Last Thursday, Yonadav Chaim Hirshfeld, 19, visited his 99-year-old great-grandmother in Jerusalem. She is Rebbetzin Etta Shapiro, widow of Rabbi David Shapiro, longtime spiritual leader of Milwaukee’s Congregation Anshe Sfard.
Yonadav played flute for his great-grandmother, as he often did during his regular visits.
Two hours later, Hirshfeld entered his yeshiva, Merkaz Harav, just as a terrorist had begun spraying bullets around the school’s library. He was reported to be the first of eight young men killed in the attack.
That evening, Rabbi Menachem Rapoport of Mequon was looking out his hotel window in Jerusalem. After watching the end of a wedding celebration, he turned back into his room. Then the sirens began wailing.
Rapoport was in Israel with his parents, Fagie and Rabbi Dovid Rapoport of the Peltz Center for Jewish Life, and his brother, Rabbi Benny Rapoport of Scranton, Pa. They were leading a group of 20 on a 10-day trip through the Jewish state.
For most of the group members, including four children, this was their first time in Israel. But nobody suggested leaving, Rapoport told me via cell phone from Tzfat this Monday.
The attack “encouraged us to be here. It made us feel better about being here,” he said. Though many of the locations visited showed the group what it means to live as a Jew in Israel, the attack made that lesson more powerful and more personal.
“What was beautiful for me as someone in a leadership role is to hear, ‘No, we’re going to continue to go where we are and we’re not going to reduce the notion of our mission because that would be giving the terrorists what they want and would weaken the people who live here,’” Rapoport said.
“When we’re here, we tell [Israelis] that it’s OK to be here and that they shouldn’t feel alone,” he said.
That solidarity should be the takeaway message for all of us. When eight of our children are killed, we are all attacked.
Unfortunately, the attack spawned some divisive, violent rhetoric that seems too dangerous to ignore. On Sunday, Education Minister Yuli Tamir had to cut short a visit to the yeshiva after students called her a “murderer” and “Oslo criminal.”
During the protests at the yeshiva’s middle and high schools, Tamir was kicked in the back twice and a plastic bottle thrown at the minister struck one of her security guards, according to the Israeli daily Ha’aretz.
“When I was invited, I didn’t hesitate for a moment,” Tamir said. “Unfortunately, I feel that some people, hopefully only a handful, cannot transcend their propensity for incitement, even in times of mourning.”
Tamir is not the only one concerned about the incident. “We’ve seen such things before when [Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin was murdered [in 1995], and apparently haven’t learned their lesson,” National Infrastructures Minister Benjamin Ben Eliezer was quoted to have said Monday at a Labor Party meeting. “Like then, the incitement now may lead to another political murder.”
Is it too much to hope that Israel remember its status as one nation, divided perhaps by disagreements and fiery political conflict but united in a much deeper, more transcendent way?
Palestinians in Gaza responded to the attack with celebrations. But we must not. We must not let our differences overtake our commonality and we must not become each other’s enemies. We must heed the word of Leviticus 19:17: “Do not hate your brother in your heart.”
In Milwaukee, we mourn Segev Pniel Avihayil, 15; Neriah Cohen, 15; Yonatan Yitzchak Eldar, 16, Yonadav Chaim Hirshfeld, 19; Yochai Lipschitz, 18; Doron Maharata, 26; Avraham David Moses, 16; and Roey Roth, 18.
May their memories be for a blessing.
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