When the father and sister of Nikolai Rappaport (22), an immigrant from the Caucasus who last Saturday became the latest victim of the mini-war raging in south Lebanon, announced that they would be taking his body back for burial in his native town of Krasnador in Russia, the dead soldier's military commander felt moved to protest.
In a heartfelt radio interview, Lieut Assaf Rosenfeld recalled that Nikolai had been an admirable soldier - dependable, disciplined, uncomplaining - and that he had volunteered for combat service because of his profound love for his new country. "I don't think he would have wanted it," he said of the bereaved family's decision to have the dead man laid to rest overseas.
The officer's protest notwithstanding, Nikolai's remains were flown back to Russia for burial on Wednesday, his coffin draped in the blue-and-white flag of the country in whose army he fought and died. And very few Israelis felt moved to argue with the family's decision because, in the wake of his death, it has become evident that Israel had failed Nikolai and his family.
When President Ezer Weizman came to pay a condolence call on the grieving father and sister, he found to his unconcealed dismay that the Rappaports were living in abject poverty in a tin-roofed store-room in a Tel Aviv slum. He found also that the father, Ilya, was unemployed, and that an uncharacteristic request made by the self-effacing Nikolai to the army for financial aid had been rejected.
No soldier, said Mr Weizman, a distinguished air force veteran, "should be living in such disgraceful conditions. If the army didn't know about this, it should have."
All this week, the Israeli media have carried new details of this and other tales of immigrant poverty and disillusion. Yesterday's headlines featured a family of seven who have been reduced to living in the stairwell of a Jerusalem apartment building, and a single, mid-30s Russian immigrant woman left penniless when her rights to government assistance expired.
But what has largely escaped public attention is another injustice done to the Rappaports and many thousands of immigrant families like them: the inequality with which they are treated because they are not Jewish enough for the state's religious authorities. Had the bereaved family decided to bury Nikolai here, his bones would have been laid to rest, not alongside those of other fallen comrades but outside the walls of a Jewish cemetery.
Because his mother, who never joined the family in Israel, is Christian, Nikolai, according to the Orthodox law followed here, would not have been permitted a Jewish burial.
Knesset members have now tabled a Bill to grant citizenship automatically to parents of immigrant soldiers. But such a Bill will doubtless be resisted by ultra-Orthodox politicians.
And, even if passed, it would not solve the burial problem - which is the province of Israel's rabbis, not its legislators.