 44:49
  Now the Battle of Scherberg is now going on.
• 44:51
  Fierce, fierce, fierce, fierce fighting.
• 44:53
  The Americans cut off water to the entire area because that's
• 44:57
  what you do when you want to win a war, unless you're Jewish, in
• 44:59
  which case you have to feed your enemy and you have to give them
• 45:02
  polio vaccines and, well, this insanity.
• 45:05
  But when people used to know how to fight wars, it was it was you
• 45:09
  defeat your enemy because that's where evil is.
• 45:12
  So they had no ability to protect these soldiers.
• 45:15
  A lot of German soldiers died that day, and all the soldiers
• 45:17
  who died that day were put in a mass grave in the community
• 45:20
  cemetery of Scherberg. after World War 2, France gave the
• 45:24
  Germans, I forget the exact number, I believe it's 12 places
• 45:27
  to bury their dead. One of them was in Maroni,
• 45:29
  France. So they take this mass grave,
• 45:31
  transfer it to Maroni, and there's a mass grave there.
• 45:34
  When they did the transfer, strange things came.
• 45:37
  An American lieutenant's bars, a unit patch, the 889th tank
• 45:41
  destroyer unit, which was his unit, right?
• 45:44
  And his dog tax. Now is that 100% evidence that
• 45:47
  he's there? It's pretty darn close.
• 45:49
  It's great circumstantial of us, but the Army, American military
• 45:53
  knew this in 1957. So they did go and investigate
• 45:56
  the mass grave and they found six sets of remains that could
• 46:00
  have belonged to him. But since they couldn't identify
• 46:03
  pre DNA, pre DNA studies, they couldn't identify him.
• 46:07
  So they never told the family that they thought they knew
• 46:09
  where he was. The family dies.
• 46:11
  Everybody ever knew him died where that ever had disappeared
• 46:14
  into thin air. And all that time he was a
• 46:18
  Marini. So now imagine the bureaucratic
• 46:21
  complexity. You have an American soldier on
• 46:24
  French soil in a German military cemetery.
• 46:27
  Go figure out this problem. We got everybody together and we
• 46:30
  got the University of Wisconsin ancient phones program, an
• 46:34
  anthropologist from there. And the key to all of this,
• 46:37
  again, I'm skipping so much, but the key to all of this is that
• 46:41
  the he was 5 foot 5 and an anthropologist on modern
• 46:46
  measurements, not that they used in 1950s.
• 46:49
  If you have a femur or one or two other bones, you can measure
• 46:53
  them, reverse into near them and they can tell you how tall this
• 46:56
  guy was. So.
• 46:58
  Through that, we hand dug this entire grave over three days,
• 47:04
  December 2020, first, 22nd and 23rd.
• 47:08
  We thousands and thousands of bones.
• 47:11
  We dugout, we cleaned, we categorized 17 of us.
• 47:15
  Were you and you were involved in that?
• 47:17
  I headed the American side. Wow.
• 47:19
  And then a German major from the German military, from the German
• 47:22
  Warriors Commission. Again, one of the most
• 47:25
  incredible people you could possibly meet.
• 47:27
  Who's my partner on the other side.
• 47:28
  We've become dear, dear, dear friends, and he's an amazing
• 47:32
  person. And we LED this group of 17
• 47:34
  people, and we found the samples.
• 47:38
  The German Foreign Ministry had them shipped to the United
• 47:40
  States on our behalf. We had them analyzed at
• 47:43
  America's largest DNA lab and we found them.
• 47:45
  Wow, it's a crazy story. And then we buried.
• 47:48
  Him on the 80th anniversary of his death at the Normandy
• 47:51
  American Cemetery. Full military honors funeral and
• 47:56
  the first halachic Jewish burial in any military cemetery in
• 48:00
  American history. It's a book right there.
• 48:03
  It's a book right there. But the end When Denise found
• 48:06
  out, what did she say? I mean, we were in contact every
• 48:08
  step of the way. She was a full partner in every
• 48:11
  part of this. She's actually writing a book
• 48:13
  now, which is going to be amazing.
• 48:15
  And I mean, it was amazing. So what's?
• 48:19
  Your name. No.
• 48:20
  Doctor Samantha Baskin, Professor Samantha Baskin Crew
• 48:23
  and State University. She's an art historian.
• 48:25
  She just wrote a great book on Moses.
• 48:27
  Ezekiel was this very fascinating Civil War great, the
• 48:32
  sculptor, and she's writing a book now about this experience.
• 48:37
  Yeah, that's great. Wow.
• 48:38
  That's unbelievable. And and this is.
• 48:40
  And through this, what's up? Let me tell you so.
