After losing their son to cancer, Chaim and Miri Ehrental have spent the last three decades making sure no other parent faces the challenge alone
Photo: Elchanan Kotler
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cadre of news reporters surrounds Miri Ehrental, their live mics jutting under the waning Jerusalem sun, while family, friends, and volunteers stand by her side. Noise. Lots of noise. But standing over her son’s grave, all the cacophony washes away with her tears. “This prize is really for you, Menachem,” she says. “All our work is in your zechus.” The cameramen hit pause — there’s not a dry eye in the crowd.
Visiting the cemetery had not been on the Ehrentals’ agenda that day. But that changed when Chaim Ehrental answered the phone and found the Minister of Education’s secretary on the line. The voice was businesslike and to the point: “Minister Naftali Bennett wants you here this morning.” Shifting his weight, Chaim replied: “I don’t know… we have a meeting scheduled in Jerusalem, and then another at Rambam hospital, up in Haifa.” After checking with his wife, Miri, he added: “We can come through Tel Aviv on our way back, if you like. Around 6 p.m.…”
“Mah pitom!” The secretary was emphatic. “You must come in. With your wife. 11 a.m. — the minister is expecting you!”.
The Ehrentals canceled their Haifa meeting and dutifully drove to Tel Aviv, thinking that perhaps they were finally being granted a bureaucratic license they had applied for earlier that year. In their wildest dreams, however, they couldn’t have imagined the gargantuan media hug that was to engulf them as they stepped through the Ministry’s revolving doors. Once there, Minister Bennet informed the Ehrentals that they were to receive the Israel Prize for the care they gave kids with cancer and their families at Zichron Menachem — an organization they established in 1990 near their home in Jerusalem’s Bayit Vegan neighborhood, following the death of their son who battled cancer for most of the 14 years of his young life.
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