An IDF spokesperson has announced that the bodies of Private Binyamin Aryeh Eisenberg and Private Yitzhak Rubenstein have been found by the IDF unit for location of missing soldiers.
Eisenberg and Rubenstein were killed in the battles at Yad Mordechai during Israel's War of Independence in 1948, and their place of burial was not known. Their bodies were found after over a decade of intensive efforts by the IDF's unit for locating missing soldiers.
During the War of Independence, at the conclusion of the battle to protect Kibbutz Yad Mordechai on the night between May 23-24, 1948, just a few days after the State of Israel was declared and while evacuating a wounded comrade, a group of three Palmach fighters was taken into captivity. Among the group were Eisenberg, who was lying wounded on a stretcher; and Rubenstein and medic Libka Shefer, who were carrying Eisenberg's stretcher.
In 1952, then-IDF Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren declared the three to be fallen soldiers whose place of burial was unknown.
Between 2012-2018, there has been an ongoing investigation to locate the soldiers' bodies, and it was discovered that in 1949, Shefer's body was located and buried in a mass grave in Nitzanim. This was confirmed in 2018, and Shefer's name was added to the list of names at the grave.
Recently, the investigation revealed that at the same time that Shefer's body was found and brought to burial in the mass grave at Nitzanim, Eisenberg's and Rubenstein's bodies were also found and buried in the mass grave at Nitzanim.
Eisenberg was born in Poland in 1927, and immigrated to Israel in 1946, on a ship of illegal immigrants. In 1947, he joined the Palmach, and he was among the defenders of Kibbutz Yad Mordechai during the War of Independence. He was killed while defending the kibbutz, on May 24, 1948.
Rubenstein was born in Ukraine (then Galicia) in 1913, and immigrated to Israel in 1938, on a ship of illegal immigrants. He joined the Palmach and was among the defenders of Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, where he was killed during the War of Independence on May 24, 1948.
Eisenberg's and Rubenstein's families were notified Friday morning of the completion of the investigation.
In the coming weeks, a ceremony will be held to reveal their headstones, and their names will be added to the list of those buried in the mass grave at Nitzanim.
Major-General Yaniv Asor, who heads the manpower department, said, "Every Hebrew mother should know that we will not cease until we bring all our sons for burial in Israel and discover the place of burial of all our fallen whose place of burial is not known."
"The fighters of the generation of 1948 dreamed of the State and fought for its founding. Some of them are Holocaust survivors who fought with courage in fierce battles against the Arab armies, for the sake of the State of Israel's independence. Determining the grave of the fighters whose place of burial is not known, even 74 years after they fell, is a deep and authentic obligation that the nation of Israel and the IDF have.
"Today, the State of Israel and the Israel Defense Forces fulfill an ethical obligation to declare the graves of Binyamin Aryeh Eisenberg and Yitzhak Rubenstein at the mass grave at Nitzanim."
