A purple heart for an unknown hero

Leah Adler’s recent article in the Jewish Standard, “Honoring Jewish American Veterans,” told the story of a wonderfully meaningful inter-synagogue program in Teaneck among Orthodox Rinat Yisrael and Bnai Yeshurun and Conservative Beth Sholom — a noteworthy occurrence in itself. The program commemorated Veterans Day and saluted those shuls’ members, and relatives of members, who served in the U.S. military. The article’s concluding paragraph quoting Rabbi Elliot Schrier of Bnai Yeshurun particularly resonated with me:

“On a very personal note, [the program] was a point of pride for me. My grandfather, who I am named for, served this nation in World War II. He was injured in combat, and his purple heart is one of my family’s most cherished possessions.”

This brought back a flood of memories, and not only because I knew R. Schrier’s grandparents from my Far Rockaway days. Rather, my mother’s brother, Uncle Moshe — Murray A. Gross, Seaman Second Class, U.S. Navy — also received a purple heart for his service in World War II. Unlike R. Schrier’s grandfather, however, Uncle Moshe did not return home to loving relatives and a grateful nation; rather, he was lost off the Normandy shore in the D-Day invasion. His body was never recovered, and he remains memorialized as one of the 1,557 names on the Walls of the Missing in the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial in France, on the reverse side of the headstone of his father on Har HaZeisim in Jerusalem, and, finally, in the eponymous Yeshiva Zichron Moshe in South Fallsburg (originally in the Bronx), which Rav Yerucham Gorelick founded together with my grandparents, Isaac and Regina Gross, who financed its creation using Uncle Moshe’s military life insurance benefit.

But that still doesn’t tell the full story of why R. Schrier’s comment resounded so deeply. It’s this. As I’ve written before (“Heroes Close to Home …”), there was “a corner in the living rooms of my maternal grandparents’ apartments, first in the Bronx and then in Far Rockaway . . . [that] had a table with a framed picture of a handsome sailor, beneath which lay his Purple Heart medal and certificate.” And so, the Purple Heart of our family’s hero was also deeply cherished for decades.

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After I read Leah’s lovely article, I wondered what happened to the Purple Heart after my grandparents died and their apartment’s contents were dispersed. And with no one left from Uncle Moshe’s generation to ask, I emailed those in mine (and even one in a generation below) in the hope that someone would know what became of it.

Seaman Second Class Murray Gross was Mr. Kaplan’s Uncle Moshe.And someone did. As I had vaguely remembered, it had first gone to my late Uncle Alex. And in response to my email, his daughter, my cousin Ellen, who lives in Modi’in, told me that she has it now. She also said she was planning to donate it to the recently opened Chaim Herzog Museum of the Jewish Soldier in WW II, located on the grounds of Israel’s famous Tank Museum in Latrun. A most fitting final resting place.

So the story has a somewhat happy ending, with the Purple Heart found (of course, it was never lost), and Moshe to be memorialized yet a fourth time — now in a museum in a state that he never knew, but to which, in some small, circuitous way, he gave his last full measure of devotion in helping in its ultimate creation.

There is also an unhappy part, however. I wish I could add that Moshe had been a Zionist and would be pleased to know that his Purple Heart will now reside in a museum in the Jewish State of Israel. But I can’t, because I don’t know enough about him. I know he was dashingly handsome and had a very good voice (he sang in liturgical choirs on the High Holidays, sometimes with his father). I even know a bit about his death, as my mother once told me that she made a hospital visit to Moshe’s seaman buddy, who was standing next to him when their ship was bombed. He told her that he was thrown backward by the blast, severely injured but alive; Moshe was thrown overboard and lost.

But I don’t know if Moshe was a Zionist, just like I don’t know so much more: if he had a girlfriend waiting for him to return from war; if he spoke English with an accent (he came to America at a young age); if he loved learning Torah or playing baseball, or both, or neither; if he planned on going to college after he finished his service or what career he envisioned for himself; if, if, if. And I don’t know any of this because — the foolishness of youth! — I never asked my parents, grandparents, or aunts and uncles about him. And by the time I realized how much I didn’t know and wanted to learn, there was no one left to ask.

I know I’ve delivered this message before, but repeating it every few years, especially to my younger readers, is a privilege I think I’m entitled to as a regular columnist. And it’s this: find out your family’s lore from those who know it before it’s too late. When your kids are grown and out of the house and your career has perhaps reverted to second gear from third and you realize how much you want to know about your family history and you finally have the time to spend learning it, it may no longer be possible to do so.

Elie Wiesel said that “without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.” I would add that without memory there is no family, and without knowledge beyond oneself there is no family memory. It warms my heart that we’ll be able to memorialize Uncle Moshe in this new way. How much warmer my heart would be if I truly knew who this unsung hero was.

Joseph C. Kaplan, a retired lawyer, longtime Teaneck resident, and regular columnist for the Jewish Standard and the New Jersey Jewish News, is the author of “A Passionate Writing Life: From ‘In my Opinion’ to ‘I’ve Been Thinking’” (available at Teaneck’s Judaica House). He and his wife, Sharon, have been blessed with four wonderful daughters and five delicious grandchildren.