MARCH 30, 1921 - Moses Ezekiel's Funeral at Arlington

Coming Home: Part One: The Morning of March 30, 1921

Photo: Colorized Image of Moses Ezekiel's Funeral

Casket guarded by Virginia Military Institute Cadets

Memorial Amphitheater | Arlington National Cemetery

The air had that particular chill that settles into wool and doesn't leave. The kind of day that makes Arlington even more piercing than usual. The trees along the paths of the Cemetery were still mostly bare, their branches dark against a pale sky. Winter was not quite done with Virginia.

This was to be the very first ceremony at the new Amphitheater and every state in the Union was covering the event.

At the head of the procession, eight young men in the uniform of the Virginia Military Institute stood at attention along the walkway. They did not move. They did not speak.

They watched as the casket passed.

And it was not lost on anyone.

That was an American flag draped over that coffin. Not a Confederate battle flag. Not the banner of a lost cause. An American flag. The same flag that flew over the new marble edifice that stood waiting at the top of the hill. But not the same flag that had been carried into battle by the men buried in the concentric circles of Section 16 just beyond the path.

But they were all Americans now.

He was born an American, but he wasn't always. At least not always a United States American.

Moses Jacob Ezekiel was born October 28, 1844 in Richmond, Virginia. In a house on Old Market Street on the west side of 17th, in a neighborhood that no longer exists, in a world that no longer exists, where a Jewish merchant and his wife welcomed the sixth of what would eventually be fourteen children into a life that no one could have predicted.

Richmond in the autumn of 1844 was a city on the move.

The James River ran brown and fast below the falls, powering the flour mills and iron foundries that made Richmond one of the most productive industrial cities in the South. Canal boats moved goods east toward the Chesapeake. The Virginia Central Railroad was pushing west into the mountains. The population was growing. The streets were loud with commerce and argument and the particular energy of a city that knew it mattered.

Old Market Street ran through the heart of it. The 17th Street Farmers Market drew buyers and sellers from across the region, Black and White, free and slave, farmers and merchants and housewives and tradesmen, all of them converging on the same narrow streets in the shadow of Shockoe Bottom. The smell of the James was always present. So was the smell of the market. Livestock and tobacco and fresh produce and the particular odor of a Southern city before modern plumbing.

It was not a wealthy neighborhood. Jacob Ezekiel was a man of learning and community standing, but not a man of great means. The house on the west side of 17th between Main and Franklin was modest. Fourteen children would eventually fill it.

But what filled it first was something money could not buy.

Jacob Ezekiel was no ordinary merchant. On weekday mornings he was at his ledgers, a cotton merchant and bookbinder in a city that ran on cotton and commerce. But on Friday evenings everything stopped. The ledgers closed. The house on Old Market Street went quiet in a particular way. Catherine lit the Sabbath candles and the smell of the market gave way to something older. Something that had survived every country this family had ever lived in.

Jacob was a leader of Kahal Kadosh Beth Shalome, the Holy Congregation, House of Peace. It was the oldest Jewish congregation in Richmond and one of the oldest in America. Founded in 1789, just three years after Virginia passed the Statute for Religious Freedom, it was the sixth Jewish congregation in the United States. George Washington himself had written a letter to its members. On the Sabbath, Jacob Ezekiel stood among his people and carried that history on his shoulders without complaint. A man of books and faith and community. He owned the complete works of Maimonides. On the shelf beside them, his well-worn prayer book. He understood something that his son would one day carve into bronze and marble for the world to see. A people without memory are a people without a future.

His wife Catherine de Castro Ezekiel understood that better than anyone.

The de Castro name is a Sephardic name. It carries centuries.

Catherine's ancestors were among the Jews of medieval Spain. They had built something remarkable there. Physicians, philosophers, poets, astronomers, mathematicians. They lived alongside Christians and Muslims in an arrangement the Spanish called convivencia.

A coexistence. A civilization within a civilization. For centuries, the Jews of Spain were among the most educated, most accomplished people in Europe.

Until 1492.

Until Ferdinand and Isabella.

Until the Inquisition gave them a choice. Convert. Leave. Or die.

