Hundreds of sailors who came from Ashdod, Tel Aviv, Herzliya, Makamorat, and of course from Haifa, honored the memory of the divers who perished in the sinking of the submarine that happened 50 years ago.
The ceremony began at 10:00 in the morning in front of the quiet beach a mile north of Haifa's shores. Many threw strangers into the water and among them I saw the representatives of the families of the spacemen. A navy submarine was in the water and it was surrounded by yachts, scout ships, kayaks and small sailboats. Next to them stood the ship "Queen of Acre", on board of which were the families of the martyrs of the Dakar who perished in the disaster. The foreigners floated in the sea and drifted slowly in the west wind towards the east.
When the wreaths were thrown, the submarine officers stood still. The submarine commander stood in the submarine pavilion and saluted. Then the ship the Queen of Acre sounded a siren and all the yachts that have horns joined her in one thundering and exciting siren.
All the while, small ships of the navy surrounded the submarine and made sure that the many vessels kept a safe distance from the vessel, which is the most valuable strategic combat weapon of the State of Israel. Navy fighters could also be seen on the guard ships.
Watch the video - a ceremony in memory of the martyrs of the Dakar
It was a moving sight to see the respect given by the sailors to the families and to the memory of the fallen.
At the end of the ceremony, the ships jumped into a competitive flotilla and a popular flotilla to Akziv and back. At the end of the cruise there will be a prize distribution ceremony for the winners. The entire event is jointly produced by the Municipality of Haifa and the Navy and in cooperation with the Carmel sailing community, headed by Commodore, Brigadier General Shlomo (Momo) Cohen.
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At the time of the disappearance of the Dakar I was an 11-year-old boy, I remember the winter month of January when we were sitting in the football field of Kiryat Eliezer and watching a football game when the rumor about the disappearance of the submarine began to spread.
As a son of Kiryat Eliezer, many of the navy men are from the neighborhoods of Bat Galim and Kiryat Eliezer and some of the names were indeed familiar to me. I especially remember the character of Amnon Paz, whose sister was one layer above me at Dror school.
Over the years I matured and enlisted in the Navy, submarines were not on the agenda at this point. , not in a submarine!!) All these years in the background we lived with the rumors about the Dakar and the reasons for its disappearance, some of our friends went on searches following the peace agreement with Egypt in the Egyptian coastal area, Sisyphus searches that turned up nothing and were mainly due to the fact that the Dakar's lifebuoy was found in 1984 on the shores of Khan Yunis by Fisherman from Gaza. The findings of the buoy and the animal that grew on it showed that the supposed submarine was sunk in relatively shallow water.
Several more years passed by in 1992 when I served as the head of the Navy's operations branch due to the technological capabilities for more accurate searches, the GPS became a usable and available tool.
I was asked by the late Navy Commander Micah Ram to plan the continuation of the search for the Dakar in shallow waters in the Aegean Sea.
I headed a committee of experts, all reservists from the field of submarines to carry out the searches in the Aegean Sea region, I decided to give the search operations the name "Brotherhood", a name that took root and continued for the continuation of the search operations in the Aegean Sea in the Rhodes area and the crossings north of Crete based on the assumption that Commander Yaakov Raanan chose to train the team The submarine is in ambushes in the restricted maneuvering areas, all this is still assuming that the submarine is submerged in shallow water.
In 1993 I had the privilege of being commander at sea of the search operation Brotherhood, we went out to sea for a period of 6 weeks while towing a side scanning sonar, and checking every discovery with an underwater robot, routine scanning activity cm by cm, we found ancient ships and obstacles Many, but we did not find the stinger. After several more years of scans, we in the navy decided to define that the submarine was not in the Aegean Sea.
In 1996, I attended the US Naval College in Newport, USA, in a lecture by Dr. Ballard, the man and legend who searched for and found the Titanic and even wrote an imaginary book about the sting.
At the end of the lecture I turned to him and introduced myself and asked for his opinion on what happened to Decker, especially in light of the story that appeared in his book.
Dr. Ballard, very surprised, said he had never been asked about it and invited me to a meeting in his office. I included the naval attaché from Washington and the commander of the Navy's tracking unit and we went to Dr. Ballard's laboratories in Connecticut to hear his opinion.
After we presented him with all the findings and the searches conducted and after he examined all the material, Dr. Ballard told us, you are constantly relying on the assumption that the submarine is in shallow water because of the buoy, ignore the buoy, think that you did not discover it and go search for the original path of the submarine.
In those years, technology developed and enabled efficient search in deep water, a relatively new capability that did not exist before.
At that time, Admiral Mike Burda, a dear Jew, served as the commander of the American Navy.
In his meeting with the commander of the Navy at the time, Major General Alex Tal, Borda promised the assistance of the US Navy in the search.
I was sent to test the NR-1 submarine, a tiny nuclear submarine for underwater search purposes, some say it was built specifically for the purpose of extracting data from a sunken Soviet submarine.
The NR-1 submarine arrived in Ashdod and went on a search on the route, searches that encountered a lot of technical problems. Search failed.
In a joint decision of the American and Israeli navies, it was decided to transfer the search task to an external contractor, the Nauticos company, which, together with Dr. Ballard, carried out the location of the Titanic and other impressive voyages of discovery in the Mediterranean and Black seas.
Indeed the company arrived with two ships, one that scans with a side scan sonar to depths of more than 3 km and the other with a robot... and hence the story of the detection and discovery is known to everyone.
In 1999 I was appointed to serve as the head of the manpower ship, the first task I received was to literally train a passenger ship of a shipping list and hold a naval memorial ceremony for the victims of the submarine together with the families on the exact site where the submarine sank. One of the most exciting moments in my service was the ceremony in the sea above the submarine site.
In the navy it was decided to continue and examine whether there are remains of the crew in the submarine. I appointed an inspection committee of experts from all disciplines and we performed robot scans inside and near the submarine until we came to the conclusion, there are no remains. But in one of the searches we found a sealed plastic bag with a raincoat inside and new clothes packed inside.
On the uniform was the diver's symbol with a number printed on the back, we examined the number and found that the uniform belonged to a diver (Almog) [email protected]@seapoweramerica.comSwisa Yosef, from Moshav in the south, the mystery of the ironed uniform was solved when we found that on the last visit of the submarine to Portugal Yosef was tied to the submarine and did not go on the beach vacation.
I established contact with the family as a representative of the Navy and asked them to gather the mother and brothers at their home because I want to come to them and bring them something, we traveled with a doctor and a psychologist and gave the emotional family the uniforms that had undergone special treatment for their preservation.
The next day there was a big conference of the families with the commander of the navy Yedidia Yaari during which he informed them that there were no remains and that the navy decided not to remove the submarine and to remove the bridge only for the purpose of a memorial. During this ceremony, the Swiss family called me and returned the uniforms to us saying that we would make a much better memory with them than if they were left in the hands of the family and we did put the uniforms on display at the Navy Museum.
The last dimension in the relationship with the families was determining the location of the bridge, the surprising finding that the number of steps from the road to the monument is exactly the same as the number of spaces, and since then we have determined together with the submarine flotilla and the son of the submarine commander Odi Ra'anan, that the memory of the crew and the submarine will be remembered and remembered at sea in a flotilla with mostly teenagers and sailors. Since every year on the first Friday of June we have been holding the Dakar flotilla in memory of the victims of the submarine Dakar for 19 years.