03/20/2025
On March 21, 1945, Bobby Levine was an almost twenty-year-old Marine on Iwo Jima. He had landed on February 19th as a pioneer for the 4th Marine Air Wing with the assignment to secure and maintain the 2nd airstrip in the center of the island.
When the fighting was over, Division Chaplain Warren Cuthriell, a Protestant minister, asked Rabbi Gittelsohn to deliver the memorial sermon at a combined religious service dedicating the Marine Cemetery. Cuthriell wanted all the fallen Marines (black and white, Protestant, Catholic and Jewish) honored in a single, nondenominational ceremony. Unfortunately, racial and religious prejudice was strong in the Marine Corps, as it was then throughout America. According to Rabbi Gittelsohn's autobiography, the majority of Christian chaplains objected to having a rabbi preach over predominantly Christian graves.
To his credit, Cuthriell refused to alter his plans. Gittelsohn, on the other hand, wanted to save his friend Cuthriell further embarrassment and so decided it was best not to deliver his sermon. Instead, three separate religious services were held.
After breakfast a company officer ordered all Jewish Marines to report to the command post. At the command post, my father Robert Levine LCPL was ordered with three other Marines (including a sergeant named Art Buchwald) to proceed to a ceremony at the 5th Marine cemetery.
At the Jewish dedication service Rabbi Lt.Roland Gittelsohn, the first Jewish chaplain in the USMC history led a congregation of 70 or so who attended, At the ceremony Rabbi Gittelsohn delivered the following powerful eulogy he originally wrote for the combined service
My father told me he couldn’t hear very well and didn’t pay much attention, as he was only thinking of getting relieved and off the “stinking” island.
Weeks later my father told me he came across a copy of Leatherneck, the Marine Corp magazine, which published a copy of the Rabbi’s Eulogy. Years later when relating the above to me, my father said that not paying attention that day was his only regret from his three years in combat.
Below is a copy of the eulogy which was titled,
“The Purest Democracy”
"This is perhaps the grimmest, and surely the holiest task we have faced since D-Day. Here before us lie the bodies of comrades and friends. Men who until yesterday or last week laughed with us, joked with us, trained with us. Men who were on the same ships with us, and went over the sides with us as we prepared to hit the beaches of this island. Men who fought with us and feared with us. Somewhere in this plot of ground there may lie the man who could have discovered the cure for cancer. Under one of these Christian crosses, or beneath a Jewish Star of David, there may now rest a man who was destined to be a great prophet–to find the way, perhaps, for all to live in plenty, with poverty and hardship for none. Now they lie here silently in this sacred soil, and we gather to consecrate this earth in their memory.
It is not easy to do so. Some of us have buried our closest friends here. We saw these men killed before our very eyes. Any one of us might have died in their places. Indeed, some of us are alive and breathing at this very moment only because men who lie here beneath us had the courage and strength to give their lives for ours. To speak in memory of such men as these is not easy. Of them too can it be said with utter truth: "The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here. It can never forget what they did here."
No, our poor power of speech can add nothing to what these men and the other dead of our division who are not here have already done. All that we even hope to do is follow their example. To show the same selfless courage in peace that they did in war. To swear that by the grace of God and the stubborn strength and power of human will, their sons and ours shall never suffer these pains again. These men have done their jobs well. They have paid the ghastly price of freedom. If that freedom be once again lost, as it was after the last war, the unforgivable blame will be ours, not theirs. So, it is we the living who are here to be dedicated and consecrated.
We dedicate ourselves, first, to live together in peace the way they fought and are buried in this war. Here lie men who loved America because their ancestors generations ago helped in her founding, and other men who loved her with equal passion because they themselves or their own fathers escaped from oppression to her blessed shores. Here lie officers and men, negroes and whites, rich men and poor–together. Here no man prefers another because of his faith or despises him because of his color. Here there are no quotas of how many from each group are admitted or allowed. Among these men there is no discrimination. No prejudices. No hatred. Theirs is the highest and purest democracy.