• 48:42
  So how do I get to the Germans? So now what happens is before we
• 48:46
  find him, the head of the German War Graves Commission, an
• 48:49
  amazing person, General Dirk Bakken.
• 48:52
  I think I started talking about him in the first instance and he
• 48:56
  calls me. If this is Shalom, I'm in a
• 48:57
  World War One German cemetery, I'm looking at a grave named
• 49:04
  Mayor Levy, he said. In 1000 years I never would have
• 49:08
  noticed this, but now that we're dealing with Nathan Baskin
• 49:10
  daily. He has an eye for it, I.
• 49:12
  Have an eye for it. He's buried under a cross.
• 49:14
  He says he has to be Jewish. So he says to me, let's change
• 49:19
  this. I'll get my historians to prove
• 49:20
  these Jewishes that I'm sure he is.
• 49:22
  We'll change this and there must be a dozen guys like this or
• 49:25
  dozens. He said let's go find out a Mini
• 49:27
  there and let's do the right thing.
• 49:29
  There's a German officer. It's not.
• 49:30
  Amazing. I think that's so long.
• 49:31
  Let's let's do the right thing. So righteous.
• 49:34
  It's righteous, absolutely righteous.
• 49:35
  I'm sitting and getting in tears and he's, he's unbelievable.
• 49:39
  So I said General Beckon, how many do you think they're
• 49:42
  racist? I don't know, he says.
• 49:44
  You guys do your research. We'll do our research.
• 49:46
  Let's come up 1307. Oh my gosh.
• 49:49
  So we're changing every one of them.
• 49:51
  Oh my God, We find the families and we get the permission.
• 49:53
  We let them know what the Germans are doing and then we do
• 49:56
  the histories, we find the descendants and that.
• 49:58
  So we were just in that comes the end of the story.
• 50:01
  We're just in, in MU Sargon, we changed five U.S. soldiers and
• 50:07
  we changed 8 kilometers away. We changed 12 German Jewish
• 50:12
  soldiers who fought each other, who killed each other.
• 50:16
  But were Jews? But were Jews?
• 50:18
  How is there none? There needs to be more press.
• 50:20
  That's his wild story. It's wild.
• 50:22
  This is it's wild stuff. How do you get your information
• 50:24
  out there? How do people know what you do?
• 50:26
  So on our last mission, Scott Jennings was there from CNN.
• 50:30
  He's spoken about it. Michael Oren, Ambassador Michael
• 50:33
  Oren was there. He was amazing.
• 50:35
  And I know he talks about it a lot.
• 50:38
  We've been in a lot of newspapers, a lot of TV
• 50:41
  interviews. We were on CNN with Dana Bash
• 50:44
  joined us for two days in Italy a day and 1/2 in Italy.
• 50:47
  But as many as much as press as we get, we're the best kept
• 50:51
  secret around. Wow, well what can someone do if
• 50:55
  they want to get involved with operation?
• 50:57
  So we get a lot, I'll tell you a very funny thing.
• 50:59
  So we get, we have a website that people come to very, very
• 51:02
  often. It's a very robust website.
• 51:03
  A lot of videos of all of our ceremonies or videotapes, a lot
• 51:06
  of them are very moving and. Are they on YouTube also?
• 51:10
  They're on YouTube. We have a YouTube channel,
• 51:11
  people are on there. So we, we get people who, who
• 51:17
  volunteer all the time. So most emails start with, I'm a
• 51:21
  retired attorney. I'd like to now do something
• 51:23
  useful. And it's hilarious how often we
• 51:26
  get the same line. Nothing.
• 51:28
  It's attorneys. But really we get that often.
• 51:30
  It's very, very fun. And it, it, it's, it's actually,
• 51:33
  it's hard for us because we're very tightly run organization.
• 51:38
  We don't have an office. We do everything online.
• 51:41
  We don't spend, you know, more than we absolutely need to.
• 51:44
  So the people who really help help us are either social media
• 51:50
  experts, yes, those volunteers were always in favor of hearing
• 51:53
  from or very, very, very high level genealogists or
• 51:58
  historians. And we're talking about real top
• 52:00
  of the tier. Other than that, it's not.
• 52:02
  It's, I hate to say it, but it's, it's more trouble for us
• 52:05
  than it's worth. But how do you fund this
• 52:06
  operation? So, so I go around, it's very
• 52:15
  interesting. What doesn't work is the shotgun
• 52:18
  approach. Explain to people we do.
• 52:20
  So it's so hard to understand exactly what we do and what our
• 52:22
  motivation is. That's not effective.
