ROME — Privates First Class Del Riley and Frank Kurzinger were fast friends. They met in 1943, training for the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division at Camp Hale, Colo.

Riley called Kurzinger “the old man,” because he was two years older. Sailing on the USS West Point from New York to Naples, Italy, they once snuck into the galley to steal a fresh cherry pie meant for Navy men, and ate the whole thing themselves.

In 1945, they took part in a mission to seize Monte Belvedere, in northern Italy, from the Germans. Riley hit a tripwire and was critically wounded on the way up the mountain. Kurzinger, a combat medic, rushed to Riley’s aid. He stepped on a land mine and was immediately killed. He was 22 years old.

“Frank Kurzinger laid down his life for my father,” Del’s son, Marc Riley, said on Wednesday. “Since Feb. 20, 1945, my father spent his life trying to find the Kurzinger family to tell them … the kind of man Frank Kurzinger was. My father spent his life looking for Frank.”

Del’s daughter, Deleen Willis, said that her father reached out to the 10th Mountain Division and went to great lengths to find the Kurzingers. “They were all dead ends,” she said.

Del Riley died seven years ago, but on his 100th birthday this week, 15 of his descendants were reunited with Frank Kurzinger’s relatives in Italy, following the efforts of Operation Benjamin.

The organization, which works to preserve the memories of American-Jewish soldiers who fell in World War II, gave a proper memorial this week to three servicemen — PFC Frank Kurzinger, Technician Fourth Grade Ben Zion Bernstein and 2nd Lt. Paul S. Singer — who were originally buried under Latin crosses, replacing their tombstones with new ones shaped like Stars of David.

Kurzinger, like many other Jews fighting in World War II, hid his Jewish identity out of fear of being captured by the Nazis. But his fear was compounded by the fact that, five years before he enlisted, his family fled Nazi Germany to Denver. 

Kurzinger became a combat medic because he thought that if he did not directly fight Germans, he may not be tried as a traitor if he was captured. He wore a Catholic medal on his uniform to conceal his Jewish faith. 

However, after his death, Kurzinger’s heroism was reported in Jewish newspapers and he was honored by B’nai B’rith in Denver.

Operation Benjamin honored Kurzinger at a ceremony on Wednesday in the Florence American Cemetery, surrounded by sycamore and cypress trees on a Tuscan hillside.

Marc Riley said that he grew up hearing about the man who died trying to save his father’s life: “In our home, if you said the name Frank, we all knew who it was.” 

Bruce Riley, Del’s son, said, “It’s our responsibility, our duty, to pay it forward through this story. I brought my 12-year-old granddaughter with me here. I hope Frank will never be forgotten.” 

Bruce had commemorative coins made in Kurzinger’s honor, which had Del Riley’s name and a cross on one side and Kurzinger’s name and a Star of David on the other, as well as the 10th Mountain Division’s slogan, “climb to glory.” He put a coin in Kurzinger’s grave, and his brother put in a shell casing from the 21-gun salute at their father’s funeral.

After the ceremony, 15 of Riley’s descendants, who traveled to Italy from Oregon, planned to climb Monte Belvedere to bury another one of the coins on the mountaintop that Kurzinger and Riley never reached, “completing their mission,” as Bruce Riley put it.

”This is just what Dad would have wanted,” Willis said, in tears, after the ceremony.

Unlike the Riley family, Kurzinger’s living relatives did not know he existed until Operation Benjamin contacted them. Kurzinger was an only child, and most of his parents’ relatives remained in Germany and perished in the Holocaust.

However, his aunt, Dorothea Stern, moved to Israel. Her son, Dr. Michael Stern, who was born and grew up in Israel but lives in New Jersey, represented the family.

”In the early years in Israel, the topic of family was approached with great care,” he recalled, explaining how he did not know about his cousin. “There were no grandparents to give historical context, and an unspoken understanding that some ghosts were best left undisturbed.” 

Stern said his family had no photos of Kurzinger and did not know the date of his death to observe his yahrtzeit, his annual Jewish memorial.

”Here, through the unlikely context of death and burial, he has become a tangible link to life, to family,” Stern said. “We are doing what time and circumstance denied Frank, giving him the honor and memory he deserves. This has become a mission of reclaiming identity, and an act of familial commitment … There is no longer a matter of family secrecy.” 

Observing the Jewish custom of placing a stone on a gravesite, Stern brought one from his vegetable garden, “a place rooted in life … an extension of my own home.” 

Operation Benjamin’s Italy Mission was attended by 85 people, including relatives of servicemen — the donor-supported organization provided assistance to every family member who wanted to attend — board members and supporters.

Working in cooperation with the local U.S. consulates and the American Battle Monuments Commission, Operation Benjamin oversaw the replacement of Kurzinger, Bernstein and Singer’s tombstones.

After each tombstone was replaced, the attendees said Psalms, the memorial prayer, El Maleh Rachamim and the mourner’s Kaddish, “welcom[ing] them back to the region of their families, bring[ing] them back to the bosom of their faith,” Rabbi Jacob J. Schacter, president of Operation Benjamin, said. 

Servicemen and women present gave a slow salute at each grave, and “Taps” was played at the end of each ceremony.

The memorials for Bernstein and Singer took place in the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery on Tuesday on a sunny spring afternoon, with birdsong punctuating the solemn proceedings. 

Technician Fourth Grade Ben Zion Bernstein was the eldest of six siblings from Cleveland. He moved to Mandatory Palestine in 1938 and lived on a kibbutz, but returned to the U.S. and enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1941. He served in the “Devil’s Brigade,” a joint American-Canadian commando unit trained for mountain warfare. He was one of 73 men killed in a combat mission called “Operation Raincoat,” an attack on a German stronghold on Monte La Difensa.

Bernstein’s family knew that he was buried under a cross; his niece Bennette, one of two relatives named for him, visited the cemetery in the past.

His nephew, Dr. David Rottman, said that replacing the cross with a Star of David “is repairing something that was a great pain in my family lasting generations.” 

“Dear Uncle Ben,” Rottman said at the ceremony, “we are here to claim your place in our family and your role in the world … We miss you at all of our Seders and candle lighting and graduations and sukkahs. You are with us now, and you’ll always be with us.” 

Second Lt. Paul Sigmund Singer volunteered to fight the Nazis, leaving his studies at Columbia University to join the Canadian Air Force before the U.S. entered World War II. He transferred to the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1942, serving as a navigator in the 44th Bomb Group. Singer’s aircraft was attacked during a bombing raid on a German airfield in Italy in 1943, and his parachute did not deploy.

Singer’s relatives wore baseball caps with the insignia of the “Flying 8 Balls,” as the 44th Bomb Group was known, and Singer’s name embroidered on them.

Jodi Reif, whose mother was Singer’s second cousin, said that she met relatives she did not know before through Operation Benjamin. She shared photographs of Singer and articles that he wrote in his high school newspaper in Milwaukee. 

“Paul lived as a Jew, fought for America and the free world as a Jew, and died as a Jew,” Reif said. “L’dor vador [from generation to generation], it’s now on us.”  

Shalom Lamm, Operation Benjamin’s chief historian, said that “justice is finally being done. After all these years, we are righting a silent wrong done to someone fighting for a cause greater than himself.”

”The voices of the fallen cry out from these sacred hills, not only in agony, but in testimony of those who gave their future so that we may live in freedom,” Lamm said. “I believe that what we are doing today offers some comfort … and perhaps, in some way, peace.” 

Schacter said Operation Benjamin was honoring “heroic young men who, in the prime of their lives never returned to the haven of home and to the embrace of bereaved families.”

“As we stand in this most incredibly moving, solemn and hallowed ground, we publicly acknowledge and affirm that their heroic contribution to the defense of America and the freedom of the world has not blurred with the passing of the years, has not receded these many decades later,” Schacter said.

Rodney Hunter, the chargé d’affaires of the U.S. Mission to the U.N. Agencies in Rome, said that the soldiers’ stories “remind us that a cemetery like this is not just a collection of headstones, but of real people who gave their lives to give futures to people like us.”

”Their sacrifice was not in vain. I am here today because of them. We all are. … In times of peace, it is easy to take our freedom for granted, but freedom is not automatic. It takes commitment and vigilance,” Hunter said.