Rabbi Yonatan Sandler, 29, who was killed with his two children and with eight-year-old Miriam Monsonego in Toulouse, France, may have unknowingly hinted about his death before he went to France, a family friend said Wednesday.

In a conversation with Arutz Sheva at the victims’ funerals in Jerusalem, Yaakov Ben-Shushan, recalled the farewell party that was thrown for Rabbi Sandler before he departed to France to teach at the Otzar Hatorah school.

“He used to live here in Israel,” said Ben-Shushan. “He studied at a kollel and when he decided to go to France they threw a farewell party for him, and in that party he cried so much that nobody understood it. ‘Why is he crying so much? He’s only going away for a year or two and then he’ll come back,’ they said.”

Ben-Shushan added, “Now, after what happened, we began to understand why he cried. His soul probably felt where he was going. He didn’t know where he was going, but his soul felt that he was going to a mission from which he wouldn’t come back. That’s why he cried so much. But this is something that you only understand after it happens.”

Rabbi Sandler, in France for what was intended to be a two-year educational mission, was known beyond the school in which he taught, as he wrote a Torah article for a French Jewish weekly, and conscientiously, said the editor, always sent in his writings several weeks in advance. Three remaining articles will be published in the coming weeks, although the young rabbi's voice has been silenced by a bestial murderer.