A train collision rerouted the Kook family to a new destination 

Photos: Yedidya Meir archives

The personal churban of the Kook family over 50 years ago could have caused the surviving children to crumble, but the tragic train collision on the fourth night of Chanukah in 1971 — claiming the lives of Rechovot chief rabbi Rav Shlomo Kook, his wife and two children — became instead a survivor’s banner of emunah, hope, and growth. “We never felt like nebachs,” says Rabbanit Ziva Meir today. “We always thought about our role in spite of the circumstances”

W

hen 15-year-old Ziva Kook woke up on the fourth day of Chanukah in 1971, she couldn’t believe her bad luck. The entire family was looking forward to a day trip to Jerusalem, but she’d somehow contracted an eye infection.

Her father was Rav Shlomo Zalman Kook, the dynamic rav of Rechovot, who regularly traveled around the country as a sought-after Torah lecturer. He’d recently acquired a new car, and the rare family trip to Jerusalem would surely have been the highlight of Ziva’s Chanukah vacation: purchasing tefillin for her brother Uriel for his upcoming bar mitzvah, a tefillah at the Kosel, dropping off the manuscript her mother, Rabbanit Yehudit, had recently completed for a final proofreading before print, and then a Chanukah party in the home of their Katz grandparents.

But her swollen eye upended her plans.

“Seeing how upset I was, my father felt bad, and told me that if the doctor agreed, I could come along. But the doctor didn’t agree, and boy, was I furious,” says Rabbanit Ziva Meir, an acclaimed Israeli parenting expert and wife of Moshav Gimzu’s Rav Eliav Meir (and mother of media personalities Yedidya and Yitzchak Meir and another nine children), recalling that dark day over half a century ago, the day that would change her life forever. “But little did I know it meant that I would be saved.”

Rav Shlomo and Rabbanit Yehudit Kook collected their children, ten-year-old Yocheved, eight-year-old Menachem Don, and three-year old Nachman Nosson, and headed for Jerusalem. Uriel, 12, said he had a headache and stayed home with Ziva, and their brother Benzion — today a well-known posek, city rav and author of seforim — went to Teveria to be with their grandmother, Rabbanit Rachel Baila Kook, who was spending her first Chanukah alone after her husband, Teveria chief rabbi Rav Raphael HaKohein Kook, had passed away suddenly a few months before.

“I sat with Uriel at home,” Rabbanit Ziva recalls. “I wanted to make a surprise for my parents, so I took out a pot and made a batch of popcorn for them.” She had no idea that she’d never see them again.

An hour passed.

Then another.

It was long past the time to light the fourth candle, but there was still no sign of Ziva’s family. She and her brother waited and waited. Even some guests had already arrived — Rav Yehudah David Wolpe from Rishon Letzion and his family, who were invited for the evening after candle lighting.

A phone call to Rabbanit Yehudit’s father, Rav Dov Katz (author of the Tenuas Hamussar seforim series and one of the eminent students of Yeshivas Knesses Yisrael when it was still in Chevron) clarified that indeed, the Kooks had departed from Jerusalem long before dark and headed back to Rechovot.

Where were they?