Sgt. Yosef Cohen Hy”d paid the ultimate sacrifice in defense of Am Yisrael, but sent a message of hope from Above to his grieving family

It was last year in Teves, the morning of my brother’s chasunah. My mother was in a taxi in Jerusalem when she heard over the radio the word pigu’a, followed by two victims’ names. This time it was so close — she usually heard about these tragedies in faraway England. She was barely over the shock when the cab pulled up to her destination. As she entered the building where she was staying, she heard wrenching wails in the hallway. A woman was coming up the stairs followed by her husband, weeping so bitterly she looked like she would dissolve in her tears. Her husband led her into an apartment and the sobbing intensified. The woman’s pain was obviously coming from the depths of a broken heart, and my mother, never one to pass an opportunity to ease someone’s pain, felt she had to offer her help — or at least use her power as a baalas simchah to give this poor woman a brachah. Just then, the husband, a distinguished-looking man with long white beard and peyos, came out again. My mother asked him if there was any way she could help.

“Our son was just killed in a pigu’a,” he said, in near-perfect English.

Struggling to hide her emotions, she remembered the radio announcement. “Yossi Cohen?” she whispered.

“Yes,” he answered heavily.

My mother was speechless. All day, she couldn’t get the pained image of the broken woman out of her mind. When she walked to the chuppah that afternoon, she found herself davening not just for her own son but for the mother who had just lost hers. During sheva brachos week, there were placards of the shivah all over. It turns out that Yossi Cohen was the son of prominent parents, well known in Jerusalem’s chareidi community, and especially in the Breslov kehillos of Eretz Yisrael. The room was packed, but Yossi’s mother, Odel Cohen-Merav, a popular lecturer to whom hundreds of women flocked, looked at my mother standing in the doorway questioningly, recognizing her vaguely. “You don’t know me,” my mother told her, “but Yidden everywhere feel your pain. I took my son to his chuppah the same time as you took yours to his levayah, but I took him under the chuppah with me too.”

“Nichamtani, nichamtani,” she responded effusively, coming over to show my mother a photo of her sweet son, 19-year-old Yossi Hashem yikom damo, murdered by terrorist fire outside the Givat Assaf junction near Beit El, together with his friend Yuval Mor-Yosef. Both young men were part of the Netzach Yehuda (“Nachal Chareidi”) brigade. She also told her briefly about her and her husband Rav Eliyahu Merav’s own riveting life stories, which merged in their second marriage a mere five years ago.

It is a story of twists and turns, of heartbreak and personal redemption. Now, a year after their son’s murder, as the searing intensity of the pain has morphed into more of a constant, unrelenting ache, Rav Eliyahu Merav — venerated Breslov mashpia and the former mayor of Emanuel — agreed to pull back the curtain and share a bit about his own personal trajectory.