• 52:25
  But when we find specific people who are like yourself, there's a
• 52:28
  military family or Holocaust survivors or American military
• 52:33
  did something very spectacularly important for them or her very
• 52:37
  patriotic. This enters the heart and will
• 52:40
  not leave. And then those who've been on
• 52:42
  the missions, it just you can't believe that you've seen this
• 52:46
  happen. It's just you can't believe that
• 52:48
  there's a German Brigadier General talking to you about the
• 52:52
  historic responsibility to restore the oh, he's so
• 52:57
  passionate, so passionate about it.
• 53:00
  And he and he says, I'm not looking for absolution.
• 53:02
  I wear the burden of history. I know my history.
• 53:06
  I'm not looking for absolutely. I want to do the right thing I.
• 53:08
  Want to do the right thing. That's my lesson for and you sit
• 53:12
  there and you cry, you go, I want to hug this guy.
• 53:14
  He's unbelievable. So we so there are a lot of very
• 53:18
  passionate people who who really take a very strong interest in
• 53:22
  this. And that's what that's what
• 53:24
  keeps the lights on. It's such a beautiful thing that
• 53:26
  you do. It's such a privilege.
• 53:28
  God should bless every single part of it.
• 53:30
  Thank you such a privilege. I want to take a small pivot and
• 53:33
  talk about something you mentioned before about you being
• 53:36
  involved in real estate. So you weren't involved in a
• 53:39
  little bit of real estate. From my understanding, you're
• 53:41
  involved in a lot of real estate.
• 53:43
  So I always wanted to ask a real estate expert this question.
• 53:46
  We had an economist on a few weeks back, Doctor Asquith, and
• 53:50
  we were talking about how it's wonderful when real estate is a
• 53:54
  bad investment because that means there's more than enough
• 53:57
  housing for everyone. You've added so much housing
• 54:01
  and, and in America, which has serving so many people, every
• 54:05
  single person that is in one of those apartments or one of those
• 54:07
  houses means they have a story. What is wrong with us here?
• 54:12
  Why can't Israel, you know, get itself together and and make
• 54:15
  housing affordable for everyone? It is astounding.
• 54:20
  You're going to know the answer to.
• 54:21
  This, It's astounding that we can do so many amazing things
• 54:27
  and can't solve what is really not such a difficult problem.
• 54:31
  And I am going to, I am going to hedge because it has to be more
• 54:39
  complicated. It has to be more complicated
• 54:43
  than I'm making it, the level of bureaucracy here and, and Israel
• 54:49
  has done I, you know, there's a lot of cynical over that.
• 54:52
  You know, there's no customer service.
• 54:53
  There's no this, it's not true. Israel has done a spectacular
• 54:56
  job of really becoming pretty bureaucratic friendly.
• 55:00
  There are some very big exceptions and one of them is a
• 55:03
  world of real estate. The fact that it can take you 10
• 55:05
  years to get approvals. Why is, is an absolute crime.
• 55:10
  It's a crime. It is.
• 55:12
  There are so many systems in government that have to be
• 55:15
  involved in what is essentially a very simple process.
• 55:18
  The need is so great, the population should revolt against
• 55:23
  governments that cannot solve this problem.
• 55:26
  The fact that, you know, and they say it's a small country,
• 55:29
  I'm sorry, it's not just a small country.
• 55:31
  It is. Size wise, it's smaller than
• 55:33
  Lake MI, but there's enough land here to accommodate 10 times our
• 55:37
  population. It's just a matter of approvals
• 55:42
  and getting the bureaucracy out of the way and the fact that it
• 55:44
  has not been solved is literally a crime against the Jewish
• 55:48
  people. Do you think it's dirty?
• 55:51
  You know, I don't know enough to say yes or no.
• 55:55
  I will say that government bureaucracy, unchecked, grows at
• 56:02
  massive, at massive numbers and complexity for no reason.
• 56:11
  When there's no adult supervision, it just creates A
• 56:14
  sole gobbledygook of a monster. Do I think it's dirty?
• 56:18
  I don't know, because I don't know enough.
• 56:20
  But I do know that New York, by the way, California has the
• 56:23
  problem. New York has the problem.
• 56:25
  Go to Florida and you don't have the problem.
• 56:28
  So Florida is going. Texas doesn't have the problem.
• 56:30
  Texas is booming. You don't have to be Albert
• 56:33
  Einstein to solve this. You have to be willing to tack
• 56:36
  entrenched interests that are there to say no, that are there
• 56:39
  to be obnoxious, that are there to do endless studies that mean
• 56:43
  nothing, that mean absolutely nothing.
• 56:46
  So what what do we do to combat it?
• 56:48
  Meaning So what what needs to change?
• 56:50
  OK, so there's too much bureaucracy.
• 56:51
  There's 15 year waits just to get approval.
• 56:53
  It's, by the way, is that the crux of it is that is that
• 56:55
  really editors them more. The other thing is that the
• 56:57
  state owns so much land and they need to release it.
