was formed and where its ethical and religious traditions were created. To Jews, Israel is unique, and we live here because we believe it is the natural and normal place for Jews.” The land is part of this hope. “The other members of the Jewish people who have come to live here also give us hope. The education of our children and the religion in which we are raising them give us hope. Nonetheless, nothing changes the sadness and remorse that we feel over the death of our daughter. No culture, hope, or tradition can comfort us over the tragic loss of her wonderful life.”
We ask him what the victims of terrorism represent. “Jewish history is full of tragedy. It isn’t easy to understand. But the questions that families like ours ask are questions that have already been posed by others before us. We also know that there are few answers. This does not make us any less devout, because in Judaism we can ask questions and know that sometimes the answers are elusive and impossible.”
Frimet Roth was born in a secularized family in New York; Arnold has severed roots in Europe. “I was born in Melbourne, to parents who had survived Auschwitz and had lost everything there,” says Arnold. Both of his parents came from Poland. “My mother, Genia, survived together with three of her sisters; they were deported to the ghetto and then to a death camp. After the war, they discovered that their parents and their three brothers had been killed by the Nazis. My father was the youngest of a large family. He and his oldest brother survived; all the others were exterminated by the Nazi machine. My uncle Shaya had decided that the prewar anti-Semitism in Poland was intolerable, so he survived thanks to his decision to emigrate to Tel Aviv. His children, my cousins, are authentic Palestinians, Jews who escaped Nazism and whose parents decided to take them to Palestine. So we know that our lives are an inseparable part of an organic nation with strong connections to the past. I was a child without grandparents. We didn’t talk about our uncles, cousins, and grandparents who had been killed as heroes. They died because they were Jewish, and those who murdered them did so in the name of hatred and racial prejudice.”
Arnold remarks, “I never would have expected to see the past tragedies of our people return into our lives. But it has happened, and today it is impossible for us to see what has happened to our daughter, her death as a martyr, without connecting it to the centuries in which we were dominated by those who hated us, by racists and by the ignorant. This is the reason why we have become so involved in the debate on terrorism, and it frightens and disturbs us that civil society is so reluctant to understand the danger.” Unfortunately, in Israel there does not yet exist a shared memory of terrorism. “Israeli society wavers endlessly between the expression of force and determination on the one hand, and of compassion for the victims on the other. In Israel we have learned that terrorism is not a fluke, but a constant. It is a form of war in which one act of terror is a prelude to the next. They will strike as long as they can, until we have stopped them.”
Arnold has founded a nonprofit association in Malka’s name. The Malki Foundation has no politics, but optimistically celebrates life and the human spirit. “We wanted the foundation dedicated to Malka to be the antithesis of terror. We wanted to honor her memory through practical actions that would unite people, apart from race and religion—Jews, Christians, and Muslims. The most difficult thing for the parents of a daughter who has been killed is to get up in the morning. This gives us the strength. We have financed 27,500 therapy sessions for hundreds of Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Druze children. And we did this in order to preserve and honor the memory of a beautiful, sweet young woman who never reached the age of sixteen. I am filled with hope by the stories of a society afflicted by terror that is learning to honor and respect the memory of the human beings who have lost their lives. A society’s correct answer to actions of hatred is actions that affirm life and dignity, starting with the lives and dignity of the victims.”
Roth explains that the concept of chesed is different from that of charity; it is a Hebrew word more similar to “love.” “When you perform an act of chesed, you know that you will receive nothing in return from the person who benefits from it. There will be no ‘thank you.’ People who do chesed do so because they know that it is intrinsically good, and adds goodness to the world.” One example is the preparation of the corpse. “In every Jewish community, there are people who do this for free, without being paid. It is clear that the deceased person cannot offer any thanks. In Hebrew, this is called chesed shel emet, true generosity. My daughter Malka knew this. And she took great pleasure in the simple fact of helping other people, especially children with problems. Her sister, Haya, is blind and does not communicate with the world, not even now, at the age of thirteen. Haya didn’t know how to thank Malka when she picked her up. When we decided to remember Malka by creating a foundation bearing her name, it was because we wanted to honor her beauty and generosity. We wanted to emulate her values. This way she will not be forgotten. We wanted her memory to be respected. As I said at the funeral, her life was an act of beauty. The people who live on the other side of the security barrier, the Palestinians, are not worse than us. It is the values of our society that are different. By doing an act of chesed, we remind ourselves every day that our society is different from theirs. A person like Malka couldn’t have been born in a society that produces murderers.”
Arnold Roth was one of eighteen victims of terror from different countries who spoke at a symposium hosted by the United Nations in New York. “The challenge to individuals, to the victims who endure terrorism, is to find and adopt ways to survive the evil of the perpetrators of terrorism,” he said. “To reaffirm our humanity, our dignity, our generosity, and our optimism.”
Arnold has always felt that the life of his daughter was the continuation of another story cut short by barbarism sixty years earlier—that of Feige, his father’s sister, who was killed by the Nazis in Europe. “Malka herself saw a strong connection with Feige. I live in Israel, and I have chosen to come here to be with my wife and my children. Although our life in Australia was certainly comfortable and good, we wanted more: a place where Jewish values would be at home. Malka, like me, grew up knowing that she was part of Jewish history. She seemed very similar to the aunt that I never met. Feige’s upbringing was very similar to that of Malka; both of them prayed from the same book and mentioned Jerusalem in their prayers three times a day. Unlike Malka, who had the privilege of living in Jerusalem, Feige was murdered in the Nazi campaign of hatred that turned into something unimaginable on a vast scale.”
Malka knew well what terrorism does. “She wept secretly for the victims; we found this out from what she had written. We found it out only after she was gone. Hers was a pain that was intimately connected with that of her people. She wept over the death of innocent Jews, and Malka’s tears have become our tears. Her life was taken away just as the life of my father’s family was torn from him, leaving him alone. It is therefore impossible for me to think about my daughter’s death without it reflecting on the stunning number of Jewish victims over the course of history, especially the victims of the Holocaust. My parents, victims of the Holocaust in which they lost everyone, tried to live productive lives after the horrors of the Nazi extermination. In the same way, my wife and I are trying to help people and to express an optimistic perspective on life.”
Israel is a country that has become all too accustomed to digging graves for its children. Is the Holocaust really over? Those killed at Sbarro also included two-year-old Hemda, four-year-old Avraham Yitzhak, fourteen-year-old Ra’aya, their mother, Tzira, and their father, Mordechai—five members of the Schijveschuurder family cut down in a single stroke. They had come from Holland, where their Jewish ancestors had lived for more than four centuries, since the time of Baruch Spinoza. The children’s grandmother, who had survived the Holocaust, was called the next day to identify the bodies of her loved ones. “I had sworn that I would have another family after the war. Now Arafat is finishing what Hitler started,” said Naomi Friedman. Born in Czechoslovakia, she had gone through the concentration camps of Ravensbruck and Bergen-Belsen, while her husband was in Theresienstadt. “We survived that hell, but we lost seven brothers and sisters. Here we have found worse murderers than the Nazis.”
