While commemorating his uncle, Israel Zisek identified an empty area with a rust-filled sign • On a closer look it turned out to be a Holocaust survivor's grave • Now the decades-long injustice has been fixed

• The grave after the tombstone is placed // Photo: Sharulik Steinmetz "Memorial stones"

54 years ago, Jacob Schmilowitz and Natman died in the old Carmel Coast cemetery, without a headstone and probably also without people who had visited his grave. About a month ago, one alert person noticed this and decided to take action so that Jacob would finally be truly honored.

Israel Zisk from the Mosque of Yitzhak in the south, encrypted every year to Haifa to attend the memorial service for his uncle, Israel Globus, after his name, who was murdered in 1965 by terrorists and buried in the old Carmel beach cemetery. Suddenly, he noticed that near his uncle's grave, there was a vacant space without a headstone.

At first, Zisk thought it was an empty tomb, but at a second glance he recognized that on the ground was a rusty metal sign that could hardly be read. After finding out with various officials in the cemetery administration, he realized that a man named Ya'akov Shmilowitz was buried there.

Shmilowitz was born in Romania in 1910, survived the Holocaust and immigrated to Israel in 1962. Three years later, he died at the age of 55 when he was single and without a family, except for his brother who was probably the one who led the burial.

Knowing that there was a man buried without a tombstone that would honor his memory properly, plagued Israel. "I thought it could not be that in the Jewish state, a person buried in a cemetery will not have a situation for 54 years," he says, adding that at that moment he decided, "that it is time for him to have the most simple and humble situation." Zisk was assisted by Batya Carmon, who worked for many years in the Interior Ministry, and Dorit Perry from the "Give a Face to the Fallen" association, which is how the man came to be. He then approached the ZAK commander in his hometown of Beer Sheva, Rabbi Moshe Dickstein, and he succeeded in raising donations of NIS 4,500, which enabled the purchase of the tombstone in memory of Shmilowitz.

Someone who was excited about the event was the chairman of the Holocaust Survivors' Organizational Center in Israel, former Knesset member and Romanian native herself, Colette Avital, who wrote to Zisk: "I would like to thank you very much for your initiative and the kindness you did in giving there and burying a man who passed away so many years ago" .

Zisk did lead the last act of benevolence with Shmilowitz, more than five decades after he passed away, but he says there is still much work to be done. "Of course I did, only in the old Carmel Coast cemetery, there are about two hundred graves without a tombstone. I guess in all the country the number comes to thousands and more. That is why the State of Israel should undertake to place tombstones on all those old tombs that no one commands and honor Last of all those people who are no longer living "