• 57:00
  But I think that's much easier to solve than the approvals
• 57:05
  process. The approvals process is now
• 57:07
  limited to a small number of people who have the expertise to
• 57:10
  go through what is a mind numbing bureaucracy.
• 57:13
  And that's crazy. The more people you have, the
• 57:16
  more expertise would develop, the more innovation would have.
• 57:18
  There's no innovation that, I mean, in Israeli apartments,
• 57:22
  this the floor plans are dreadful, dreadful.
• 57:26
  And the reason is there's no innovation, there's no
• 57:28
  creativity, there's nothing. There doesn't have to be because
• 57:31
  there are only a few people who can build who can get this
• 57:33
  through insane level of bureaucracy.
• 57:35
  So if you could solve for that, you everything else would
• 57:38
  naturally follow my opinion. Again, I don't claim to be an
• 57:41
  expert in it just for I hear and see like everybody else and just
• 57:45
  what I know from having built a lot in New York and I, I did
• 57:50
  business in Texas and Florida and New York and many, many,
• 57:52
  many other places. And I can tell you the
• 57:55
  difference is astounding in terms of innovation, speed to
• 57:58
  build, ability to build. And therefore housing becomes
• 58:02
  much, much, much, much, much cheaper because there's supply
• 58:06
  and demand. It's very, very simple.
• 58:07
  The demand here is out of control and the supply is out of
• 58:11
  control. And the fact you can't solve for
• 58:13
  that, it's a criminal offense against the Jewish people.
• 58:16
  To me, it's it's it's it religiously bothers me.
• 58:20
  It religiously bothers me. You can have certain things
• 58:22
  that, OK, you know, on the bus, people should really understand
• 58:26
  that you let people off first before getting up.
• 58:28
  OK, right. But this one religiously bothers
• 58:30
  me. And the reason is because I feel
• 58:32
  that it probably locks off a good chunk of people from Jews
• 58:34
  from living here. Good greed, right?
• 58:37
  No question. And they and they go back, you
• 58:38
  know, outside of Israel because of it.
• 58:41
  I just wonder, I just wonder what, what do you think
• 58:45
  concretely can be done about it? Like if you had a message to
• 58:48
  give the people watching this, what would it be?
• 58:53
  About housing. How to fix it?
• 58:55
  I mean, all I know, look, you worked in real estate and were
• 58:58
  successful. You built a lot.
• 59:01
  I think I built a cardboard box once, you know, house.
• 59:05
  So that's the extent of my real estate expertise.
• 59:08
  What should be done? What are we not getting?
• 59:10
  We should be able to unleash the creativity and the native genius
• 59:13
  of the Jewish people. And the only way to do that is
• 59:16
  to get the bureaucracy out of the way.
• 59:18
  And there's so many ways to solve it, but it takes someone
• 59:20
  to do something boring. Solving economic problems is
• 59:24
  boring. It doesn't have trauma.
• 59:26
  It's not foreign affairs, it doesn't deal with the IDF.
• 59:29
  Those are all dramatic and should be dramatic, wonderful,
• 59:32
  amazing things. The fact that your goal is to
• 59:38
  break down entrenched bureaucracies, it's the most
• 59:41
  boring thing in the world and no one has patience for it.
• 59:44
  I mean, just to look about the monopolies on dairy goods, you
• 59:47
  know, in Israel, why isn't that tackled, right?
• 59:51
  Why aren't the costs of milk and eggs brought down?
• 59:54
  Because it's not exciting and it doesn't win elections.
• 59:57
  So there has to be someone fanatically, maniacally
• 1:00:01
  dedicated to doing that. I, I nominate you, you're very
• 1:00:04
  well spoken and you care. I I think that's great.
• 1:00:07
  I'm just a lowly. Rabbi Yeah.
• 1:00:08
  Lowly rabbing my eye. It's, it's, it takes someone
• 1:00:12
  with a religious zeal and a religious commitment to say that
• 1:00:16
  this is an affront to the Jewish people, which it absolutely is.
• 1:00:18
  And it's there are a few bureaucracies like that, but
• 1:00:22
  certainly this is the the one with the most terrible impact,
• 1:00:28
  really terrible impact. Absolutely.
• 1:00:30
  Do you think that it's has anything to do with the
• 1:00:33
  international legality of Israel?
• 1:00:36
  I'd imagine that to get these permits, it's far more difficult
• 1:00:38
  over the Green Line. I don't know.
• 1:00:40
  It depends on the government that's operating then right now.
• 1:00:43
  It shouldn't be difficult at all, right?
• 1:00:46
  I don't think so. I think it's an excuse.
• 1:00:49
  Jerusalem. You have no problem expanding
• 1:00:51
  Jerusalem other than you can never get a permit for anything.
