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Jewish Chaplains Get Memorial of Own

When the USS Dorchester, a U.S. Army troop ship carrying 900 soldiers and civilians, was attacked by the Germans in 1943, a rabbi, a Catholic priest and two Protestant ministers helped soldiers onto lifeboats and handed out life jackets, giving away their own as the ship sank off the coast of Greenland. The four chaplains were seen singing hymns and holding hands until the very end.

Yet Rabbi Alexander Goode was the only one of the Immortal Chaplains, as they came to be known, not honored with a memorial. That is, until now.

On October 24, a ceremony at the Memorial Amphitheater at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia will dedicate the first monument on Chaplains Hill, commemorating Goode and 13 other Jewish chaplains killed on active duty in America’s armed forces.

“We decided that all four needed to be honored,” said the project’s originator, Ken Kraetzer, commander of Squadron 50 of the Sons of the American Legion. Kraetzer was searching for the names of all four lost chaplains at Chaplains Hill when he realized not only that Goode’s name was missing, but also that there was no monument to Jewish chaplains at all....

Read entire article at Jewish Daily Forward