david berger national memorial

In today's world, it's hard to remember that terrorists were targeting innocents many decades ago. The David Berger National Memorial honors the memory of Cleveland native David Berger, who joined the Israeli Olympic team and was killed by Arab terrorists at the 1972 Olympic games in Munich.

This memorial represents the American life lost in the tragedy at the Munich Olympics. David Berger was a weightlifter who participated in the 1972 Olympics for Israel. The monument itself is a work of art and shows the Olympic rings broken from that tragedy. If you want the National Park passport stamp, go to the front desk of the center next door and they'll happily give it to you.

So you are trying to get all the National Parks and National Historic Site Passport Stamps for your National Parks Passport book. There are 404 to get as of this writing in May of 2014, and one of them is the David Berger National Memorial found on the grounds of Mandel Jewish Community Center in Beachwood, Ohio.Frankly, it was on a fluke that we even stopped here. We were exploring other National Parks and National Historic Sites in NE Ohio, and our Fodor's America's National Parks listed this as one of the 369 National Park sites as of the 1996/1997 printing. We investigated it online, and sure enough, this somewhat lonely statue south of the main entrance of the Mandel JCC is one of our nation's few National Memorials. Designed by David E. Davis, an internationally renowned Cleveland sculptor, the work has had several homes since it was authorized by Congress as the David Berger National Memorial on March 5, 1980 (Public Law 96-199). Since the fall of 2006 it has been at it's current location after being restored at McKay Lodge Fine Arts Conservation Laboratory, in Oberlin, Ohio, in the year or so before its instillation at its current locale. It is a simple, but somehow very moving sculpture honoring all of the athletes and coaches that were murdered by Palestinian Terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics. I had no memory that one of those athletes was an America citizen, and Jewish Olympic athlete, David Berger. This sculpture is his National Memorial. The half circles represent 5 broken Olympic circles, the base consists of a support for those Olympic Circles representing each of the slain athlete's, with David Berger's support being slightly different from all the others to represent him individually as the sole lost American citizen in this tragedy. Not much really, but worth a picnic lunch while we learned about the details of a tragedy long forgotten by most, and a man that could easily be totally forgotten if it had not been for this National Memorial to him. Glad we stopped to relearn this part of our American heritage, and would recommend it to you too. Just don't make it THE reason for your trip here, combine it on your way from some of the other great whole day National Parks in this part of Ohio (Cuyahoga, First Ladies NHS in Canton, or Garfield NHS, to name three, two of which we saw on our spring break trip in April of 2014). Interestingly, it is not listed in the current Fodor's America's National Parks edition that I looked through. But it is listed on the National Park Service website. There is a stamp available for your Passport book, but it needs to be obtained at the Mandel JCC front desk, which has specific hours during which it can be obtained from what we found to be a very cheerful and helpful front desk staff at Mandel JCC. Maybe not worth a separate trip to the SE Cleveland metro area to see, but if you are passing through, or close, and you collect Passport stamps as we do, it is a worthwhile National Memorial to visit, and what you learn about David Berger and the Munich Olympic horror is probably a darn good lesson for us all to not forget.