• 1:00:54
  Why is that? It's insanity.
• 1:00:56
  Have you ever met or worked with any How do you say Kabla name?
• 1:01:00
  How do I say that in English? Developers.
• 1:01:01
  Contractors. Yes, you're contractors.
• 1:01:03
  Have you ever met any of these people, worked at any of these
• 1:01:05
  people before? I have met with some mostly
• 1:01:09
  Americans who tried to do business in Israel and found it
• 1:01:12
  difficult that are very, very difficult.
• 1:01:15
  You know, I just like a person who's been in the industry for a
• 1:01:18
  long time. You're shocked.
• 1:01:22
  Well, first of all, being a New York developer, you get shocked
• 1:01:24
  by what you have to go through. It's insane.
• 1:01:26
  What do you mean just Also you're on bureaucratic mess or?
• 1:01:29
  You have to do any time you're in upstate New York and you want
• 1:01:31
  to build something, you have to. You have to hire APHD.
• 1:01:37
  What's you called? Not anthropologist.
• 1:01:42
  Let's get archaeologist to dig thousands of 2 foot holes to
• 1:01:48
  find Indian arrowheads, right? And look, it's the biggest waste
• 1:01:52
  of money. And of course you pass on that
• 1:01:53
  cost and time to the consumer. Any structure you tear down, an
• 1:01:58
  architect has to go and do a study about this irrelevant
• 1:02:01
  1920s barn that no one cares about, has been out of service
• 1:02:05
  for 50 years. No one wants to know it.
• 1:02:07
  But you have to pay for an architect to go there, do a
• 1:02:10
  study about it, take pictures, do drawings, and it sits in the
• 1:02:13
  file that will never be opened again in history.
• 1:02:15
  But that cost and that time gets passed along to the consumer.
• 1:02:19
  And so that's why New York housing is very, very expensive.
• 1:02:22
  These are crazy things. And then you take the global
• 1:02:26
  warming hoax and you and you Add all this.
• 1:02:28
  What are you doing to stop this from happening?
• 1:02:30
  Which isn't happening. So you Add all these things
• 1:02:33
  together and you create madness. Absolute madness.
• 1:02:37
  I don't know if it's just me, this is kind of what I'm getting
• 1:02:40
  at, but you know, I've met contractors from America and now
• 1:02:46
  I've met you. You seem like a reasonable and
• 1:02:48
  nice person that probably doesn't do anything evil in the
• 1:02:52
  middle of the night. True.
• 1:02:53
  But I find that a good chunk of contractors here in Israel I
• 1:02:59
  don't get the same feeling. I wonder why that is?
• 1:03:03
  They're working in a different interrupt that from a lifeline.
• 1:03:06
  I just want to preface what I'm not a conspiracy person.
• 1:03:10
  We landed on the moon. OK, It happened.
• 1:03:13
  OK, right. But it just it just it feels
• 1:03:17
  some malevolent, like something is the whole thing bothers me.
• 1:03:21
  And the reason why I want to air it out on the air is because no
• 1:03:24
  one really talks about it. People complain about it every
• 1:03:26
  once in a while, but but something's rotten in Denmark.
• 1:03:28
  Like it doesn't doesn't feel right.
• 1:03:30
  So I'm going to throw everybody a lifeline.
• 1:03:32
  There are a lot of cultural differences between Americans
• 1:03:36
  and Israelis, People from a Dota, Mizrah, and a lot of times
• 1:03:41
  you find there's an outward coarseness or difficulty and
• 1:03:45
  then you just peel it away a little bit in the sweetest human
• 1:03:47
  beings in the world, right, And the most wonderful people.
• 1:03:52
  I think there is a sense of standards here that are not as
• 1:03:57
  strong, not as good as other developed countries in the
• 1:04:00
  world. Europe, certainly in the United
• 1:04:02
  States, we have much, much, much higher standards in the US we
• 1:04:07
  deal with different materials that are more durable that are
• 1:04:10
  easier to work with. And the other end, a lot of our
• 1:04:12
  labor here came from Palestinians.
• 1:04:14
  Well that was a nightmare and I had a political answer and
• 1:04:18
  shouldn't reverse, shouldn't go back there that we're done we're
• 1:04:21
  finished. So where do you bring them from?
• 1:04:22
  Well, wherever you bring them from around the world, you can
• 1:04:25
  get very, very good workers. But method of building here, and
• 1:04:28
  it is the Middle East, so it has to be different than it is.
• 1:04:30
  You could use Arizona building here quite effectively, but
• 1:04:35
  they're so used to having their way.
• 1:04:39
  And once you get those approvals, you have gold in your
• 1:04:41
  hands and you get to not have any competition.
