Amichai Schindler lost his hands, but not his faith

Photos: Elchanan Kotler

INthe small shul inside Sheba Hospital’s rehabilitation wing sits a man whose hands have been blown off, and he and his chavrusa meet every day to study Maseches Yadayim.

To write these words about a grievously wounded man would — in any other context — be cheap melodrama. But not when it comes to Amichai Schindler. The starkness of that outline seems the only way to do justice to this father-of-six’s story.

On Simchas Torah morning, Hamas terrorists blasted their way into Kerem Shalom, a kibbutz on the Gaza border. They blew open the door to the bomb shelter where Amichai and his family were hiding. The explosion threw him clear across the room where he lay for the next two hours, his life ebbing away.

When Amichai woke up ten days later, he found that his smashed face had been rebuilt, but that his hands were gone forever.

And yet within days of beginning to breathe on his own again, the kollel graduate and social worker was back in the beis medrash — first figuratively, and then literally.

In parallel with the pain-racked regimen of operations and physical therapy, he began an intense program of spiritual therapy, from three minyanim a day to in-depth Torah learning — beginning with an unusual choice for a severely wounded terror survivor.

“Rav Chaim Kanievsky told someone who lost his arms to learn Maseches Yadayim,” says Amichai of the highly technical tractate that deals with halachic purity, not anatomy, “so I decided to do the same.”

The utter genuineness of those words — as if the most natural response to losing one’s arms is to channel the pain into an out-of-the-way part of the Mishnah — is what sets Amichai, and his story, apart.

In a hospital full of people courageously dealing with lost limbs and shattered bodies, Amichai Schindler and his calm, faith-filled optimism have become a magnet. His room in the IDF rehabilitation center plays host to a revolving cast of guests, from chassidic rebbes to celebrities. They’re all drawn by word of the heroism playing out in Room 14.

“It’s scarcely of our generation, like something out of a Tales of Tzaddikim,” says Rabbi Shlomo Ra’anan, head of Ayelet Hashachar, an outreach organization. Rabbi Ra’anan is the original founder of the shul in Schindler’s kibbutz, and during the last two months he’s spent countless hours at the latter’s bedside. “Here’s a man who has only one finger and yet his concern now is how to use it to light the Chanukah candles.”

If you spend a few minutes at Amichai Schindler’s side, though, you’ll quickly learn that his personal story is only one part of a wider miracle — that of his kibbutz’s survival.

Located on the tri-border of Israel, Gaza, and Egypt, Kerem Shalom ought to have suffered the same gruesome fate as other frontline kibbutzim like Be’eri and Nachal Oz, which were utterly destroyed, and whose residents were massacred or carted off to captivity.

Yet despite being breached in three places by a heavily armed Hamas force numbering in the hundreds, only two residents of the kibbutz fell. They were Amichai’s friends and members of the Kitat Konenut, the village’s own rapid-response team, who went to the aid of the besieged Schindler family.

Over the course of six hours, the hopelessly outgunned team held off the marauders virtually unaided. By the end of the battle — which the IDF belatedly joined — the only house in Kerem Shalom to be touched was the Schindler homestead, at the kibbutz’s edge.

Standing outside the bullet-pocked front of the house six weeks later, his armored jeep idling in the background, rapid-response team head Eliyah Ben-Shimol shakes his head, still unable to digest the scale of what happened on the grassy area around him.

“We were 11 men, with just six rifle magazines each to defend against a massive force armed with rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns, and yet this is the only house that they breached,” he says, reaching for a metaphor that is both convenient and utterly fitting.

“The survival of Amichai, his family, and the rest of Kerem Shalom is nothing short of a Chanukah miracle. It’s a latter-day story of the many falling into the hands of the few.”