After 74 Years, resting place of two Israeli MIAs found
74 years after their falling during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, the IDF has identified the resting place of Private Binyamin Aryeh (York) Eisenberg, and Private Yitzhak Rubinstein.
PVT Binyamin Eisenberg and PVT Yitzhak Rubinstein. (IDF)
An IDF spokesman stated this week that the two IDF MIAs (Missing in Action), who were killed in a battle to defend Kibbutz Yad Mordechai in the south against the invading Egyptian army and whose burial place was unknown, were located after a strenuous investigation that lasted over a decade.
During the Independence Day War, at the end of the battle for the defence of Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, on the night between May 23 and 24, 1948, a few days after the announcement of the establishment of the State of Israel, during the evacuation of the wounded and after a battle with Egyptian forces, a squad of three Palmach fighters was taken captive. The squad, whose traces were not known, included Eisenberg, who was lying wounded on a stretcher, as well as Rubinstein and the medic Livka Shafer who carried it.
In 1952, Rabbi Shlomo Goren, chief Rabbi of the IDF, declared the three martyrs whose burial place is unknown.
In the years 2012-2018, the IDF conducted an investigation into MIAs, which revealed that in the operations that took place to locate the victims of Kibbutz Nitzanim, in 1949 the body of Shafer was collected from Majdal (Ashkelon) and was buried in the mass grave in Nitzanim. In 2018, her body was located at the end of an extensive investigation and her name was added to the mass grave in Kibbutz Nitzanim.
Following the investigation, it was recently determined that under the same circumstances in which Shafer’s body was collected, the bodies of her friends Eisenberg and Rubinstein who were by her side until their death, were also recovered.
Private Binyamin Aryeh (York) Eisenberg was born in Poland in 1927 and immigrated to Israel in 1946. In 1947 he enlisted in the Palmach fighting force and was among the defenders of Kibbutz Yad Mordechai during the War of Independence. He fell in battle on May 24, 1948.
Yitzhak Rubinstein was born in Ukraine (Galicia at the time) in 1913 and immigrated to Israel in 1938. He enlisted in the Palmach and was also among the defenders of Kibbutz Mordechai in the War of Independence. He fell in battle on May 24, 1948.
Their families received an update about the end of the investigation from the head of the IDF’s Head of the IDF Manpower Directorate, General Yaniv Asor.
“Let every Israeli mother know that we will not stop until we return every son to a grave in the State of Israel, and discover the burial places of our missing fallen soldiers,” Asor stated.
In the coming weeks, a ceremony will be held to reveal the gravestones of the two, during which, after 74 years, the names of the late Benjamin Eisenberg and Yitzchak Rubinstein will be added to the mass grave in Kibbutz Nitsanim.
