Words of Comfort

NIGHTMARE Avigdor Gavish was a teenager when a Hamas terrorist infiltrated his home. He remembers his brother calling out to him “What’s happening?” and answering “Everyone’s dead.” Over the past 16 years One Family’s dozens of full-time staff members and over 700 volunteers have helped nearly 3 400 families like Avigdors cope persevere and heal (Photos: Sarah Levin Flash90)

T he all-important Jewish tenet of ahavas Yisrael sometimes seems to come in for the same treatment as inclement weather: Everyone talks about it but too few people actually do something about it. Last week however New York’s mid-February weather was unseasonably beautiful and so was the simple love of one Jew for another on display at a very special encounter in Manhattan where Rabbi Yaakov Bender dean of Yeshiva Darchei Torah in Far Rockaway New York met with a group of young Israelis there for a weeklong tour of the Big Apple.

The group’s members all in their twenties and thirties are bound together by tragedy and loss of an unfathomable magnitude. All of these young men and women have suffered the deaths of both parents in a single terrorist attack and many of them lost siblings in those attacks as well. Since the beginning of the second intifada the mothers and fathers of 16 families were murdered together leaving 72 double-orphaned children many of whom were witness to their parents’ gruesome deaths.

It’s not simple say those who’ve seen the unthinkable to enshrine their parents in their memories without the visions of terror overshadowing the good times. Naama HaLevi’s parents Rafi and Elana HaLevi of Kedumim were killed by a suicide bomber in April 2006. They picked up two hitchhikers on their way home and generously squeezed a third one – the terrorist – into the car as well. Witnesses described a struggle inside the car and how the terrorist blew up his prey just as Rafi managed to swerve away from the gas station at the entrance to the yishuv.