Operation Jacob: 100th yahrzeit for heroic medical serviceman and an overdue consecration
On 26 October 1922, while riding bareback to render first aid, the 31-year-old Captain Norman Packer was thrown from the horse and died of a fractured skull, and was buried in a cemetery near Cologne.
Captain Norman Packer
In 1923 Norman’s parents arranged for the body of their doctor son to be exhumed and returned to Australia to be re-buried in Sydney’s Rookwood Jewish Cemetery.
Captain Packer was one of only three servicemen to be reinterred in Australia between WWI and WWII.
This month will see his 100th yahrzeit.
Trooper Benjamin Braun, born in 1877, served on two deployments from 1899 to 1902 in the Boer War, South Africa, then served from 1917 to 1921 in the Australian Army. He died in 1928 and was buried in an unmarked grave in Rookwood Jewish Cemetery. It was not until 2016 that his story was discovered, and a headstone provided – but it remains unconsecrated. Now, 94 years after Benjamin Braun’s death, that duty will finally be completed.
The public is invited to these unique commemorative services, led by Rabbi Dr Benjamin Elton, Chief Minister of The Great Synagogue, on Sunday, October 30, at 11:15am.
Operation Jacob has also arranged for the attendance of a special horse – ‘Charger with boots reversed’ – and representatives of Jewish and military history organisations to mark the centenary of the death of Captain Norman Packer RAMC and for the belated consecration of the grave of Trooper Benjamin Braun, a Boer War veteran.
The unique story of Norman Edward Packer has remained unheard until now. Born in 1891 and bar-mitzvah at The Great Synagogue, he studied medicine at the University of Sydney. Packer was one of the young Australian doctors known as Kitchener’s One Hundred, recruited by the British Army in 1915 to serve on the Western Front until the end of The Great War in 1918.
Subsequently, he served in the British Army of Occupation of the Rhine.
The services will be followed by a tour of other notable Jewish military graves, concluding with the Last Post at the Jewish Ex-Services Memorial at 1:00pm.
Contact: Peter M. Allen – [email protected]
Operation Jacob is supported by the Federal Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women (FAJEX) and the Australian Jewish Historical Society (AJHS).
