Army Pvt. David Moser has spent more than 100 years with a cross on his grave, despite being Jewish. Now, the fallen soldier can finally rest in peace with a Star of David on his headstone.
Moser was buried in Arlington in 1920 after dying of influenza while fighting in Germany in 1918.
The news of Moser’s death resulted in his father having a stroke, leaving him unable to ever speak again, according to the Washington Jewish Week.
Deborah Eiferman, Moser’s 102-year-old niece, told CBS News that "He was a proud American Jew who loved his country and respected our Constitution…It was part of his essence."
"It's a validation of what my baby uncle was, so it means a lot to me,' Eiferman said of the headstone ceremony.
“For 105 years, David Moser was buried under a Latin cross, meaning part of his true identity lay hidden,” she said. “As a proud member of the Jewish religion who loved his country, volunteered to defend it and gave his life for it, I feel that his contribution as a Jewish American is finally being honored.”
Moser’s story is not a unique one, as hundreds of American soldiers have been wrongfully buried under a headstone of a different face, according to Rabbi Shalom Lamm from the organization Operation Benjamin.
"We think the total number of errors that we'll find between World War I and World War II is about 900," he estimated. "The question really is, why are they (the headstone mistakes) so rare? If you think about it, let's just take World War II, for example: 5,000 Americans are killed in battle every month. You have these terrible battlefields. And there's no computers."
“Many Jews didn’t want to be identified as Jews,” said Shalom Lamm, Operation Benjamin’s co-founder and chief historian. “Either they were afraid of being captured — certainly in World War II. But in World War I, there was plenty of antisemitism.”
Another almost-lost Jewish war hero
Around the same time that Moser was finally able to rest under the symbol of his faith, Pfc. Adolph Hanf’s gravesite was also corrected, according to Ynet.
The soldier, who was originally from Russia but migrated to the US, was killed in a missile strike in 1918. Hanf’s brother, who migrated alongside him, never had children and so Hanf’s history was almost entirely lost until Operation Benjamin researched him.
“It’s a phenomenal gift that the Arlington National Cemetery — and I really mean a gift — allowed us to stand in for the closest living relative because there is no closest living relative; he is ultimately alone,” Lamm said in an interview with Washington Jewish Week. “We asked the Eiferman family to basically be the family of Adolph Hanf at the ceremony and they did.”
“You have a guy who’s not had Kaddish said for him in 100 and some odd years, and now you had 150 people sitting there saying Kaddish; that was so special,” Lamm added
