My love for all of them, Avner, Marianne, Orna, Gidi, Dorit, and the other children, and my love and concern for Judith is what gives me the strength to move forward and to try to live a normal life. We talk about our losses openly and freely; we mention Inbal and Yanay all the time. But we also enjoy what we have.”
The story of Lipa Weiss is a story about destruction and heroism, about death and rebirth. It is the sacred story in which every life that ends is linked to another being born. It is Israel with its silent ranks of six million souls that march, hand in hand, until the ranks form an unbroken circle. One of the greatest mysteries of the past two thousand years is how one-third of God’s chosen people—six million men, women, and children—were reduced to ashes during the Holocaust, and no more than a blink of an eye later, the same battered people won independence and freedom in Israel for the first time since the destruction of the Holy Temple. “We, your children, were born to survivors of the Holocaust, and constitute irrefutable proof to those who tried so hard to extinguish the Jewish nation,” said Avner Weiss, speaking at his father’s kibbutz, Ein Hashofet. “Our existence is also a partial compensation for the inconsolable loss of your loved ones, who were taken from you with such brutality. We were born in this land, as members of a kibbutz, growing up as the new nation and society were being formed. We were the sons and daughters of parents who had undergone unbelievable sorrow and anguish, who were now seeking for themselves love, support, security, and peace—a home. I stand before you in awe, filled with admiration that you were able to overcome such tremendous obstacles and to bestow on your lives a new and special meaning, as living witnesses to the Holocaust that annihilated whole families and loved ones.”
The marvelous optimism of Lipa Weiss, his prodigious face of tears and smiles that is the very place of Shoah; the quiet smiles of Inbal and Yanay, emanating earnestness, seriousness, determination, moral strength and courage; the admirable spirit that carries Avner and Marianne through their almost unbearable pain—these will be forever part of this everlasting mystery. This is the best and most honorable part of Israel, and of all humanity.
A Clock Frozen at 2:04
Arnold Roth traveled from Jerusalem to The Hague so he could hold a photograph of his daughter, Malka, in front of the International Court of Justice as it began its deliberations over the legality of Israel’s security fence. Malka was killed along with fourteen other people by a suicide bomber while enjoying lunch in Jerusalem’s Sbarro pizzeria on August 9, 2001. “Do I feel bad about the destruction the fence is causing? I do,” Roth said. “But do not compare the murder of my daughter to the inability of a Palestinian to get to work by 9:00 A.M.” Since construction of the security fence began, the number of terrorist attacks has declined by more than 90 percent, and the number of Israelis murdered and wounded has decreased by more than 70 percent and 85 percent, respectively.
Avi Ohayon brought a bullet to The Hague. He had found it under a pile of toys in the bedroom corner where his two sons huddled with their mother when a terrorist shot all three to death. Ohayon held it up before a crowded room a few short blocks from the International Court, where a panel of fifteen judges in black robes ruled that Israel’s security fence was a violation of humanitarian law. Israel was on trial for protecting its citizens.
Fanny Haim had the presence of mind to write an open letter to the judges: “Today, in The Hague, you will sit in judgment. Today, I will bury my husband, my heart—which has been cut in two. I am not a politician. I am appealing to you as someone who has lost her husband, a woman whose heart has been silenced—and a woman whose tragedy the separation fence could have prevented. Today, as you begin your deliberations with open eyes, think, just for a moment, about the ordinary people behind this bloody conflict. Think for a moment about the golden heart of my husband, Yehuda, and about our young son, Avner. Maybe you can explain to him—he’s only ten years old—why in God’s Name he doesn’t have a father anymore. This evening, you will go home, kiss your spouses, hug your children—and I will be alone. Today, I am burying my husband; don’t you bury justice.”
Creating a river of faces, Israeli supporters and families marched through the Dutch city to the triangular plaza near the courthouse, holding posters of victims. Already parked there was the bombed-out shell of the No. 19 bus, in which eleven people were killed in Jerusalem. The organization Christians for Israel had helped bring the bus to The Hague, and held a silent march in front of the court with portraits of 927 terror victims. Paramedics from Magen David Adom read out the names of the dead. Some of the demonstrators were holding up a sign with a picture of the bodies rapped in plastic, and a banner saying: “The people who used this bus in 29.1.2003 were on their way to work and to school. Some of them never got there.”
When the suicide bomber blew it up, the Sbarro restaurant had its usual crowd of families and office workers on their lunch break; there were children, teenagers, mothers with infants in strollers, elderly couples. A clock on the wall froze at 2:04, the time of the explosion. For hours, a bitter odor of explosives and burned bodies hung in the air. “I saw a man lying on the street shaking like he was being electrocuted and a child that looked dead in another man’s arms,” said a survivor. “A woman soldier sat motionless in shock inside, with the table that should have been in front of her gone.” Blood pooled on the floor and stained the pitted plaster walls. Two strollers were overturned on the pavement amid broken glasses, blood splotches, fragments of tables, a charred chair back, a half-opened purse with a small teddy bear as a good-luck charm. There were clots of hair everywhere, and a splinter from a victim’s arm. From the ceiling hung electrical wires, shattered signs, the chimney from the oven. Outside, the ultra-Orthodox Jews of Zaka, the guardians of Jewish piety, picked up even the tiniest scraps of the bodies. Beneath a blanket was the torso of a woman without legs. “The most striking thing I saw, which I will never forget, was a child sitting in a stroller outside of a shop: he was dead, and soon afterward his mother came out and started screaming,” said Naor Shara, a soldier who was passing by the restaurant. All that remained of the building facade was the red, white, and green sign reading: “Sbarro: the Best Italian Choice. Kosher.”
Today there is a plaque in Sbarro that reads: “In memory of the shadows that have fallen upon us. From the Sbarro family, the city of Jerusalem, and the entire Jewish nation.”
Before going to lunch, the last thing Malka Roth and Michal Raziel did was decorate the room of a friend who was returning to Israel later that day. By the time the friend came back, the girls were no longer alive; they had made a date for Sbarro. “Malka was an extraordinary young woman; her life was an act of beauty,” says her father, Arnold. She took care of handicapped children, and her sister was also disabled.
“We were old-school Zionist—we wanted to raise our children where the Jewish life could be truly lived,” Arnold explains. He met his wife, Frimet, in New York, and they moved to Melbourne. “Before getting married, we promised each other that we would emigrate to Israel in a few years. We both believed in the centrality of Israel for the life of Jews. We are both devout in the Orthodox sense. In 1988, we went to live in an apartment in Jerusalem.” Asked where he found the strength to go on after the death of his daughter, Roth replied, “Living a ‘normal life’ and rebuilding it after the death of a daughter is not an end or a result. It is a process—a process that has dominated our lives for seven years, since Malka was taken away from us. There are times when the battle gets the better of you. Each person is different from the next. It is so abnormal to bury your children, victims of an act of barbarity and hatred.”
Roth has nothing rhetorical to say about Israel. “This is no place for angels, but a fascinating place with a unique history. The people of Israel are very similar to others, neither better nor worse, ordinary like all the rest. But the spirit of Israel and its history
