Private Sam Greyman made the ultimate sacrifice on September 8, 1918, at just 27 years old. He was one of roughly 886,000 to 908,000 British servicemen who fell during World War I, leaving behind his wife, Franny, and two young sons, including my grandfather’s father.
The Greyman family history was nearly lost to time. When Sam’s descendants, myself among them, uncovered his grave in the Jerusalem War Cemetery, it was nearly swallowed by a thick mat of succulents.
In truth, Greyman might have remained one of the thousands of forgotten soldiers who perished in the Great War, were it not for a reply to a small post on X by The Jerusalem Post, which tagged me as an author.
Seeing the name “Greyman” attached to an article I had written, a now-deceased distant relative reached out. Knowing she had been reluctant to share the family story, I’ll keep what she told me private, but that chance encounter sparked a far-reaching quest to recover fragments of the Greyman history long forgotten.
Greyman originally came from Russia with his parents, Wolfe and Eva Greyman. He took the anglicized name to help his integration, though he was born Shmuel Ben David Greenman, according to the Israeli organization Giving Faces to the Fallen.
The Greyman family, which settled in Leeds in northern England, likely fled the economic hardship, state-sponsored antisemitism, and violent anti-Jewish pogroms that followed the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. The May Laws enacted by Alexander III restricted Jewish life to major cities. They prevented members of the tribe from owning or managing real estate, leasing land, and operating their businesses on Sundays or other Christian holidays, according to the Center for Israel Education. Approximately 2.5 million Jews fled Eastern Europe as Russia tightened its restrictions around Jews, many immigrating to the United States or, as in the case of the Greyman family, to the United Kingdom.
At the age of 23, Greyman wed Franny Chizis at the Zionist Synagogue on Brunswick Street in Leeds, and, despite being married only a handful of years before his death, the pair had two sons and a daughter.
Despite being a known pacifist, according to accounts published by John Henry Patterson in the book With The Judeans In The Palestine Campaign, Greyman enlisted in the Royal Fusiliers’ 38th Battalion, the first Jewish battalion formed by the British Army. He had originally considered the Labor Battalions, which would have seen him build trenches and railways away from the fighting, but eventually decided it was part of his civic duty to fight.
“He was a man who disapproved of all forms of violence,” Patterson recalled. “He hated war and all the brutalities pertaining thereto, yet he carried out his military duties most conscientiously.”
It was that same conscientious decision to join the war that saw Pvt. Greyman shot by a Turkish sniper as he tried to protect the British camp near Umm esh Shert Ford. Greyman fought in the campaign for the Jordan River crossings, in which he was killed, according to Israel’s Defense Ministry, while standing guard in a forward trench in the Jordan Valley.
His death was “instantaneous,” according to Patterson, who described how a sniper bullet passed straight through his head. While he didn’t suffer much, the same could not be said of Franny, who refused to believe her husband had been killed on Rosh Hashanah, because she could not conceive that a young, observant Jewish man would fight on such a day.
Greyman left behind his sister, Rachel; his wife, Eva; his sons, Harold and Isaac; and his daughter, Rose.
While some Jewish families find healing in preserving memory, my branch of the Greyman family apparently did not. My grandfather, Rod Greyman, died at only 55 years old, before I turned one, and so I never had the chance to ask him about his family history. My grandmother and aunt are people who prefer to steer their minds from brutal topics, and it never occurred to my mother to ask.
I have no idea how Pvt. Greyman’s plaque, a commemorative medal, ended up in South Africa, and none of my research has yet shed light on this. After messaging the sellers, they could only tell me that they purchased the plaque in an antique shop.
During the intensive research to learn anything and everything about Greyman, which involved research in Hebrew, English, and Russian, I happened quite randomly upon a South African auction site where I found his death plaque for sale.
Over a million Bronze death plaques were issued to the families of fallen British and Commonwealth service personnel. The plaques, designed by British sculptor and medalist Edward Carter Preston, are inscribed with the names of the deceased regardless of their rank.
Without much thought, I paid the R2,750 for the plaque and had it sent to the South African address of the parents of a good friend of mine, whom I met while living in Rosh Ha’ayin. While getting the plaque to her parents was easy, retrieving it from them was anything but. Beyond the difficult diplomatic situation between South Africa and Israel, making mailing the plaque more complicated, my friend’s parents were advised not to send it, as it looked valuable and would therefore likely be stolen.
Needing to have this piece of my family’s history, I turned to the Jewish community, and it delivered. The plaque was passed from my friend’s parents to their friend, to the friends of the parents of former Post employee Eyal Green, to his parents, to him, and finally, to me. This precious piece of family treasure was passed through the hands of so many strangers, flown across borders, and delivered safely into my hands – a journey that can only be credited to the deep empathetic ties of the international Jewish community.
Finally, in possession of the plaque, a book about my great-great-grandfather, and with my mother in the country, we visited Pvt. Greyman in the east Jerusalem cemetery in September, only days after the anniversary of his death.
We searched the gravesite, my mother panicking that she would find her ancestor buried under a cross like the hundreds of other graves we were seeing, and eventually found him tucked in a corner with a group of fellow Jewish soldiers. It was a family friend, a former British soldier called Gordon, who actually discovered Sam.
My mother’s partner, a convert to the religion with a greater knowledge of prayer than my mother and I, combined, possess, said kaddish for Sam and commented that he had been “Russian by birth but British by choice,” after he became “a soldier of his chosen country because he felt it was his duty to the land where his new wife and infant children waited for him to return.” Gordon left a coin on his grave, explaining that it was a traditional way for soldiers to honor their fallen brothers.
I often think about how strange it is that a social media reply under an article I wrote led me there, to a quiet corner of a Jerusalem cemetery, brushing dirt from the name of a man I had never met but whose choices shaped my life. Journalism is rarely about ourselves, but in this case, it opened a door long closed, returning a story to the people who needed to hear it most.
Pvt. Greyman’s grave lay nearly hidden, but his legacy no longer is. By finding him, I found something of my family’s own fractured history, threaded through Russia, Leeds, South Africa, and finally back to Jerusalem. What began as a coincidence ended as an act of remembrance.
It is a great tragedy that nobody knew to mourn Pvt. Greyman, but I will carry his memory with me for the remainder of my life and, hopefully, pass that privilege on to my future children.