There are many ways to mourn the dead. “At the celebration of the Tabernacle, the high priest Aaron saw his two sons die, but remained silent. When Job saw his family die, he said, ‘God gives and God takes away, may the name of God be blessed forever.’ We must talk about those who have passed away. David was a born leader, a wonderful father, a husband, a scientist, a teacher, and a friend. He saved human lives every day.”
Addressing his family, someone quoted the words of Rabbi Soloveitchik, who said that Applebaum wanted them to live “a life according to the Torah, in the Holy Land.” Israel’s chief rabbi, Yisrael Meir Lau, compared Applebaum to the greatest saints of Judaism: “He was a true descendant of Maimonides. David and his daughter were great souls.” His grandson Natan called him “one of the thirty-six just of the earth.” According to an old legend, every generation has thirty-six righteous people, lamedvavnikim or tzadikim, upon whose piety the fate of the world depends. It is the minimum number of righteous men required to prevent the destruction of the world. The biblical book of Proverbs (10:25) says that the just man is the basis of the world’s existence: “When the storm wind passes, the wicked is no more, but the righteous is an everlasting foundation.” A tzadik is a just man, a saint and a sage, chosen by God to share his gifts with the rest of humanity. That was David Applebaum.
Israel’s determination in tackling head-on the physical problems that arise either from natural causes or from war is astounding. There is an amazing quantity of research, inventions, new techniques for curing the ill and helping the blind and the paralyzed return to normal life. It is common to see children with Down syndrome or other disabilities on television programs and in the military. One leader in this work was Moshe Gottlieb.
“A tzadik,” sobbed the mother of one of Gottlieb’s patients. In Israel, Moshe was known as the healer of Down syndrome children and someone who could help people deemed by others to be untreatable. He was murdered on his way to another day’s work of charity in behalf of the sick and disabled. Moshe Gottlieb was one of the nineteen victims of the suicide attack in Jerusalem on June 18, 2002.
After leaving a high-paying job at a fur coat factory in New York, Moshe had studied chiropractic in Los Angeles. He visited Israel in 1972 and fell in love with it. Six years later, he went with his wife and children to live in Jerusalem, where he expanded his medical practice and began an intensive study of the Torah. It was in a Jerusalem clinic for the chronically ill that he saw most of his patients, including a girl who was diagnosed with a brain tumor, whose wedding he attended as a guest of honor.
“We moved to Israel after spending a summer there a few years before,” says Dr. Gottlieb’s son, Seymour. “Simply put, my father ‘fell in love’ with the land and the people there. His love for community service was so great that he would usually prefer to stay home for the Sabbath and tend to the religious and social services of his community in the Gilo neighborhood of Jerusalem rather than take a weekend off to visit his children and grandchildren living elsewhere. He was also instrumental in creating the core of the neighborhood community services, and he continued to play an active role in these services for over twenty years, until his very last day.”
Moshe Gottlieb lived at the far southern end of Jerusalem. For months, during the Second Intifada, the neighborhood was hit day and night by rockets and mortar rounds from the Palestinian suburb of Beit Jalla. Moshe always kept his chair in front of the window, where he could see all of Jerusalem. “His chair will always be there,” says his wife, Sheila.
Every Tuesday, Moshe Gottlieb took the bus to Bnei Brak, the impoverished suburb of Tel Aviv inhabited by Orthodox devotees, and worked free of charge in a center for children with Down syndrome. He chose Tuesdays because in the Jewish tradition it is a day “twice as good,” and therefore one must give twice as much glory to the Lord. Every other day, Gottlieb saw patients in his office starting at 8:15 on the dot. Many of them were desperate cases, chronic patients and the seriously disabled. “Moshe started working with one girl with Down syndrome when she was two years old,” Sheila recalls. “At first she was completely withdrawn and terrorized; she didn’t even want to be touched. She had been abandoned by her natural parents, and Moshe cared deeply about her adoptive parents. He always worked with special people. Well, to make the story short, the girl is about ten years old now and she plays the piano very well.”
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Moshe worked with seriously ill patients at Tel Chai. He cared for a woman in a vegetative state for thirteen years, with impressive dedication. Every time he visited New York, he bought expensive medical equipment to help that woman. He also worked at Aleh, a residential care facility for disabled children, always bringing gifts; and he did charity work for orphans.
Moshe woke up at 3:30 every morning, studied the Torah, and prepared the lessons on the Mishnah that he would be giving to a class of Russian immigrants. At sunrise and sunset, he went to pray at the synagogue of Gilo, which he had helped finance. “The synagogue was home to him,” said Eliyahu Schlesinger, the chief rabbi of Gilo. “He was the first to arrive and the last to leave, and he was always ready to teach and to encourage us with his wisdom and his smile.” A painting in his honor had been unveiled in the synagogue a short time earlier; now it is dedicated to his memory, and his eulogies were delivered beneath it. Moshe helped the ultra-Orthodox Haredim families in which the men didn’t work so they could continue to study. He was never without his religious books. It was the same way that fateful June day, as he walked serenely to the bus stop with his books under his arm.
“He was a very special person, my husband,” Sheila tells us. “Two years before his death, Moshe had begun to work with children who had Down syndrome. He had two hundred patients from all over Israel. Everyone loved him. Moshe used to say, ‘the body speaks.’ . . . And with his hands and the divine guidance of Hashem, he was able to help many people. He was very close to our rabbi in Gilo, Eliyahu Schlesinger. Moshe had financed his synagogue. Now everyone misses his love, his guidance, his presence. His patients, friends, and family, they all mourn him. I hope that one day we can all be together again in techiyat hametim, the resurrection of the dead. And to be witnesses to the coming of the Messiah.”
Sheila says, “My faith in Hashem, in God, and my love for my children and their families have sustained me during the years after Moshe’s death. Now, in his memory, I volunteer with Alzheimer’s patients.” The famous biblical commentator Rashi said that when a tzadik leaves a place, everyone senses his absence, but a roshem, a spiritual presence, remains behind.
Dr. Shmuel Gillis lived in Gush Etzion, the most important bloc of settlements south of Jerusalem. “For us,” says his wife, Ruthie, “Gush Etzion was part of the national consensus; there were settlements there since the 1920s.” Dr. Gillis was killed on February 1, 2001, while returning home after work in the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. One of his Arab patients, Omrina Pauzi, called him “the angel in the white coat.” At his funeral, Ruthie told her children that their father had built bridges across religious, ethnic, and political differences. For a hematologist, all blood is the same, and Gillis was a pioneer in hematology. He might not have met his death that day on his way home if he had not waited for one of his colleagues, Dr. Hussein Aliyan, an Arab, who had asked him for help on a case of childhood leukemia.
Dr. Gillis had a warm, contagious smile; he loved the land and hiking in the desert of Judea. He was a humble person, but also a luminary. “Shmuel dedicated himself in everything to the preservation of human life,” says his brother David, a pediatrician in the same hospital. “He would always look at the surrounding villages and say, ‘I have a patient there, and two there.’ It was hard on him that he couldn’t go visit them without risking his life. What he loved about the hospital was that all divisions disappeared there; he could be a human being taking care of another human being.”
Shmuel was born in England and he arrived in Israel at age eleven. He joined the air force and served in the Lebanon War. “He is still remembered for his compassion for the Arab prisoners of war, for how he treated them,” his