An Orthodox Jew from Vallejo was sitting shiva this week for his daughter Airman 1st Class Elizabeth Jacobson, 21, who was the first female member of the Air Force to die in Iraq.
Jacobson was baptized and mostly raised Christian, and her mother was not Jewish. But her father tried to give her and her sister some sense of Jewish identity. She had enough of one to wear dog tags that identified her as Jewish.
Jacobson was born in Florida and was raised in Madera Ranchos, near Fresno. She and her sister were young children when their parents divorced.
“I felt guilty, and wanted them to self-identify in part as Jews, at least to the extent what I understood it meant to be Jewish,” said David Jacobson in a phone interview. “I tried to transmit it to them, and for awhile that meant telling them they were Jewish because I wanted patrilineal Judaism to be true.”
David Jacobson later began exploring Orthodox Judaism, and about five years ago, he became Orthodox.
He is now married to an Orthodox woman, and Rabbi Yehuda Ferris, of Chabad House of Berkeley, married them. He is currently a student at Touro University, but said that he wasn’t sure if he would complete this year, after losing his daughter.
She was providing convoy security Wednesday, Sept. 28, when her Humvee was hit by an explosive device near Camp Bucca, Iraq.
Jacobson said he never would have asked his daughter to request Jewish dog tags when she enlisted in the Air Force, since even he does not consider his daughter Jewish.
“She did so strictly of her own volition,” he said. “But what fascinated me about her doing it was that she told me not long before she went in [the military] that she wanted to find out more about Orthodox Judaism. She hinted it to me, but she directly told this to my wife.”
Her first assignment was guarding a detainee camp, but she eventually volunteered for a more dangerous post.
She spent two years in the 17th Security Forces Squadron (the Air Force equivalent of Military Police) at Goodfellow Air Force Base in Texas before being assigned to the 586th Expeditionary Security Forces Squadron in Iraq three months ago.
She was 17 when 9/11 happened, which motivated her to join the military.
David Jacobson said his daughter fully believed in her mission there, especially since she believed that not only the United States, but Israel was at risk.
“My daughter and I had many, many political discussions, and she was well aware that what she was doing was, in effect, preventing Israel from being the very next target,” he said. “And she certainly felt what they were doing there was preventing terrorists in Iraq from blowing up our own children.”
Jacobson, who was buried in Florida where her grandparents live, was given a nondenominational funeral. A Chabad rabbi, Yossi Gansburg, attended to support her father.
While certain Jewish rituals were adhered to, others were not. “I made sure she was wrapped in a shroud and she was buried in a plain wooden casket,” said Jacobson, who said Kaddish over his daughter.
“Jewish law allows you to mourn for your non-Jewish children, and that’s what I was doing.”
“She was an outstanding airman who accepted all challenges and responsibilities without wavering,” Col. Scott Bethel, 17th Training Wing commander, said at the funeral. “She was the spark plug that made the squadron go.”
Avi Frier of the Florida Jewish News contributed to this report.