No Prayer Goes Unanswered

Title: No Prayer Goes Unanswered

Location: Jerusalem, Israel

Document: Jerusalem Post

Time: October 14, 1994

My husband asked that it be stated at Nachshon’s funeral, to please tell all our people that G-d did listen to our prayers and that He collected all our tears. My husband’s greatest concern when burying his son was that there would be a crisis in faith. And so he asked that it be told to everyone that just as a father would always like to say yes to all of his children’s requests, sometimes he had to say no, though the child might not understand why. So our Father in Heaven heard our prayers, and though we don’t understand why, His answer was no.

—Esther Wachsman, mother of Nachshon Wachsman Hy”d

When the Oslo Accords went into effect in the last months of 1994, Palestinian extremists attempted to stop the peace process. Hamas, which actively wanted to prevent any possibility of peace between Israel and the Palestinians, carried out a series of suicide bombings and deadly terror attacks to try to convince the Israeli public of the futility of peace. Hamas terrorists also wanted to free the founder of their organization, Ahmed Yassin, along with hundreds of other terrorists, from Israeli prisons. To that end, they invested great effort into abducting an IDF soldier who could be used as a bargaining chip. Sadly, they found one: Nachshon Wachsman.

Nachshon’s mother Esther was born in a DP camp in Germany in 1947 to survivor parents who had lost their entire families in the Holocaust. Having grown up in Brooklyn, she moved to Israel in 1969 and studied history at Hebrew University, specializing in Holocaust studies. It was there that she met her husband, Yehuda Wachsman, who was born in Romania in 1947 and immigrated to Israel when he was 11.

Settling in Jerusalem’s Ramot neighborhood, they raised a family of seven sons. The first two were appropriately named for ancestors martyred in the Holocaust. The third son was born on Shevii shel Pesach, the anniversary of Kri’as Yam Suf, inspiring hope for a better future. Named for the Biblical Nachshon ben Aminadav, who was the first to jump into the Yam Suf, he attended a yeshivah in Jerusalem before following his older brothers into the elite Golani combat unit of the IDF.