When we mourn, we suddenly remember we are all one

Photo: Flash90

Sunday morning found the sidewalks of Jerusalem’s grieving Ramot neighborhood with new adornments: metal and concrete barriers.

In terror-stricken Israel, this sight is not new. Since car-ramming attacks began, many such barriers have been installed near bus stops. For some reason, the Ramot bus stop, located near the entrance to the Arab town Bayt Iksa, didn’t have such barriers. Now the city is putting them in at playground entrances as well.

Some residents are not impressed. So what, they say. So we secured this spot. Someone who wants to kill us will find another way.

People from across the entire societal spectrum mourned the attack. Many secular Israelis turned to social networks to express their pain, forgetting for the moment that the country is in the midst of a constitutional crisis. When we mourn, we suddenly remember we are all one.

Photos of the off-duty cop and detective who neutralized the terrorist went viral, but someone eventually noticed that the victims’ families were also depicted in the background, seconds after the attack. A mother standing over one lifeless son and another who was mortally wounded, the severely injured father lying on the ground nearby. A newlywed wife bending over her husband, soon to be pronounced dead upon arrival at the hospital. Photos of such agonizing moments are usually not circulated, but the background features were not noticed in time.

But their greatness was also on display. Both parents of the murdered Paley children had recently lost brothers. But the family was nevertheless standing at the bus stop because they were on their way to a Shabbos sheva brachos. After the attack, Mrs. Paley, knowing already that she had lost a son, insisted that no one in the family should abandon the event, that simchas chassan and kallah must go on. And so the Paley family danced for their newly married kallah, putting aside for one day the burial of five-year-old Yaakov Yisrael. On Motzaei Shabbos, they departed the simchah to attend the levayah of seven-year-old Menachem Asher.

Mrs. Paley was asked to identify Yaakov Yisrael so the levayah could proceed before Shabbos. A ZAKA volunteer who witnessed this told the media that the mother said, “Ribbono shel Olam, You gave me this son as a gift for five years. I received him as a korban and I return him as a korban.” Her husband is still in the hospital, fighting for his life.

“She is such an example, holding herself and the kids together,” said her father, Rabbi Amos Broner. On Sunday, he revealed another heartrending detail to Army Radio.

“We knew before Shabbos that Menachem Asher was gone,” said the grandfather, “but we didn’t tell the kids. He passed away on Friday bein hashemashos, and only on Motzaei Shabbos did we tell everyone.”

The boy had undergone resuscitation on the scene and was rushed to the hospital, where doctors fought for his life. His mother, returning from her other son’s levayah moments before Shabbos, received the news that her second son had succumbed to his wounds.

Both of the boys were buried next to their uncle Rabbi Dovid Broner, whose untimely passing came on Simchas Torah last year.

In Elad, the family of Alter Shlomo Lederman, the 20-year-old newlywed yungerman murdered in the attack, asked the media for privacy. Lederman studied at Yeshivah Tal Torah, and was in charge of publishing the rosh yeshivah Rav Tzvi Katz’s weekly divrei Torah. He was working on publishing them in a book.

At Lederman’s funeral, the Pinsk-Karlin Rebbe, currently in the US, eulogized him in a pre-recorded hesped, knowing he would not be available on Motzaei Shabbos for the funeral: “I don’t know if there has been another generation where everybody was surrounded with such difficulties. And despite all of this, we should all cry ‘Shema Yisrael Hashem Elokeinu Hashem Echad,’ and reflect that there is definitely good hidden in this gezeirah.”

The security forces’ response to the terror attack has yet to be determined. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu announced before Shabbos that he had ordered the terrorist’s house be sealed and destroyed. But several MKs declared that insufficient action conveys weakness.

“Our response to the Neve Yaakov terror attack was not enough,” said Otzmah Yehudit MK Almog Cohen. “We demand an appropriate response this time.”

Security minister Itamar Ben Gvir promised an Operation Defensive Shield 2 against Palestinian terror in Jerusalem, but that drew skeptical reactions. Operation Defensive Shield was an IDF action carried out within the Palestinian Authority, with heavy military equipment. Ben Gvir said later he did not mean he would “bring tanks into the streets, but [rather] to start enforcing the law.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 949)