survived. Yanay had gone outside to get some fresh air, and he was killed. The next morning I woke up at the usual time, 4:40, and turned on the radio. I heard that there had been an attack at Mike’s Place and that there were three dead. I was very anxious; I didn’t know the name of the pub, though I knew that Yanay played in Tel Aviv every Tuesday night. But I knew that the odds were against another horror in my family. Inbal had been killed a year and a half before. For two hours, I forced myself not to call. I thought that if Yanay were at home and if I called before seven o’clock, I would wake everyone up. Then the door opened. It was Avner—he had come to tell me the news. Yanay had been killed. It was as if my entire world had collapsed on me. Inbal had left her parents and relatives behind; Yanay left a widow and two orphans, a terrible tragedy. Avner took me to Orna. She was sitting down. She told me about the last time she had seen him, their last kiss. This time I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t write a eulogy for my son.”
During the shivah, the seven days of mourning, hundreds of people from Yanay’s workplace and from the music world came to pay their respects. One of his coworkers created a memorial website. “The terrorists were not from the Palestinian Territories; they were English citizens, well educated and from respectable families. Terrorism was based on hatred of Jews.
Inbal and Yanay were not killed as soldiers in battle, but as innocent citizens. The occupation is not the result of direct government policies, but a consequence of the fact that we must defend ourselves. I have suffered many losses in my life. The death of my family in the Holocaust had become a faint twinge of pain; my joy and pride in my sons and their families, and the satisfaction of my participation in the kibbutz and in Israel, had overshadowed the memory of those I had lost. But the tragic, cruel killing of my dearly beloved granddaughter and of Yanay, who was in the prime of life, who loved others and was himself loved, this has hit me very hard. I could never have imagined that I would bury my son and granddaughter in my lifetime—that I would be alive and they would be dead, that I would mourn for them in a eulogy. This has devastated both me and Judith. It robbed us of the satisfaction we had found in life. I had a family that was growing, and it has been reduced in such a cruel way.”
Both Inbal and Yanay believed in coexistence with the Arabs. “Judith and I had raised them that way. My kibbutz was very left-wing; the motto was ‘Zionism, socialism, and brotherhood. ’” I had great respect for the Arabs, and I identified with this ideology. Even after the attack, I was not angry with the Arabs, but with the extremists and fanatics who want to kill us. In spite of everything, our lives have been touched by hatred, cruelty, and fanaticism. Before they died, we gathered around the table for birthdays, for the Jewish holidays, we sang, we joked, we talked about our lives. It was the purest form of pleasure for me. But now when we get together, our joy is mingled with sadness. We don’t say it out loud, but inside we feel the absence of Inbal and Yanay. It is the sorrow that stains our happiness.”
These days, Lipa thinks about his childhood in the village in the Carpathians, about the death camps, and about rebirth in Israel. “I was born in the early decades of the last century, and I survived the horrors of the years that followed. I found happiness in life in the kibbutz, in the house I lived in for sixty years, and in Israel, which has made unbelievable progress. I am proud of who we are, and of what I and the other members of the kibbutz achieved through our work. Today, at the age of eighty-four, I am retired, and the kibbutz takes care of everything for me. My love for all of them, Avner, Marianne, Orna, Gidi, Dorit, and the other children, and my love and concern for Judith is what gives me the strength to move forward and to try to live a normal life. We talk about our losses openly and freely; we mention Inbal and Yanay all the time. But we also enjoy what we have.”
The story of Lipa Weiss is a story about destruction and heroism, about death and rebirth. It is the sacred story in which every life that ends is linked to another being born. It is Israel with its silent ranks of six million souls that march, hand in hand, until the ranks form an unbroken circle. One of the greatest mysteries of the past two thousand years is how one-third of God’s chosen people—six million men, women, and children—were reduced to ashes during the Holocaust, and no more than a blink of an eye later, the same battered people won independence and freedom in Israel for the first time since the destruction of the Holy Temple. “We, your children, were born to survivors of the Holocaust, and constitute irrefutable proof to those who tried so hard to extinguish the Jewish nation,” said Avner Weiss, speaking at his father’s kibbutz, Ein Hashofet. “Our existence is also a partial compensation for the inconsolable loss of your loved ones, who were taken from you with such brutality. We were born in this land, as members of a kibbutz, growing up as the new nation and society were being formed. We were the sons and daughters of parents who had undergone unbelievable sorrow and anguish, who were now seeking for themselves love, support, security, and peace—a home. I stand before you in awe, filled with admiration that you were able to overcome such tremendous obstacles and to bestow on your lives a new and special meaning, as living witnesses to the Holocaust that annihilated whole families and loved ones.”
The marvelous optimism of Lipa Weiss, his prodigious face of tears and smiles that is the very place of Shoah; the quiet smiles of Inbal and Yanay, emanating earnestness, seriousness, determination, moral strength and courage; the admirable spirit that carries Avner and Marianne through their almost unbearable pain—these will be forever part of this everlasting mystery. This is the best and most honorable part of Israel, and of all humanity.
A Clock Frozen at 2:04
Arnold Roth traveled from Jerusalem to The Hague so he could hold a photograph of his daughter, Malka, in front of the International Court of Justice as it began its deliberations over the legality of Israel’s security fence. Malka was killed along with fourteen other people by a suicide bomber while enjoying lunch in Jerusalem’s Sbarro pizzeria on August 9, 2001. “Do I feel bad about the destruction the fence is causing? I do,” Roth said. “But do not compare the murder of my daughter to the inability of a Palestinian to get to work by 9:00 A.M.” Since construction of the security fence began, the number of terrorist attacks has declined by more than 90 percent, and the number of Israelis murdered and wounded has decreased by more than 70 percent and 85 percent, respectively.
Avi Ohayon brought a bullet to The Hague. He had found it under a pile of toys in the bedroom corner where his two sons huddled with their mother when a terrorist shot all three to death. Ohayon held it up before a crowded room a few short blocks from the International Court, where a panel of fifteen judges in black robes ruled that Israel’s security fence was a violation of humanitarian law. Israel was on trial for protecting its citizens.
Fanny Haim had the presence of mind to write an open letter to the judges: “Today, in The Hague, you will sit in judgment. Today, I will bury my husband, my heart—which has been cut in two. I am not a politician. I am appealing to you as someone who has lost her husband, a woman whose heart has been silenced—and a woman whose tragedy the separation fence could have prevented. Today, as you begin your deliberations with open eyes, think, just for a moment, about the ordinary people behind this bloody conflict. Think for a moment about the golden heart of my husband, Yehuda, and about our young son, Avner. Maybe you can explain to him—he’s only ten years old—why in God’s Name he doesn’t have a father anymore. This evening, you will go home, kiss your spouses, hug your children—and I will be alone. Today, I am burying my husband; don’t you bury justice.”
Creating a river of faces, Israeli supporters and families marched through the Dutch city to the triangular plaza near the courthouse, holding posters of victims. Already parked there was the bombed-out shell of the No. 19 bus, in which eleven people were killed in Jerusalem. The organization Christians for Israel had helped bring the bus to The Hague, and held a silent march in front of the court with portraits of 927 terror victims. Paramedics from Magen David Adom read out the names of the dead. Some of the demonstrators were holding up a sign with a picture of the bodies rapped in plastic, and a banner saying: “The people who used this bus in 29.1.2003 were on their way to work and to school. Some of them never got there.”