Five years after losing my mother of blessed memory in a Jerusalem bus bombing
and sixty years after the death of my father’s brother during Israel’s War of Independence, I stood at Mt. Herzel and listened to my father chanting the Kaddish in memory of Israel’s victims. My father was honored with reciting the memorial prayer for the fallen on the occasion of Israel’s 60th anniversary.
The wide- open space could barely contain the emotions within. My father’s Aramaic Kaddish prayer moved even the most secular of Israel’s leaders present at the official ceremony. His voice at first choking then turned loud and clear. When a brother and sister, who lost their parents and younger brother when terrorists attacked their car walked up to lay a wreath I lost any pretence of composure. Tears rolled down my eyes watching these two burn victims conduct themselves with so much dignity despite having their whole world destroyed.
One by one the injured and the bereaved displayed such courage and defiance. A father who lost his teenage daughter, among an entire school class when their bus was attacked , kept on repeating how he had wished her a great day when she had left never to return again. Israel’s earth is soaked with the blood of so many innocent victims.
We stood there our heads held high on an overcrowded mountain of mourners. On one side grieved the relatives of the fallen soldiers of Israel’s wars and on the other the relatives of victims of terror attacks. The Israeli nation commemorated the memory of its soldiers and those who joined the ranks of soldiers only after their violent death.
Yet, this community of grief sought not revenge but remembrance. The greatest miracle is that even though, not a single family in Israel has not lost a loved one or does not know one personally, life goes on. It is not the banality of death as I first thought when people could not remember the bombing of bus nr. 14 in which I lost my precious mother.It is survival.
At he same time of year as we commemorated the Day of Remembrance Jews around the world were reading, as part of the annual Torah cycle, Jeremiah. G-d’s message of hope to the ancestors of these Jews when all seemed lost in the midst of the Babylonian’s siege was ;’ For so said Hashem,Master of Legions,God of Israel; Houses, fields and vineyards will yet be bought in this land’. The greatest miracle nowadays is notthe confidence that we share with Jeremiah in the rebuilding of Israel. It is the witness we bear to the rebuilding of so many shattered lives .
Shoshana Tita is a Judaic lecturer and the director of Torah Life Center. She now resides in Barcelona Spain. Her mother was killed in a terrorist attack on bus Nr. 14 in Jerusalem June 11, 2003 just forty eight hours after her wedding
See Shoshana's article on her mother's life and tragic death, written upon the occasion of her first yahrzeit.
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