medical equipment to help that woman. He also worked at Aleh, a residential care facility for disabled children, always bringing gifts; and he did charity work for orphans.
Moshe woke up at 3:30 every morning, studied the Torah, and prepared the lessons on the Mishnah that he would be giving to a class of Russian immigrants. At sunrise and sunset, he went to pray at the synagogue of Gilo, which he had helped finance. “The synagogue was home to him,” said Eliyahu Schlesinger, the chief rabbi of Gilo. “He was the first to arrive and the last to leave, and he was always ready to teach and to encourage us with his wisdom and his smile.” A painting in his honor had been unveiled in the synagogue a short time earlier; now it is dedicated to his memory, and his eulogies were delivered beneath it. Moshe helped the ultra-Orthodox Haredim families in which the men didn’t work so they could continue to study. He was never without his religious books. It was the same way that fateful June day, as he walked serenely to the bus stop with his books under his arm.
“He was a very special person, my husband,” Sheila tells us. “Two years before his death, Moshe had begun to work with children who had Down syndrome. He had two hundred patients from all over Israel. Everyone loved him. Moshe used to say, ‘the body speaks.’ . . . And with his hands and the divine guidance of Hashem, he was able to help many people. He was very close to our rabbi in Gilo, Eliyahu Schlesinger. Moshe had financed his synagogue. Now everyone misses his love, his guidance, his presence. His patients, friends, and family, they all mourn him. I hope that one day we can all be together again in techiyat hametim, the resurrection of the dead. And to be witnesses to the coming of the Messiah.”
Sheila says, “My faith in Hashem, in God, and my love for my children and their families have sustained me during the years after Moshe’s death. Now, in his memory, I volunteer with Alzheimer’s patients.” The famous biblical commentator Rashi said that when a tzadik leaves a place, everyone senses his absence, but a roshem, a spiritual presence, remains behind.
Dr. Shmuel Gillis lived in Gush Etzion, the most important bloc of settlements south of Jerusalem. “For us,” says his wife, Ruthie, “Gush Etzion was part of the national consensus; there were settlements there since the 1920s.” Dr. Gillis was killed on February 1, 2001, while returning home after work in the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. One of his Arab patients, Omrina Pauzi, called him “the angel in the white coat.” At his funeral, Ruthie told her children that their father had built bridges across religious, ethnic, and political differences. For a hematologist, all blood is the same, and Gillis was a pioneer in hematology. He might not have met his death that day on his way home if he had not waited for one of his colleagues, Dr. Hussein Aliyan, an Arab, who had asked him for help on a case of childhood leukemia.
Dr. Gillis had a warm, contagious smile; he loved the land and hiking in the desert of Judea. He was a humble person, but also a luminary. “Shmuel dedicated himself in everything to the preservation of human life,” says his brother David, a pediatrician in the same hospital. “He would always look at the surrounding villages and say, ‘I have a patient there, and two there.’ It was hard on him that he couldn’t go visit them without risking his life. What he loved about the hospital was that all divisions disappeared there; he could be a human being taking care of another human being.”
Shmuel was born in England and he arrived in Israel at age eleven. He joined the air force and served in the Lebanon War. “He is still remembered for his compassion for the Arab prisoners of war, for how he treated them,” his brother says. “Many years later, he would treat some of Yasser Arafat’s associates in the same way.” According to one of his patients in Tel Aviv, “He was the closest thing to an angel. He made no distinction between Arabs and Jews; he treated everyone wonderfully.” His approach to his patients, his care for children with cancer, his attentiveness to infertile women, his joy at the circumcision of wailing little boys, and the happiness with which he greeted victory over the most terrible illnesses are still associated with the Gillis name.
“Shmuel was a very simple man, famous only among his colleagues and patients,” says David Gillis. “As his brother and a doctor, I can tell you that I heard many times about his brilliant solutions during hematology conferences. Colleagues would often stop me in the hallway to tell me, ‘You really have a special brother.’ The hematologists tell me that Shmuel would reach a certain diagnosis through a Talmudic form of reasoning; they use a term for him that indicates a genius in the Talmud, iluy. Professor Pollack, a well-known hematologist who specializes in the diagnosis and treatment of lymphoma, once said that he felt as though he could consult with Shmuel over a difficult case for help in making a diagnostic decision. Shmuel’s specialty was blood coagulation, and in this field he often came into contact with gynecologists and traumatologists. He helped the gynecologists to realize that in many cases, miscarriage is caused by blood coagulation problems, and Shmuel was close to women with problems in pregnancy. After his death, I came into contact with some women at Hadassah who recognized me because of my resemblance to Shmuel. Without waiting for me to tell them my own stories, these women told me, ‘Look at this child—he is alive thanks to your brother.’ In traumatology, Shmuel was involved in treating patients who had lost a lot of blood. The head of the traumatology ward at Hadassah talks about Shmuel’s contribution to survival rates.”
David describes Shmuel as “an incomparable researcher and teacher. He authored some pioneering works, becoming famous at the international level. Shmuel taught many students, including one Palestinian doctor. One year after his death, this doctor went to a conference in the United States through a fund established in Shmuel’s memory. And this is what my brother would have wanted; he was a great humanist who never nursed any hatred toward the Arabs. He never mixed medicine and politics. He had served in the Israeli army as a doctor in the special forces, taking part in spectacular military operations, but he never lost his humanity or dignity during those actions. He always wanted to be sure that the soldiers were treated with dignity, even the enemy soldiers. Many of the things he did in the army became known only after his death.”
The story of the Gillis brothers begins in Eastern Europe and winds through England. “One of our relatives was a rabbi in Lithuania, the last in a chain of rabbis that had spanned twelve generations,” David tells us. “He was one of the ohave Tzion, the lovers of Zion, predecessors of the Zionist movement. And he wrote a book proposing that the Jews be brought back to their ancient land, in a movement in which the majority of Orthodox rabbis said would have to take place through divine intervention. He titled it Love of Zion and of Jerusalem, and demonstrated that most of the Jewish laws and traditions favored a physical return to Zion by means of human enterprise. Thanks to his fame, he was invited to Manchester, England, to become the rabbi of the main synagogue. Nonetheless, he never gave up on his Zionist ideals, and raised his children in the dream and ideology of returning to Zion. Our father and his brothers and sisters were raised as fervent Zionists, and over the years they all came to Israel. The first was my father’s brother Joseph Gillis, who immigrated in 1948 and became a great mathematician, the designer of Israel’s first computer, and the dean of the mathematics faculty at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. Our father was very active in the Zionist movement in England, and we made the aliyah in 1970. Shmuel was eleven years old, and he quickly became one of the best students. We immediately fell in love with this land and this people.”
David says that “Shmuel believed in the sanctity of the land of Israel, and after he married Ruthie they decided to build their house in the settlements of Judea and Samaria. The historical connection between the Jewish people and these places dates back to the time of the patriarchs. Shmuel was an enthusiast for the history and geography of these places, and he believed in peaceful coexistence with the Arab inhabitants. His view was that there was room for everyone in Israel, and that everyone should be able to live in peace.”
After one year in the farming settlement of Beit Yatir in the Hebron Hills, the Gillises moved to Carmei Tzur. “In the first settlement,