Catherine's people chose to leave. They carried what they could. Their Torah scrolls. Their prayers. Their recipes. Their names. The de Castro name itself. They made their way to Holland, that great refuge of the persecuted, where Sephardic Jews had built remarkable communities in Amsterdam and elsewhere, carrying the memory of Spain into a new country and keeping it alive.

They kept it alive for three hundred years.

In 1808, as Napoleon's wars reshaped Europe and the old certainties collapsed once again, the family came to America. To Philadelphia. To a country that had written religious freedom into its founding documents and built a government around the idea that no king and no church would ever again tell a man where he could pray or whether he could live.

They believed it. They came anyway.

By 1844 they were Richmonders. Virginians. Southerners. Americans. Catherine de Castro had married Jacob Ezekiel and together they were building something in that modest house on Old Market Street. A family. A community. A life.

Into that life, on October 28, 1844, came Moses.

He entered a household that was at once deeply American and ancient beyond American reckoning. His father's Ashkenazi learning and his mother's Sephardic memory met in those rooms. The prayers of two distinct Jewish worlds rose under one roof. The smell of Shockoe Bottom drifted through the windows. The sound of the market on 17th Street was the sound of his earliest mornings.

He was a Southern boy. A Jewish boy. A Richmond boy. The sixth of fourteen children in a house that was full of noise and faith and the particular intensity of a family that knew exactly who it was and where it came from.

No one on Old Market Street that autumn could have imagined what this boy would become.

No one could have predicted that one day, in a studio built into the ancient Baths of Diocletian in Rome, he would create works that moved kings and emperors to award him their highest honors. That Franz Liszt would sit for a portrait bust in his studio and call him a genius. That the Italian government would knight him. That the United Daughters of the Confederacy would commission him to create the most important Confederate memorial in the country.

That on a cold March morning in 1921, the President of the United States would call him a great American and a great citizen of world fame.

That was all still to come.

In the autumn of 1844, he was simply Moses. A Richmond boy. Born into a world that would not survive his lifetime. Born into a family that carried three hundred years of survival in its blood.

It was enough to build a life on.

And this is his story.

To be continued.

NOTE: March 26, 2026 marks 824 days since the Reconciliation Memorial/Moses Ezekiel's Grave Marker was removed from Arlington National Cemetery.

-By Mindy Esposito / March 25, 2026 / Nashville, Tennessee

Mindy Esposito is an independent historian, writer, and Confederate heritage advocate based in Nashville, Tennessee. She has spent more than two decades in primary source research on nineteenth and twentieth century American history.

Coming Home is a Six-Part Series on the Life, Death, and Funeral of Sir Moses Jacob Ezekiel.

Bibliography   - Part One

Primary Sources

• Cincinnati Enquirer, March 31, 1921. "Lesson of Americanism Drawn by Harding From Monument Marking Ezekiel's Grave." Page 16.

• The Standard-Times (New Bedford, Massachusetts), March 30, 1921. "Buried in Arlington: Memorial Exercises Held for Sir Moses Ezekiel." Page 9.

• The American Israelite (Cincinnati, Ohio), March 31, 1921. "Burial of Sir Moses Ezekiel." Page 4.

• Ezekiel, Moses Jacob. Memoirs from the Baths of Diocletian. Edited by Joseph Gutmann and Stanley F. Chyet. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975.

• Moses J. Ezekiel Papers, Manuscript 0010. Virginia Military Institute Archives, Lexington, Virginia.

Secondary Sources

• Cohen, Stan and Keith Gibson. Moses Ezekiel: Civil War Soldier, Renowned Sculptor. Missoula, Montana: Pictorial Histories Publishing Company, 2007.

• Gibson, Keith. "Moses Jacob Ezekiel (1844-1917)." Encyclopedia Virginia, December 7, 2020.

• Jewish Virtual Library. "Moses Ezekiel." 

• Kahal Kadosh Beth Shalome. Wikipedia. Congregation history and Jacob Ezekiel references.

COMING HOME: MOSES EZEKIEL'S FUNERAL AT ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY