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.

“We came as soon as we were notified ” says Naama “and saw the car there with the headlights still smoldering. They told us that when they found the bodies my parents were holding each other’s hands. So that’s the image I’ve taken with me.”

Didi Dickstein was 15 when his parents Rabbi Yosef Yaakov and Chanah Dickstein were murdered in a drive-by shooting a few minutes before Shabbos in July 2002. His nine-year-old brother was also killed and two other siblings were seriously injured; one of them was 12-year-old Shlomo who took his father’s cell phone and called for help as his parents lay dying next to him.

Didi remembers that he didn’t even know about the attack until after Shabbos when he was given some confusing details and called home only to be told by his sister Ayelet “What you don’t know that Abba and Ima were killed?”

Ayelet who was also in the car and found herself taking responsibility for six helpless siblings younger than herself says she still feels a sense of detachment. “Most people have this string they’re attached to which stays connected to them no matter where they are like a balloon that can never fly too far away. My string was broken.”

Hodaya Ames just nine years old when her parents Yitzchak and Talia Ames were murdered while driving from Kiryat Arba to their home in Beit Chagai on August 31 2010 says she doesn’t even remember the string. “I was just a kid. I don’t know what it’s like to live with an abba and ima.”