Yesterday, Americans recalled the sacrifices of their compatriots who, from the Revolutionary War until the present day, have given their lives to defend their country. Jamie Betesh Carter reports on the accomplishments of Operation Benjamin, an organization dedicated to making sure the memory of the Jews among them is properly preserved:

Shalom Lamm, Operation Benjamin’s CEO, grew up in Manhattan and always had an obsession with U.S. military history, so much so that while working full time and raising five children he went back to school and received a master’s degree in American military history. Around the same time, a rabbi and Lamm’s close friend named Jacob J. Schacter led a small tour through France, where he visited the Normandy American Cemetery. He returned from the trip and let Lamm know that while he was very moved by the experience, he expected to see more Stars of David in the cemetery.

Lamm and Schacter assumed that many fallen Jewish soldiers were mistakenly buried under Latin crosses, and conducted an experiment to see if their theory was true. . . . “It turns out there are thirteen World War II cemeteries, and in at least twelve of them there are hundreds of Jewish soldiers buried under crosses, mistakenly,” [said Lamm]. It was then, in 2020, that Operation Benjamin was created. . . . Lamm left his career in real estate to become CEO of this new nonprofit. Lamm estimates that there are between 400 and 500 Jewish soldiers mistakenly buried under crosses. Their goal is to find Jewish soldiers at American military cemeteries, and give them a proper Jewish burial and headstone.

This month, for Memorial Day 2023, Operation Benjamin will be leading a mission of over 60 participants to correct historical errors at the Normandy American Cemetery and Brittany American Cemetery in France. Soon they’ll be working to change the graves of American Jewish soldiers buried in Italy and England. “We’ve changed 23 headstones so far, and we have another 30 or so that are under active investigation,” said Lamm. “And as we go through those, we will continue further and further.”

This week, there have been numerous unconfirmed reports about the fate of Esmail Qaani, who is the head of the Quds Force, the expeditionary arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Benny Avni writes:

On Thursday, Sky News Arabic reported that Mr. Qaani was rushed to a hospital after suffering a heart attack. He became [the Quds Force] commander in 2020, after an American drone strike killed his predecessor, Qassem Suleimani. The unit oversees the Islamic Republic’s various Mideast proxies, as well as the exporting of the Iranian revolution to the region and beyond.

The Sky News report attempts to put to rest earlier claims that Mr. Qaani was killed at Beirut. It follows several reports asserting he has been arrested and interrogated at Tehran over suspicion that he, or a top lieutenant, leaked information to Israel. Five days ago, the Arabic-language al-Arabiya network reported that Mr. Qaani “is under surveillance and isolation, following the Israeli assassinations of prominent Iranian leaders.”

Iranians are desperately scrambling to plug possible leaks that gave Israel precise intelligence to conduct pinpoint strikes against Hizballah commanders. . . . “I find it hard to believe that Qaani was compromised,” an Iran watcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, Beni Sabti, tells the Sun. Perhaps one or more of [Qaani’s] top aides have been recruited by Israel, he says, adding that “psychological warfare” could well be stoking the rumor mill.

If so, prominent Iranians seem to be exacerbating the internal turmoil by alleging that the country’s security apparatus has been infiltrated.