of Buchenwald, where he lost two of his brothers, while his father was killed in the gas chamber at Treblinka, where the Jews were exterminated in less than two hours.
Mordechai Schijveschuurder had decided to live “on the front line,” in the Neria settlement. Shortly before he was killed, a friend asked him if he was fearful in driving that route every evening. Mordechai replied, “A bomb could kill me in Jerusalem, too.” He was a man of faith who loved the Torah and had been the principal of a religious school. His wife, Tzira, had taken care of deaf children. After the explosion, before he died, Mordechai recited the first line of the ritual prayer Shema Yisrael, “Hear, O Israel.” He died with those words on his lips.
At the funeral, a friend of the family remarked that “the angel of death can reach wherever he wants.” Ten-year-old Leah wanted to take part in the ceremony for her parents and siblings. “I loved you so much, dearest,” she said. “I am sorry for how naughty I was.” The oldest child of the family, Ben-Zion, also spoke: “We will hold tight what you left us, love for one another. We love you. Watch over us from above, so we can remain united.” Meir, another son, remarked, “The terrorists want to kill the free world, and America and Israel are the symbol of the free world.” Grandma Naomi said, “Thanks to God, we had returned to the land of our dreams, to the land that symbolizes our freedom. Now that the bloody hands of our murderers have reached us, all of this is incomprehensible.”
“To my father, Neria was a place to live like any other,” says Ben-Zion. “He made the aliyah from Amsterdam, and in his mind Israel was Israel. It’s not that Neria was a better place than Petah Tikva, where I was born. Israel was very important to him, but he never protested against the government because of the withdrawal from the Territories. He thought that Israel went from the bank of the Jordan to the Mediterranean.” Ben remembers his father as a businessman first of all, “and then a talmid hakham, a person who studies the Bible. Photographs show him with his black kippah like the Haredim, but he always thought that unless one is a genius, one must work. And he was a genius: every morning he learned something before going to work. He brought books with him every time he traveled. I think that one of his dreams was to be a teacher, but he knew that he could do better in business. But I am grateful that after the death of my father, a school was named after him. Everyone talks about him, never about her, my mother, who was the true genius behind my father. She loved to stay in the background, but he always listened to her. The school wouldn’t have existed without her. She loved her family, my father, and her job. The rest isn’t so important. The others in my family, the ones who are gone now—well, I was in the army, and I didn’t go back home often enough to talk with my sister.”
Ben also talks about how it was possible to get over his mourning, to move forward. “My relationship with the State of Israel is not simply one of hope and strength. I live in Israel as the place of my birth, where my friends are. Those who have helped me have been the friends of the family and my personal friends, and also people on the street. Returning to normal life was very difficult, and at the same time very easy, because I had two sisters to think about. So you can’t beat yourself up all day and feel sorry for yourself. But this deprived me of my own space to mourn. Nonetheless, I must say that I am happy with the way I chose. For a whole year after the death of our family, we went from one place to another without any plan, like a ship without a captain.”
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