the farm for twenty-one years,” he recounts, “and then I studied management on behalf of the kibbutz and began working in the field of management. I worked until I was seventy-nine years old, when I had to retire for health reasons. Since my retirement, I have been active in the senior citizens’ center.” Judith and Lipa divorced in 1981, and Lipa married Pnina, who was also a member of the kibbutz. “We spent twenty splendid years together, in mutual love and respect. Pnina got kidney disease and had to undergo dialysis, but although we had done everything we could, she died in September of 2000.”
All three of Lipa’s sons served in the army: Avner in the artillery, Yanay in the music band, and Gidi in the aviation sector. “Although I myself had been a reserve soldier for twenty-six years, my anxiety and concern for my sons has been a constant in my life,” Lipa says. He has found great joy in his grandchildren. Avner’s first daughter, Inbal, was born in 1979, followed by Avital, Ami, and Daniel. “To hold a grandchild in my arms, receive a kiss, be called Saba, ‘Grandpa,’ the laughter, the games, the delight of their first words—all of this has been a joy.”
The first of the Weiss family to fall victim to a suicide bomber was the charming Inbal. “She had served as a teacher in the army. One day a week, she went to the archives of Beit Lohamei HaGeta’ot, the center that documents the Jewish resistance against the Nazis—the partisans, the clandestine fighters, and those who rebelled in the ghettos. She was motivated by compassion, and by her connection to her grandparents and the Jewish people. Inbal and I had a special relationship, we talked about many things, she admired me and I admired her.” After her military service, it was time for Inbal to enter college. “She went to Emek Yisrael College. She started bringing me books, and she did a project on the policies of the Jewish Agency for Israel in my kibbutz. I admired her tenacity and determination. She was sent to the dean’s office, where she was told that she had been chosen for a special program. I remember that it was November 29, 2001, and Inbal called to tell me; she was excited, proud, and happy. I planned to see her that Friday at dinner at her parents’ house in Zichron Ya’akov. She always took the bus home. But that Thursday, she took a different route to meet her parents and go to the restaurant. The route wound through a number of Arab villages. Her parents called her on her cell phone to find out where she was. Two minutes later, the suicide bomber blew himself up. The bus was almost empty; there were three dead. Inbal was one of them.”
Israeli television interrupted its broadcasts to report on the attack. “I was nervous. I called Avner at home and the children told me that Avner and Marianne had gone to wait for Inbal at the bus stop. I called his cell phone and asked him where she was. I realized that Inbal had been on the bus. Later they went to identify the body. It was a horrible night. I went to Zichron to watch the children. We sat down in shock; no one said a word. We were alone with our sadness and our anger. Their parents returned in the middle of the night. We sat up until the morning, waiting for the funeral. It was rainy, another note of sadness. Pnina, my second wife, had died the year before, and I missed her deeply. I sat down to write my eulogy for Inbal. I don’t think I wept the way I did that night in Auschwitz, when my whole family was killed, maybe because I had to think about the things I had to do. But I had not wept since that night in the camps. Now everything made me weep. I missed Inbal so much; I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about her. I decided that I couldn’t let this crush me. I focused on my sons and returned to my routine. Inbal had been killed because she was a Jew, just like my parents, my relatives, and six million more.”
Yanay Weiss, Lipa’s second son, had left the kibbutz after his military service. “He wanted to become a musician, to make a living with music, although he would do any kind of work.” In Tel Aviv he married Orna, whose father was a survivor of Auschwitz and whose mother, together with her twin sister, had been among the “Mengele twins” who were subjected to horrifying medical experiments. “Orna taught at a nursery school and then worked as a therapist. Because they lived far away, I didn’t see them as often as I wanted. We saw each other once a month and at the holidays. Yanay gave up his dream of being a musician to work for a high-tech company, but he never gave up on music. He organized a band and a choir for the employees. On Tuesday night they were playing at Mike’s Place, and many of their friends and fans were there. The pub was full of people who had come to listen to them. They weren’t being paid anything; their only compensation was joy. Yanay had a family full of warmth and love.”
On April 29, 2003, Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel, Orna was at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, happy because they were going to give her an award for her work. “They decided to meet at the station in Tel Aviv. Yanay came with a bouquet of flowers, they had coffee, and then she went home and he went to the pub. That evening Yanay’s brother was at the pub, but he left a few minutes before the attack. The suicide bomber was stopped at the door by the bouncer, who was thrown back a few yards but survived. Yanay had gone outside to get some fresh air, and he was killed. The next morning I woke up at the usual time, 4:40, and turned on the radio. I heard that there had been an attack at Mike’s Place and that there were three dead. I was very anxious; I didn’t know the name of the pub, though I knew that Yanay played in Tel Aviv every Tuesday night. But I knew that the odds were against another horror in my family. Inbal had been killed a year and a half before. For two hours, I forced myself not to call. I thought that if Yanay were at home and if I called before seven o’clock, I would wake everyone up. Then the door opened. It was Avner—he had come to tell me the news. Yanay had been killed. It was as if my entire world had collapsed on me. Inbal had left her parents and relatives behind; Yanay left a widow and two orphans, a terrible tragedy. Avner took me to Orna. She was sitting down. She told me about the last time she had seen him, their last kiss. This time I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t write a eulogy for my son.”
During the shivah, the seven days of mourning, hundreds of people from Yanay’s workplace and from the music world came to pay their respects. One of his coworkers created a memorial website. “The terrorists were not from the Palestinian Territories; they were English citizens, well educated and from respectable families. Terrorism was based on hatred of Jews.
Inbal and Yanay were not killed as soldiers in battle, but as innocent citizens. The occupation is not the result of direct government policies, but a consequence of the fact that we must defend ourselves. I have suffered many losses in my life. The death of my family in the Holocaust had become a faint twinge of pain; my joy and pride in my sons and their families, and the satisfaction of my participation in the kibbutz and in Israel, had overshadowed the memory of those I had lost. But the tragic, cruel killing of my dearly beloved granddaughter and of Yanay, who was in the prime of life, who loved others and was himself loved, this has hit me very hard. I could never have imagined that I would bury my son and granddaughter in my lifetime—that I would be alive and they would be dead, that I would mourn for them in a eulogy. This has devastated both me and Judith. It robbed us of the satisfaction we had found in life. I had a family that was growing, and it has been reduced in such a cruel way.”
Both Inbal and Yanay believed in coexistence with the Arabs. “Judith and I had raised them that way. My kibbutz was very left-wing; the motto was ‘Zionism, socialism, and brotherhood. ’” I had great respect for the Arabs, and I identified with this ideology. Even after the attack, I was not angry with the Arabs, but with the extremists and fanatics who want to kill us. In spite of everything, our lives have been touched by hatred, cruelty, and fanaticism. Before they died, we gathered around the table for birthdays, for the Jewish holidays, we sang, we joked, we talked about our lives. It was the purest form of pleasure for me. But now when we get together, our joy is mingled with sadness. We don’t say it out loud, but inside we feel the absence of Inbal and Yanay. It is the sorrow that stains our happiness.”
These days, Lipa thinks about his childhood in the village in the Carpathians, about the death camps, and about rebirth in Israel. “I was born in the early decades of the last century, and I survived the horrors of the years that followed. I found happiness in life in the kibbutz, in the house I lived in for sixty years, and in Israel, which has made unbelievable progress. I am proud of who we are, and of what I and the other members of the kibbutz achieved