Any man among us the living who fails to understand that will thereby betray those who lie here dead. Whoever of us lifts up his hand in hate against a brother, or thinks himself superior to those who happen to be in the minority, makes of this ceremony and of the bloody sacrifice it commemorates, an empty, hollow mockery. To this, then, as our solemn, sacred duty, do we the living now dedicate ourselves: to the rights of Protestants, Catholics and Jews, of white men and negroes alike, to enjoy the democracy for which all of them here have paid the price.
To one thing more do we consecrate ourselves in memory of those who sleep beneath these crosses and stars. We shall not foolishly suppose, as did the last generation of America's fighting men, that victory on the battlefield will automatically guarantee the triumph of democracy at home. This war, with all its frightful heartache and suffering, is but the beginning our generation's struggle for democracy. When the last battle has been won, there will be those at home, as there was the last time, who will want us to turn our backs in selfish isolation on the rest of organized humanity, and thus to sabotage the very peace for which we fight. We promise you who lie here: we will not do that! We will join hands with Britain, China, and Russia in peace, even as we have in war, to build the kind of world for which you died.
When the last shot has been fired, there will still be those whose eyes are turned backward, not forward, who will be satisfied with those wide extremes of poverty and wealth in which the seeds of another war can breed. We promise you, our departed comrades: this too we will not permit. This war has been fought by the common man; its fruits of peace must be enjoyed by the common man! We promise, by all that is sacred and holy, that your sons, the sons of miners and millers, the sons of farmers and workers, the right to a living that is decent and secure.
When the final cross has been placed in the last cemetery, once again there will be those to whom profit is more important than peace, who will insist with the voice of sweet reasonableness and appeasement that it is better to trade with the enemies of mankind, than by crushing them, to lose their profit. To you who sleep here silently, we give our promise: we will not listen! We will not forget that some of you were burnt with oil that came from American wells, that many of you were killed with shells fashioned from American steel. We promise that when once again men profit at your expense, we shall remember how you looked when we placed you reverently, lovingly, in the ground.
Thus do we memorialize those who, having ceased living with us, now live within us. Thus, do we consecrate ourselves the living to carry on the struggle they began. Too much blood has gone into this soil for us to let it lie barren. Too much pain and heartache have fertilized the earth on which we stand. We here solemnly swear: this shall not be in vain! Out of this, and from the suffering and sorrow of those who mourn this, will come–we promise–the birth of a new freedom for the sons of men everywhere. Amen."
I am privileged to have been Bobby Levine’s son, for too many reasons to list here. But I was equally privileged to have met Rabbi Gittelsohn years after my father related his memory to me. As a paramedic for the City of Boston, I was dispatched to a major fire in synagogue on Tremont Street. As the firefighters exited the building having retrieved and saved the Torahs, they weren’t sure what to do with them. One of the fire officials noticed my presence and was aware my name was Levine; therefore, I became the instantaneous subject matter expert on the appropriate disposition of the sacred items. I had been told that old torahs were buried like a person, so I assumed putting them in the ambulance was the appropriate thing to do. A while latter an individual approached the ambulance and asked to take the torahs, I asked who he was and he told me he was Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn from a Newton Congregation, I immediately realized who he was.
Later after the torahs were safely on the back seat of his car, secured with seat belts, I introduced myself and quickly related my father’s experience. This famous and much accredited Rabbi patiently listened to my story, and finally said, “When you see your father say hello for me and Semper Fie for me, and maybe have him contact me, us old Marines have to stay together.” At that moment, I knew this man was a sincere and ever caring individual, and that his words in 1945 on that “stinking” island were as profound then, as that day and forever.
I don’t relate this as my moment meeting greatness, but as my deepest belief in the values of this country then and now, and what we should recognize and importance of our inherited responsibility to perpetuate it, it’s the values expressed 80 years ago which we should be extolling today, versus the recent division
