By Andrew Adler
Community Editor
There is a room at Congregation Adath Jeshurun whose walls bear testimonies of supreme sacrifice. These are their stories.
It was just before dawn on Monday, March 19, 1945 when the lone plane appeared: a Japanese Yokosuka D4Y “Judy” swooping out of the clouds to drop a pair of 550-pound armor piercing bombs on the broad flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Franklin. Two enormous explosions rocked the warship, igniting gasoline-nourished fires and producing waves of decimation that would kill 807 sailors and wound 487 more — more than half of the vessel’s complement of 2,200.
One of those who perished was a 22-year-old gunner’s mate from Louisville — Seaman Second Class Robert Cyril Stern — who’d enlisted three years earlier, not long after the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Soon afterward one of his younger brothers also signed up.
There was a third brother who, like his parents, could only watch as his older siblings went off to war. Donald Stern was nine when Robert left home; 12 when news of his eldest brother’s death reached the Stern household.
By then it was April of 1945, the middle of Passover. “I was in junior high school,” Don Stern, now 92, recalled, telling how his mother was in synagogue services as word filtered down to a select few. “They went and pulled her out of shul,” Stern said, “and then they came and got me.”
“My mother was never the same again – she was emotionally fragile all of her life,” Stern said. “It really did her in.”
His father was attending to business at the family pharmacy, Stern Drugs, a profession Donald would eventually embrace as his own after serving in Japan during the Korean War. During the 1940s the Stern family lived above the store at 2700 Taylorsville Road, where suddenly the reality of wartime loss was in stark relief.
“It was surreal,” Don Stern said. “I couldn’t believe it for a while. I’d had a very short time to bond with that brother — I was nine when he left. So there were three or four years when we’d pal around together, but not much.”
Details about Robert Stern’s death emerged only sporadically. He’d been assigned to the Franklin after an initial stint serving on an oil tanker. The Franklin — one of 24 Essex-class aircraft carriers that participated in WWII — entered service relatively late in the conflict: early 1944. The ship fought in several of the Pacific Theater’s biggest naval engagements, including the invasion of the Philippines and the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest battle in naval history.
On March 19, 1945, the Franklin lay a mere 50 miles off the Japanese mainland — closer than any American carrier during the war. After the bombs struck the ship, only the heroic efforts of the surviving personnel onboard kept the vessel from sinking.
The precise circumstances of Robert Stern’s death were never determined. He, like hundreds of his shipmates, was buried at sea. Posthumously he was awarded the Purple Heart.
His story is chronicled in framed documents and photographs on display in Classroom 121, located at the far end of the long corridor housing Adath Jeshurun’s gift shop and administrative offices. Alongside are similar exhibits honoring fallen AJ veterans: all from WW II except for a single Vietnam-era soldier.
The installation was shepherded by Arnold Zegart, a longtime congregation member (and another pharmacist) who’s made it his mission to keep those memories alive. The memorial grew out of the synagogue’s 2013 renovation, a substantial project that provided an opportunity to rethink aspects of the congregation’s mission.
For decades there had been a traditional bronze plaque with names of congregants who died during wartime. The plaque went missing during construction – its whereabouts remain a mystery. Yet the dedicated memorial room, with its original documents and accompanying photographs of eight fallen soldiers, embraces an altogether greater scope of sacred memory.
Forever Young reads a tall inscription on the far wall, next to a furled American flag topped with a golden eagle. Below lies a thematic attribution, unmistakable in bold capital letters:
Dedicated to the SONS OF ADATH JESHRUN who made the ultimate sacrifice for our country. Often overlooked by history, but they shall never be forgotten.
Zegart himself is a veteran, though at age 82 fell between two defining Asian conflicts. “I proudly served two years in the Army, but I was born lucky: too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam,” he said. Enrolled in Purdue University ROTC, Zegart graduated as a newly commissioned 2nd Lieutenant, and soon found himself stationed at Denver’s Rocky Mountain Arsenal, “where we made nerve gas and those M55 (chemical weapon) rockets we were prepared to send one-way to Russia. They ended up in Richmond, Ky. to be disarmed.”
On this particular afternoon at AJ, guiding a visitor among the various framed tributes, Zegart’s voice was tinged with a kind of hallowed wistfulness.
“I have great respect for these eight men who made the supreme sacrifice, because I feel like they are here in this room,” he said. Even those who survived tended to retreat into silence. “I’ve found that someone who’s been in combat almost never talks about it. It does something to him.”
Zegart plucked an example from his own extended family. “I had an uncle who was a Marine in World War II, and he was in the thick of three of the worst campaigns in Marine Corps history. He was in the second wave at Tarawa – the first wave was wiped out. He was at Saipan, and then at Okinawa as a forward artillery observer. He saw almost all of his best friends killed – and he never would talk about it.”
