136 graves, five map fragments: how IDF found fallen soldier's burial place after 78 years

A team from the IDF's Missing Persons Branch, the Military Rabbinate and the Defense Ministry spent more than four years investigating the burial place of Shlomo Haimson, who was killed nearly 78 years ago while attempting to escape the Karaolos detention camp in Cyprus. The IDF announced Wednesday that his burial site had been identified through a combination of fragmented historical records and methodical reconstruction work.

Haimson was killed by guards at the detention camp during the night of September 29-30, 1948. Because he died in Cyprus rather than in Israel, his name did not appear on the standard investigation lists initially used to track fallen soldiers.

The investigation began when a reservist major who had researched cemetery history learned that an entire cemetery had been transferred from Cyprus to Israel and reburied in Haifa. He contacted the Cyprus Detainees Association, which maintains the burial plot, and discovered they held 136 graves, 120 of them unidentified. Haimson's name appeared among documents connected to those graves.

Haimson had originally been buried in the Margo cemetery in Cyprus before his remains were transferred to Israel in 1970 along with other graves. Investigators obtained a map of the Margo cemetery, but it arrived in five separate pieces from different archives, at varying resolutions and angles. The team reconstructed these fragments into a single map and cross-referenced them with burial lists prepared by successive rabbis sent to Cyprus, who had each documented graves differently without a uniform recording system.

Investigators identified the cemetery gate to establish the map's orientation and used surviving inscriptions on some headstones as reference points. The breakthrough came when they determined how rabbis had ordered grave rows. One rabbi had recorded seven consecutive names, some of which matched surviving headstones already established as anchors. Six of those names belonged to the same row, leaving the seventh - Haimson - as the last one.

After identifying the burial site, the Defense Ministry notified Haimson's family in Brazil, and investigators presented the evidence to them in a video call. Haimson's daughter Miriam was four days old when he was killed.