Jamie Betesh Carter
Tablet, May 25, 2023
“It was around this time that we learned this wasn’t an isolated incident. It turns out there are 13 WWII cemeteries, and in at least 12 of them there are hundreds of Jewish soldiers buried under crosses, mistakenly.”
When Mariellen Miller was a child growing up in Cleveland, she noticed a photo in her house of a handsome young soldier in uniform. She’d always ask her mother and stepfather who was in the photo, and all they’d say was that it was Miller’s stepbrother Kenny, who passed away in WWII. Her stepfather, who’d married Miller’s widowed mother, was too distraught over his son’s death to speak about it. For years, she’d stare at the photo, wondering what her stepbrother was like.
Many decades later, after her stepfather passed away, Miller decided to investigate and find out who her stepbrother was. “I never knew anything about him because my father didn’t want to talk about it,” said Miller. “So after my dad died, my brother and I decided to look Kenny up and find out all we could about him.” Miller learned that her stepbrother, Kenneth Earl Robinson, was an athlete, and was on his high school’s swim team. Shortly after WWII broke out, Robinson joined the U.S. Air Force, and became a navigator on a B-17 aircraft. After becoming a second lieutenant, Robinson took part in one of the first daylight raids over Germany, and died in 1943 at the age of 22.
Miller learned that Robinson was buried in the Ardennes American Cemetery in Belgium—even finding his grave number. Soon after, a cousin of Miller’s was touring Europe and promised to visit the grave. “When my cousin got home, she said, ‘I hate to tell you this, but there’s a cross on Kenny’s grave.’ And I was so upset that I said, ‘OK, I’m going to rectify this.’” Miller knew that it would be important to her late stepfather for Kenny to have a proper Jewish burial under a Star of David, so she went to work trying to right this wrong. “I dug up all of the information about Kenny being bar mitzvahed,” said Miller. “I even spoke to the rabbi that conducted his bar mitzvah and learned that Kenny went to see him the night before he left for active duty, and Rabbi Cohen blessed him.”
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