A multitude of Purple Hearts adorn the walls of Classroom 121. So too are telegrams announcing, in the terse vernacular of military officialdom, the death of a son, a brother, a nephew. Next to these are neatly typed letters of condolence, such as one addressed to David I. Wilson of 1426 South Fourth Street, dated December 22, 1944:
My dear Mr. Wilson: At the request of the President, I write to inform you that the Purple Heart has been awarded posthumously to your son, Private First Class Daniel Wilson, Infantry, who sacrificed his life in defense of his country.
Little that we can do or say will console you for the death of your loved one…When the medal, which you will shortly receive, reaches you, I want you to know that with it goes my sincerest sympathy, and the hope that time and the victory of our cause will finally lighten the burden of your grief.
Sincerely yours,
[Secretary of War] Henry L. Stimson
A more personal account arrived a few weeks later on December 6, 1944, addressed to Hannah Wilson, Daniel’s mother. It was written by 143rd Infantry Chaplain Charles W. Arbuthnot Jr.
“As spiritual advisor to the men, Daniel was one of “my boys” and his friends and I share your loss…In the stress of war one is not permitted to tell very much. His burial place cannot even be divulged at this time.
Here is an extract from the official narrative: “Pfc Wilson, a rifleman in the third platoon in Company ‘L,’ was in the attack against a strong enemy position in Eastern France on 6 October 1944.The third platoon had to cross an open space in the attack. Pfc Wilson was caught in the crossfire of an enemy machine gun and was killed instantly.”
After Daniel’s death he was interred with a fitting ceremony by a Jewish Chaplain. We all [stood] humbly with heads bowed before this soldierly example of the supreme sacrifice for a cause that must and will survive. To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.
Elsewhere Classroom 121’s walls recount myriad acts of dedication and selflessness.
Two of the fallen soldiers had, by dint of timing and happenstance, escaped from Nazi Germany.
One was Fedor Herman Benjamin, who was born on May 3, 1925, in the Prussian town of Beuthen. In 1938 his family immigrated to the U.S., making their way to Louisville two years later. Returning to Europe as an Army Pfc. to fight the Nazis, Benjamin was killed in action in Italy on March 7, 1945 — barely two months before Germany surrendered. All of 19 years old, he now rests in Adath Jeshurun Cemetery.
Ernest Leopold Palm, a German national living with his family in Louisville, never made it back to his home country — he died in a Florida plane crash in early March 1944.
Sergeant Palm, Who Begged Chance as Alien to Enter Army, Dies a Hero read a headline in the March 4, 1944 edition of The Courier-Journal.
“They wouldn’t take Ernest Leopold Palm into the Army early in 1942 because he was a German alien,” the paper’s story began. “But he wrote letters pleading for a chance to repay the United States for giving haven to him and his family driven from their homeland by the Nazis.
“He described himself as ‘the happiest man in the U.S. Army,’” the story continued, “when he was accepted as the first German alien to be inducted in the Fifth Corps Area.”
The word “hero” certainly applied to 2nd Lieutenant Sidney S. Brownstein. He died during a training exercise at Fort Knox on November 22, 1943, when he threw himself on a live grenade a recruit had accidentally dropped, saving the lives of 20 soldiers. He was 30 years old.
Oscar Leo Sessamer, who spent much of the war stationed in England sorting mail, was frustrated that he wasn’t given the opportunity to fight the Germans. He got his wish early in 1945 when he joined Patton’s Third Army, only to be killed on April 11 of that year – less than a month before VE Day on May 8.
Stanley Sweitzer, a 1st Lt. in the Army Air Corps, was a senior at U of L’s Speed Scientific School when he enlisted in 1942. Sweitzer died in his B-17 – which its crew had named “Just Plain Lonesome” and endured for upwards of 20 missions — on February 3, 1945, during a bombing run over Berlin. He was 23 – a comparative elder next to so many teenagers.
Classroom 121 has a single more recent honoree: Michael J. Caller, a Marine Lance Corporal who was killed — along with four fellow Marines — during an early morning rocket attack in Quang Nam Province, South Vietnam on August 28, 1967.
Ordinarily stationed on Okinawa, “Caller was sleeping on a cot in his friend’s hooch when the rocket attack began,” an account of the incident related. “One of the projectiles came through the roof and Caller was killed instantly on his first night in Vietnam when a piece of shrapnel pierced [his] heart.”
The young Marine was 19. In two more years, he would have been able to vote. Instead, his body was brought back to Louisville and interred in Adath Jeshurun Cemetery, where today he lies in the company of brethren whose lives, once brimming with possibility, were cut short by the arbitrary vehemence of war.