Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

Animated Memories for Yom Hazikaron

Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day for fallen soldiers and victims of terror, is a somber one. Families and friends visit the graves of deceased loved ones, sad music plays all day on the radio, and special programming replaces regularly scheduled television shows. It doesn’t seem like the kind of day to be animated.

But Beit AVI CHAI, a cultural and social center in Jerusalem established by the AVI CHAI Foundation, is doing the unexpected. In a new project called “Panim. Yom. Zikaron,” (Face. Day. Remembrance) it is capturing memories of fallen soldiers in short animated videos. Families submit recollections of fallen loved ones, and young animators are commissioned to create short videos based on them.

There are currently nine videos posted on a special section of Beit AVI CHAI’s website, and it has put out a call out to animators, asking them to participate in the project, and to the public to submit stories. The videos and information are in Hebrew only, but you can understand the gist of the stories without knowing the language.

Just as the recollections and the fallen soldiers featured are unique, so is the style of animation for each video. One soldier remembers getting to know Aryeh Aloni, who fell during the Yom Kippur War, when they shared guard duty one night. Another has Ezra Asher, killed by friendly fire in southern Lebanon in 1993, stepping out of the newspaper announcement of his death to speak with a young boy whose father is going off to war.

Another, set to a song called, “Sha’arey Shamayim” (Gates of Heaven) by Israeli singer Ehud Banai, has a mother imagining in her grief that she dives into the depths of the Kinneret to meet her son, Yuval Glick, who was killed when his plane crashed into the lake during a training operation in 1991.

In its introduction to the project, Beit AVI CHAI explains that its purpose is to harness technology to bring to life fragments of memory and to share them with everyone: “Memories carry importance more than just one day a year.”

Watch a video from ‘Panim. Yom. Zikaron.’:

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.