The Military Cemetery in Beersheba

The story

The military cemetery of Beersheba lies in the southwest of the city, adjoining the compound of the Old Cemetery on the northeast. Its ground is flat and extends over about six dunams, its shape is a rectangle with seven plots in it, the main entrance is on the north, and at the center of its southern edge is a ceremonial plaza. It was opened in 1967 as a military plot following the Six-Day War and was later declared a military cemetery; the first burials were made in the southern plot, and buried in it are the fallen from 1962 onwards — 438 in all. By the wars: fifteen from the Six-Day War, twenty-seven from the War of Attrition, seventy-three from the Yom Kippur War, three from the Second Lebanon War, and twenty-five from the Swords of Iron War. Nine of those buried here were decorated with citations of the IDF, and four others with the Medal of Distinguished Service of the Prison Service. At the place stand gravestones in memory of two sailors who perished in the sinking of the submarine Dakar and were not brought to burial. There also stands in it a gravestone that belongs to none of the state's wars: that of the pharmacist Eliyahu Yehoshua Rivlin, who died of illness in 1916 while serving in the Turkish army. The location of his original grave in the Old Cemetery of the city is not known, since the site was desecrated; part of his original gravestone was found in another place and is set today upon his military gravestone. As is customary in the military cemeteries in Israel, the grounds of the site abound in trees and vegetation, but the gravestones themselves are all covered with stone slabs and no vegetation is planted in them, unlike the practice in other places.

• Cemeteries and graves
• Commemoration
• War
• Beersheba