Of the 24 students of the Slabodka yeshivah murdered in the 1929 Chevron massacre, eight of them were Americans. This is their story
The words seared my brain. Everything swam before me. I clutched at a passerby for support. As in a dream, I read further: Dave Sheinberg, Memphis; Benjamin Hurwitz, Brooklyn; Aaron David Epstein, Chicago; Jackie Wexler…
God!!! Jackie, Billy, Dave and the rest of “our gang” killed by filthy Arabs. I stood there on Broadway. The “elevated” rushed along roaring, like a demon, taxis flitted through the street like so many flies, men and women pushed and shoved me indifferently as they hastened on their way, the banana peddler on the corner called attention incessantly to his pushcart. I was oblivious to all of this. Mechanically, as in a trance, I made my way to my room. Ill for several days, I lay on my couch, gazing helplessly through my windows at the colossal skyscrapers of this metropolis. Magnificent structures, vast and towering, they left me cold. My thoughts turned to a small modest stone building in Hebron, whose walls even now were moist with the blood of my colleagues. Yeshivah walls — koslei beis hamedrash.
In 1953, the American survivors of the massacre gathered together in Cleveland where they relived the tragedy anew. Ohio native Sol Goodman, who on that fateful day in 1929 was hidden together with his brother Manny by a friendly Arab grocer under a pile of manure, had his kidney punctured by the probing knives of the raging mob. Bleeding profusely, he remained hidden until given the all-clear some hours later. He suffered for over two decades from the wounds he sustained before succumbing and facing an untimely death.
(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 829)
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