Their every word and deed revealed an ancient civilization and traditions filtered through the centuries. Their bodies were turned into fountains of blood by the delirium of Islamist murderers who shouted "Allahu Akbar". But to see them alive, shadows swaying, was to realize that those four learned men transmitted the plastic image of scenes from the Old Testament.
They each wanted to aspire to be a "talmid khakham", students of rabbis who preceded them, in the tradition of those pious scholars who founded a democratic theocracy and rebelled against the most formidable autocratic monarchy of the time, Egypt.
The four Israeli rabbis killed with a machete in the synagogue in Har Nof, Jerusalem, lived with an acute sense of the Jewish tragedy. The destruction of the Temple, the mass pogroms of Chmielnicki and the Holocaust were physically present in their lives.
Twersky was heir to two of the families who have contributed volumes to the glory of Orthodox Judaism. A life of study and prayer. His maternal grandfather, the great Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Jewish philosopher and rabbinic head of Yeshiva University, known simply as "the Rav", pressed Pope Paul VI to reinstate the condemnation of the charge of deicide during the writing of the Vatican encyclical on Judaism Nostra Aetate, which had disappeared from the draft under the pressure of the Arab eastern churches. The father, Rabbi Isadore Twersky, famous for his works on Maimonides, founded the Center of Jewish studies at Harvard.
In the hill of the massacre, Har Nof, literally the Hill of Vistas, lived Former Sephardic Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who died a year ago, the phenomenal rabbi who had won the title of "Ma'or Yisrael", the Light of Israel.
The motto here is: "First the Torah, then the State".
The attack on the synagogue was a deja vu. forJerusalem, On August 19, 2003, Jerusalem's number 2 bus was filled with worshipers returning from the Western Wall when twenty-three Jewish passengers were killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber. It was called "the bus of holiness." For many of the victims, going to the Kotel was a holiday, a source of immense joy.
You see them everywhere in Jerusalem, they are always in good spirits, they turn to strangers with a smile, if they are Chabad, they immediately offer to fasten the phylacteries, coiling them around the arm with the agility of magicians.
The Torah scholars killed by Palestinian terrorists had all left lives of ease and assimilation in the outskirts of the West.
Rabbi Kupinsky was from Detroit, where he was well known in the city (his parents had taught at Wayne State University). Kupinsky had moved to Har Nof from his family's home in Kiryat Arba, the "City of Four", adjoining Hevron, the city of the Jewish Patriarchs, where Jewish life is behind a tall metal fence that runs all around the houses, the post office, the school. A place where war is not on television, but enters the low houses of white stone and is on the roads, in the pine forest, in the games for children. "Welcome to the Messiah," says the yellow banner that greets visitors at the entrance of the village-bunker. It was founded with the blessing of Labour, not the Likud. It was born with 18 inhabitants and 11 Bibles.
When Palestinian terrorists stormed the synagogue in Har Nof, the four rabbis had their eyes turned to the east praying towards the Old City of Jerusalem where once stood the Temple and the Holy Ark of the Covenant. They were killed wearing their phylacteries and prayer shawls, eyes still fixed on the siddur, the book of prayer. About to say a Psalm: "This is the gate of God and the righteous will enter it."
I bow before them.