Dear Families,
Distinguished Guests,

The shadows are growing long, night is falling, and soon the Remembrance Day for Israel’s Fallen Soldiers will be sanctified.  On this special day, the entire nation, with one heart, will be as one with the bereaved family in grief, identification and a common fate.  Your pain is our pain, your grief is our grief, because the fallen are precious children to us all, and for us they gave their lives.  They are deserving of eternal gratitude and eternal glory.  Israel’s magnificence, which includes 57 years of independence and accomplishments unprecedented among nations – is thanks to them.

The fighters who returned from the fields of fire carry with them the sting of cruel parting from their fallen comrades.  Like them, from time to time I see in my mind’s eye the image of the never-ending battle.  I see the faces of my friends, my commanders and those who served under my command – familiar faces covered in dust, furrowed in effort.  I hear voices cut off by the sound of metal, a deafening boom of explosions.  I smell the sweat and fire of the battlefield.  In the soul of every fighter and every commander who led soldiers, are many friends, and each of them hold a warm place in their heart, like an album with photographs which have yellowed over the years, but still show a refreshing view of other, nostalgic times.

One who has experienced this; one who was there in the line of fire, barraged by a hail of bullets and mortars; one who carried in his arms the mortally wounded, a comrade-in-arms, and felt the heat of his flowing blood, his final breath; one who saw and knew first-hand the most terrible price of damned war – will forever uphold the vow to do everything possible to prevent the next generation – the children of today, the soldiers of tomorrow – from experiencing the cost of war, and to illuminate the future of Israel with a new horizon of security and peace.

There is no cure for bereavement.  I know.  You, the bereaved families, your hearts are burdened by the suffocating grief, and you still continue onwards.  The decree of existence is to live with the sorrow, overcome it day after day.  All the simple, obvious things entail for you unceasing confrontation.  There are those who are more successful, there are those who are less successful.  There are those who break and those who overcome.

The song of life of those who fell “was cut off in mid-course”, but they fell so that the song of life of the people of Israel will never stop, and so that your song may also go on – the song of those they loved and cherished most – so that it will never end.

I pray that this will be your comfort.

May the memory of the fallen be forever blessed and inscribed in the heart of Israel.