the suicide bomber blew it up, the Sbarro restaurant had its usual crowd of families and office workers on their lunch break; there were children, teenagers, mothers with infants in strollers, elderly couples. A clock on the wall froze at 2:04, the time of the explosion. For hours, a bitter odor of explosives and burned bodies hung in the air. “I saw a man lying on the street shaking like he was being electrocuted and a child that looked dead in another man’s arms,” said a survivor. “A woman soldier sat motionless in shock inside, with the table that should have been in front of her gone.” Blood pooled on the floor and stained the pitted plaster walls. Two strollers were overturned on the pavement amid broken glasses, blood splotches, fragments of tables, a charred chair back, a half-opened purse with a small teddy bear as a good-luck charm. There were clots of hair everywhere, and a splinter from a victim’s arm. From the ceiling hung electrical wires, shattered signs, the chimney from the oven. Outside, the ultra-Orthodox Jews of Zaka, the guardians of Jewish piety, picked up even the tiniest scraps of the bodies. Beneath a blanket was the torso of a woman without legs. “The most striking thing I saw, which I will never forget, was a child sitting in a stroller outside of a shop: he was dead, and soon afterward his mother came out and started screaming,” said Naor Shara, a soldier who was passing by the restaurant. All that remained of the building facade was the red, white, and green sign reading: “Sbarro: the Best Italian Choice. Kosher.”
Today there is a plaque in Sbarro that reads: “In memory of the shadows that have fallen upon us. From the Sbarro family, the city of Jerusalem, and the entire Jewish nation.”
Before going to lunch, the last thing Malka Roth and Michal Raziel did was decorate the room of a friend who was returning to Israel later that day. By the time the friend came back, the girls were no longer alive; they had made a date for Sbarro. “Malka was an extraordinary young woman; her life was an act of beauty,” says her father, Arnold. She took care of handicapped children, and her sister was also disabled.
“We were old-school Zionist—we wanted to raise our children where the Jewish life could be truly lived,” Arnold explains. He met his wife, Frimet, in New York, and they moved to Melbourne. “Before getting married, we promised each other that we would emigrate to Israel in a few years. We both believed in the centrality of Israel for the life of Jews. We are both devout in the Orthodox sense. In 1988, we went to live in an apartment in Jerusalem.” Asked where he found the strength to go on after the death of his daughter, Roth replied, “Living a ‘normal life’ and rebuilding it after the death of a daughter is not an end or a result. It is a process—a process that has dominated our lives for seven years, since Malka was taken away from us. There are times when the battle gets the better of you. Each person is different from the next. It is so abnormal to bury your children, victims of an act of barbarity and hatred.”
Roth has nothing rhetorical to say about Israel. “This is no place for angels, but a fascinating place with a unique history. The people of Israel are very similar to others, neither better nor worse, ordinary like all the rest. But the spirit of Israel and its history are special. We don’t live here for the weather. We came here to raise our children where our nation was formed and where its ethical and religious traditions were created. To Jews, Israel is unique, and we live here because we believe it is the natural and normal place for Jews.” The land is part of this hope. “The other members of the Jewish people who have come to live here also give us hope. The education of our children and the religion in which we are raising them give us hope. Nonetheless, nothing changes the sadness and remorse that we feel over the death of our daughter. No culture, hope, or tradition can comfort us over the tragic loss of her wonderful life.”
We ask him what the victims of terrorism represent. “Jewish history is full of tragedy. It isn’t easy to understand. But the questions that families like ours ask are questions that have already been posed by others before us. We also know that there are few answers. This does not make us any less devout, because in Judaism we can ask questions and know that sometimes the answers are elusive and impossible.”
Frimet Roth was born in a secularized family in New York; Arnold has severed roots in Europe. “I was born in Melbourne, to parents who had survived Auschwitz and had lost everything there,” says Arnold. Both of his parents came from Poland. “My mother, Genia, survived together with three of her sisters; they were deported to the ghetto and then to a death camp. After the war, they discovered that their parents and their three brothers had been killed by the Nazis. My father was the youngest of a large family. He and his oldest brother survived; all the others were exterminated by the Nazi machine. My uncle Shaya had decided that the prewar anti-Semitism in Poland was intolerable, so he survived thanks to his decision to emigrate to Tel Aviv. His children, my cousins, are authentic Palestinians, Jews who escaped Nazism and whose parents decided to take them to Palestine. So we know that our lives are an inseparable part of an organic nation with strong connections to the past. I was a child without grandparents. We didn’t talk about our uncles, cousins, and grandparents who had been killed as heroes. They died because they were Jewish, and those who murdered them did so in the name of hatred and racial prejudice.”
Arnold remarks, “I never would have expected to see the past tragedies of our people return into our lives. But it has happened, and today it is impossible for us to see what has happened to our daughter, her death as a martyr, without connecting it to the centuries in which we were dominated by those who hated us, by racists and by the ignorant. This is the reason why we have become so involved in the debate on terrorism, and it frightens and disturbs us that civil society is so reluctant to understand the danger.” Unfortunately, in Israel there does not yet exist a shared memory of terrorism. “Israeli society wavers endlessly between the expression of force and determination on the one hand, and of compassion for the victims on the other. In Israel we have learned that terrorism is not a fluke, but a constant. It is a form of war in which one act of terror is a prelude to the next. They will strike as long as they can, until we have stopped them.”
Arnold has founded a nonprofit association in Malka’s name. The Malki Foundation has no politics, but optimistically celebrates life and the human spirit. “We wanted the foundation dedicated to Malka to be the antithesis of terror. We wanted to honor her memory through practical actions that would unite people, apart from race and religion—Jews, Christians, and Muslims. The most difficult thing for the parents of a daughter who has been killed is to get up in the morning. This gives us the strength. We have financed 27,500 therapy sessions for hundreds of Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Druze children. And we did this in order to preserve and honor the memory of a beautiful, sweet young woman who never reached the age of sixteen. I am filled with hope by the stories of a society afflicted by terror that is learning to honor and respect the memory of the human beings who have lost their lives. A society’s correct answer to actions of hatred is actions that affirm life and dignity, starting with the lives and dignity of the victims.”
Roth explains that the concept of chesed is different from that of charity; it is a Hebrew word more similar to “love.” “When you perform an act of chesed, you know that you will receive nothing in return from the person who benefits from it. There will be no ‘thank you.’ People who do chesed do so because they know that it is intrinsically good, and adds goodness to the world.” One example is the preparation of the corpse. “In every Jewish community, there are people who do this for free, without being paid. It is clear that the deceased person cannot offer any thanks. In Hebrew, this is called chesed shel emet, true generosity. My daughter Malka knew this. And she took great pleasure in the simple fact of helping other people, especially children with problems. Her sister, Haya, is blind and does not communicate with the world, not even now, at the age of thirteen. Haya didn’t know how to thank Malka when she picked her up. When we decided to remember Malka by creating a foundation bearing her name, it was because we wanted to honor her beauty and generosity. We wanted to emulate her values. This way she will not be forgotten. We wanted her memory to be respected. As I said at the funeral, her life was an act of beauty. The people who live on the other side of the security barrier, the Palestinians, are not worse than us. It is the values of our society that are different. By doing an act of chesed, we remind ourselves every day that our society is different from theirs. A person like Malka couldn’t have been born in a society that produces murderers.”
Arnold