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March 10, 2008
An Unscheduled Bus Stop in Jerusalem
Names of the murdered students posted at Mercaz HaRav
This was in the comments section of the previous post, but it's so powerful, so emblematic of who and what the Jewish people are that Karen and I wanted to publish this deeply moving letter.
We thank Seraphic friend and shul companion Joe S. for sharing this with us.
An e-mail from Yerushalayim:
I thought the story below was pretty amazing, and emblematic of how connected we Jews are in this small country. Sharon Milendorf, writes:
"Every morning I take the 35 bus line to work. It's a quick ride and usually takes no more than 12 minutes. The third stop after I get on by the shuk is directly in front of Yeshivat Merkaz HaRav. This morning I found myself a bit anxious, unsure of what I was going to see as we passed by. As I looked around, I saw death notices pasted all over the street and flowers that had been brought lined the entrance to the Yeshiva.
When the bus pulled up to the stop, the driver shut off the engine and stood. With tears in his eyes he told everyone sitting on the bus that one of the boys killed on Thursday night was his nephew. He asked if everyone on the bus would mind if he spoke for a few minutes in memory of his nephew and the other boys that were killed. After seeing head nods all over the bus he began to speak.
With a clear and proud voice, he spoke beautifully about his nephew and said that he was a person who was constantly on the lookout for how to help out anyone in need. He was always searching for a way to make things better. He loved learning, and had a passion for working out the intricacies of the Gemara. He was excited to join the army in a few years, and wanted to eventually work in informal education.
As he continued to speak, I noticed that the elderly woman sitting next to me was crying. I looked into my bag, reached for a tissue and passed it to her. She looked at me and told me that she too had lost someone she knew in the attack. Her neighbors child was another one of the boys killed. As she held my hand tightly, she stood up and asked if she too could say a few words in memory of her neighbor.
She spoke of a young man filled with a zest for life. Every Friday he would visit her with a few flowers for Shabbat and a short d'var Torah that he had learned that week in Yeshiva. This past Shabbat, she had no flowers.
When I got to work, one of my colleagues who lives in Efrat told me that her son was friends with two of the boys who had been killed. One of those boys was the stepson of a man who used to teach in Brovenders Yeshiva and comes to my shul in Riverdale every Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur to be a chazan for one of the minyanim."
Last night, Rabbi Elazar Muskin, Rav of my shul the Young Israel of Century City flew to Israel to pay shiva visits to all the families of the martyred Yeshiva students.
May G-d comfort you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.
And this is what the enemy are about: Denying that Jews are connected to the land of Israel, denying that the holy Temples stood on the Temple Mount, and, of course, that old reliable blood libel.
If Jews can be expelled from Gaza simply because they are Jews, and Muslims find their presence intolerable, well then, murderous Jew-hating jihadists within Israel should be expelled to Gaza or Damascus because they are a threat to national security and subservient to a foreign power.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at March 10, 2008 11:05 AM
Comments
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