Israel’s Remarkable Fallen Soldier Tribute
Israel’s Remarkable Fallen Soldier Tribute
April 29, 2025
Stickers with photos of fallen soldiers in Israel.
Haaretz –This Wednesday, Israelis will mark Yom HaZikaron, the memorial day for Israel’s fallen soldiers. At the last count, there were more than 25,000 of them.
Although Israel has a highly developed culture of grieving and mourning, as a country that has suffered war and bloodshed since its first days, an unusual commemoration project has literally taken over the public sphere this year.
It began on a small scale, with friends and relatives of soldiers killed in action since October 7, 2023, hanging up stickers featuring their photos and interesting tidbits about them. It quickly spread, to the point that in some places in Israel – like the Tel Aviv Hashalom train station – the entire space is wallpapered with them.
Dr. Noam Tirosh, head of the Department of Communication Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), has spent the past few months studying these stickers, trying to gain some insight into what they say about Israeli society.
On the Haaretz Podcast, he tells Judy Maltz that he believes the project represents a grassroots attempt from friends and family members of the fallen soldiers to circumvent strict rules about what can be written on their gravestones.
“The stickers are clearly an attempt by people to tell a wider story,” he says. “The fallen soldiers were not only soldiers. They were lovers. They were football fans. They were friends of lots of people. They were human beings.”
Dr. Tirosh says it is also about “the democratization of the memory of the dead,” and, as far as he knows, there is no other commemoration project like it anywhere in the world.
Listen to the full podcast on Haaretz>>
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