Max Fuchs was a rifleman in the First Infantry Division when it came ashore at Omaha Beach, the bloodiest sector of the D-Day invasion of Normandy, on the morning of June 6, 1944.

Four months later, he fought with the division in the battle for Aachen, which became the first German city to fall to the Allies in World War II.

And on Oct. 29 of that year, Private Fuchs — who had attended a yeshiva and sang cantorial music in a choir while growing up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side — sang the traditional Sabbath hymns at a hugely emotional open-air service on the Aachen battlefield before some 50 fellow Jewish soldiers.

The site was near the city’s destroyed synagogue, and during the service the crack of German artillery reverberated.