• 1:04:45
  If you have no competition, there's just no reason to
• 1:04:48
  improve. What we need is a massive dose
• 1:04:51
  of competition by lowering the bureaucratic methods by opening
• 1:04:54
  land up for for construction. And just watch how quick when
• 1:04:59
  the consumer has the power to say, I'm not going to your
• 1:05:03
  place. You have no idea how to install
• 1:05:05
  plumbing, right? I am not buying from you.
• 1:05:09
  Just watch how quick they become experts.
• 1:05:12
  It's all simple economics. The minute you allow people to
• 1:05:17
  build, the bad developers will go bankrupt and they should go
• 1:05:21
  bankrupt. And the guys with the technology
• 1:05:23
  and the customer service, they're going to win the day and
• 1:05:26
  everything will change. You know, to be more blunt, I'm
• 1:05:30
  just trying to say it a little bit nicer, but let me just get
• 1:05:32
  right into it. You know, I love Adrian Mizrah.
• 1:05:34
  No problem. I'm a I'm a I'm a hybrid.
• 1:05:36
  My mother's from Morocco and my father's.
• 1:05:38
  Yeah. It's, it's all, it's, it's all
• 1:05:40
  good. But I feel that that it's kind
• 1:05:43
  of like my experience with with high level surgeons.
• 1:05:46
  There's two types of high level surgeons, the sweetest, most
• 1:05:49
  angelic people you'll ever meet or the most arrogant, you know,
• 1:05:55
  like I am God himself, you know, people and I feel that
• 1:05:59
  developers here are a lot more like that that second sort of
• 1:06:02
  category. I own the show.
• 1:06:03
  It's my show. Oh, I told you one price.
• 1:06:06
  I can just switch it, you know, like that's what I'm talking
• 1:06:09
  about. It's competition, OK, And that's
• 1:06:11
  what it is. It's.
• 1:06:11
  Just I personally believe competition.
• 1:06:13
  Remember, America built cars, built horrible cars in the what
• 1:06:17
  was it, the late 80s, but horrible cars.
• 1:06:19
  They were miserable. And so America started importing
• 1:06:21
  Japanese cars and wouldn't you know it, Americans figured out
• 1:06:24
  how to build great cars. How did that happen?
• 1:06:26
  Because competition is a beautiful thing.
• 1:06:29
  It's a. Beautiful thing.
• 1:06:31
  And I think that's what we're missing.
• 1:06:32
  It's it's an old boys network. It's too difficult.
• 1:06:35
  All the right people know the right people and still takes
• 1:06:38
  them 1015 years to get approvals.
• 1:06:40
  That's madness. Nothing should take more than
• 1:06:42
  three or four years. Nothing.
• 1:06:43
  Is it a lack of interest from the people you think, or is it?
• 1:06:46
  Or is it the government has to change?
• 1:06:48
  Well, I think the government has changed.
• 1:06:50
  I think the people are very, very interested.
• 1:06:52
  But unless you have physically seen how the system works in a
• 1:06:56
  healthy market, you have no idea how abused you are.
• 1:06:59
  So I think people are used to being abused.
• 1:07:02
  These are unhealthy marriages between the population and the
• 1:07:05
  government and the the working environment and the more people.
• 1:07:09
  And, and maybe that's how somebody would go on this
• 1:07:11
  crusade to say, I want to give you prime examples of five
• 1:07:14
  housing developments that were built in Arizona, Texas,
• 1:07:17
  Florida, and I don't know, name another one right in in
• 1:07:20
  Tennessee, right. And just watch how this process
• 1:07:23
  happened and put on the other side what happens in Israel.
• 1:07:25
  They would be enraged, enraged by what goes on here.
• 1:07:30
  And there's no excuse for it. There's just no excuse for it.
• 1:07:34
  But as soon as people are enlightened and see what could
• 1:07:36
  be, boy watch. Watch the innovation fly.
• 1:07:39
  And then we'll see wonderful contractors.
• 1:07:42
  Let's hope, let's see it happen. On the phone question in
• 1:07:46
  Operation Benjamin, you are definitely stepping out of your
• 1:07:50
  as we say in the Talmud, Daladamos, your your space,
• 1:07:53
  right? Absolutely.
• 1:07:54
  Being a developer, you know, just sitting down for coffee
• 1:07:57
  with Rabbi Jacker, have you ever met a negative response from the
• 1:08:04
  other side? Not from people that you're
• 1:08:05
  trying to set up, you know, are trying to get them the proper
• 1:08:08
  burial, the proper graves, but other organizations, other
• 1:08:14
  partners that are supposed to be working.
• 1:08:16
  Have you ever gotten the anti-Semitic?
• 1:08:17
  Get the heck out of here. Go to hell.
• 1:08:19
  Not a single time. I've got nothing but from
• 1:08:22
  Christian chaplains. Unbelievable warmth from senior
• 1:08:29
  military officers, massive admiration from superintendents.
• 1:08:33
  That's the highest level you can get to at America's military
• 1:08:36
  cemeteries. I mean, the comment we hear most
• 1:08:39
  often is I, we love when you're here.
• 1:08:42
  We're known now. We're a known entity for people
• 1:08:46
  to care about these soldiers after 80 years that you do so
• 1:08:51
  much work on their behalf, said we do this everyday.
• 1:08:53
  We, we speak to our soldiers all the time, right?
• 1:08:56
  But that you come here with 100 people at your own cost and you
• 1:09:01
  do this. We have such admiration for
• 1:09:03
  this. It's, it's just this walking
• 1:09:05
  massive. And it's, it's beautiful.
• 1:09:10
  I mean, it's, it's, it's a byproduct that's beautiful.
• 1:09:14
  The one negative we've got, it's, it's almost funny.
• 1:09:19
  We were, we were going to bury Nathan Baskin at Normandy
• 1:09:23
  American Cemetery and we had set down a number of parameters that
• 1:09:27
  were very, very important to us. One of them was what happens in
• 1:09:30
  a normal military funeral, a Christian funeral very often is
• 1:09:34
  the casket is there, it's on a, it's on a stand.
• 1:09:37
  There's a very beautiful service and then everyone leaves and the
• 1:09:40
  cemetery workers then take the casket, put it in the ground and
• 1:09:42
  they fill it up and said can't do it.
• 1:09:45
  That's not a Jewish funeral. We need to lower the casket in
• 1:09:48
  the ground and we need to put offer, we need to put the dirt
• 1:09:52
  on the grave. That's part of what we do.
• 1:09:55
  And the guy who was the Superintendent of the cemetery
• 1:09:58
  at Norman of the American Cemetery, you can't get higher
• 1:10:00
  than that. One of the nicest guys you'll
• 1:10:03
  ever meet. He was very skeptical and he
• 1:10:05
  said, Shalom, I don't think this is a good idea.
• 1:10:09
  Are you sure about this? You know, why can I explained to
• 1:10:13
  him Oferla Ofer and then that that that the highest form of
• 1:10:16
  respect we can show is that we're we're doing this cussing.
• 1:10:20
  Don't first explain to cussing. We're doing this fest for the
• 1:10:22
  soldiers, his people who are buried him.
• 1:10:25
  And he said, listen, I'm going to do it because you're saying
• 1:10:28
  so and this is your funeral. And I've been told to do what
• 1:10:32
  you want, but I don't feel good about this.
• 1:10:34
  Fine. And I can't tell you how nice a
• 1:10:36
  guy this is. This is not like a malevolent
• 1:10:37
  against guy so nice. So he has since retired.
• 1:10:40
  He's a wonderful person. So we show up.
• 1:10:43
  And by the way, the way we created the grave, we told them
• 1:10:47
  specifically it had to how it had to be done.
• 1:10:49
  We got our instructions from Rusher Weiss on exactly how it
• 1:10:51
  to be done so that it was a kebrious row and the bottom had
• 1:10:54
  to be open. And I said we need to inspect it
• 1:10:57
  the day before to make sure it was done properly.
• 1:10:59
  I go through a shack and we inspect that everything is
• 1:11:01
  Kadasukaden perfect. Then he makes a mound.
• 1:11:04
  Of course it's the military, so it's not a mound of dirt.
• 1:11:06
  It's perfectly level with sides are the perfect angles and
• 1:11:10
  they're 3 brand new silver shovels.
• 1:11:11
  I mean, he did everything to be respectful and beautiful.
• 1:11:15
  Fine. And there's an honor guard.
• 1:11:17
  The honor guard carries the casket in the military.
• 1:11:19
  Honor guard is beautiful. And we invite everybody choosing
• 1:11:23
  gentiles in the service to take a shovel.
• 1:11:26
  We explain to do it backwards, to make the whole thing and to
• 1:11:28
  put on offer. And to my shock, everybody lines
• 1:11:33
  up and wants to participate. They couldn't believe what they
• 1:11:35
  were seeing. The honor guard breaks, they
• 1:11:38
  line up. Wow.
• 1:11:40
  They line up. They want to do this, too.
• 1:11:43
  And there's a Christian chaplain there.
• 1:11:45
  He'd never seen anything like this before.
• 1:11:46
  He wanted. But everyone we finally filled,
• 1:11:49
  we put a mound on. It's beautiful.
• 1:11:51
  And Superintendent comes over to me and says, I thought this was
• 1:11:55
  a big mistake. He said it was the most
• 1:11:57
  beautiful thing I ever saw. Right.
• 1:11:59
  That's me. It's great.
• 1:12:01
  It's great. Well, now I feel really silly.
• 1:12:03
  I was going to say, what do you want to leave us with?
• 1:12:07
  But are there any, is there a message that you want to leave
• 1:12:09
  our listeners so to leave? Leave with a beautiful 2
• 1:12:11
  beautiful messages. One is we have the privilege of
• 1:12:14
  sitting here in Israel. Israel is the God's chosen,
• 1:12:18
  chosen land for the Jewish people.
• 1:12:20
  The first piece of land that we get in Israel, number one.
• 1:12:23
  The first was a burial place for Sarah.
• 1:12:27
  God takes his graves very, very seriously.
• 1:12:29
  We have an obligation to the dead.
• 1:12:31
  It's such a lemus. It's very beautiful.
• 1:12:33
  Second thing is I want to give you a challenge coin.
• 1:12:36
  Do you know what a challenge coin is?
• 1:12:37
  OK, it's good that this is on video.
• 1:12:39
  So challenge coin is a really cool thing in the military.
• 1:12:42
  In the US military, if you're of a certain rank, it's a Colonel
• 1:12:46
  or above, you're a general, you're an ambassador, you have
• 1:12:49
  what's called a challenge coin to make a coin.
• 1:12:51
  On one side is the symbol of your rank, whether it's four
• 1:12:54
  stars or the symbol of the great, you know, Great Seal, the
• 1:12:56
  United States, whatever it is. And in the back is a personal
• 1:12:59
  message. And you give this to people who
• 1:13:02
  voluntarily do something special or we're given an assignment
• 1:13:06
  that did an exceptional job. The tradition is you put in your
• 1:13:09
  hand, you shake their hand and they feel like there's a coin
• 1:13:11
  and then you've just given them a challenge coin.
• 1:13:13
  Challenge coins are are they're simple.
• 1:13:16
  Now we deal with the military all the time.
• 1:13:17
  So we developed a challenge coin.
• 1:13:19
  So one side is our symbol. It says Operation Benjamin.
• 1:13:22
  And then on on bottom, I wish I had my glasses is Bhagan Aidan
• 1:13:26
  Tahimu Haso, right, which is a beautiful thing.
• 1:13:30
  And the other side is Kevor Yosef Osadeh.
• 1:13:32
  And the question is why do we have on the other side Kevor
• 1:13:37
  Yosef Osadeh? So first of all, I have the
• 1:13:38
  pleasure of giving you a. I'm honored.
• 1:13:41
  Which is a beautiful thing. And the question is why?
• 1:13:44
  So it says Exodus 1319 on the other side.
• 1:13:48
  So I got a bar who is a great author.
• 1:13:50
  He tells the story the Exodus of Egypt.
• 1:13:53
  It's the most amazing story, the plagues and Aaron and Moses and,
• 1:13:57
  you know, heart of it's hard to talk.
• 1:13:59
  And then it's it's absolutely unbelievable.
• 1:14:02
  And they're about to go over the line. 3,000,000 Jews are leaving
• 1:14:05
  and they have a staff of how many?
• 1:14:07
  I mean, how many people run this yeshiva staff from three Aaron
• 1:14:12
  and and Moses. I mean, you can imagine.
• 1:14:13
  And they were a little bit busy, right?
• 1:14:15
  Moses had like, nothing to do just to mention the diapers you
• 1:14:18
  needed for a half million kids. That's right.
• 1:14:20
  Who had time for anything? And God does the craziest thing
• 1:14:24
  the minute they walk over the line.
• 1:14:26
  What is the pussock? And Moses goes to get the bones
• 1:14:29
  of Joseph. Oh, really?
• 1:14:31
  Like you had nothing else to do on that day?
• 1:14:33
  Joseph's been dead for 210 years.
• 1:14:35
  Who cares? And that's our Moses movement at
• 1:14:39
  specifically the time that everything is on the line.
• 1:14:42
  When you're distracted by world events, you remember you're
• 1:14:45
  heroes. You don't leave them alone.
• 1:14:48
  And that's our Moses moment. That this is a number one, I'm
• 1:14:52
  very appreciative, but that that's a perfect choice.
• 1:14:54
  That is exactly the what the Torah has to say about.
• 1:14:59
  Thank you so much. Thank you everyone.
• 1:15:01
  He said that he could use social media people.
• 1:15:03
  He can use genealogists. I encourage everyone to help out
• 1:15:06
  in this very holy work. You can share this episode.
• 1:15:08
  You can share their website. We should all get involved.
• 1:15:11
  Thanks so much for joining, Sean.
• 1:15:12
  Thanks. It's million bye.