‘The pain is greater than I can stand,” Avivit Shaer, the widow and bereaved mother of the Rehovot tragedy, told the city’s Chief Rabbi Simcha HaKohen Kook. Guy Shaer and his five children were killed by flames and smoke in their home Monday night as he tried to save them and his wife waited in vain outside for them to come out alive.
In a conversation with Arutz Sheva, Rabbi Kook said, “The events speak for themselves. There is not a word to add to this horrible tragedy. There literally has been nothing like this – an entire family gone with only the mother alive."
“The oldest child was to deliver a Talmud lesson this morning,” Rabbi Kook related. “He had prepared for it and learned with his father on Shabbat. Afterwards, he told his mother that there will be a celebration of the learning in school and that he wanted nice plates for his fellow students in the Talmud Torah where he learned."
“Now, this festival meal is taking place in the World to Come. May HaShem have mercy.”
Rabbi Kook said that Avivit Shaer is a teacher at a religious girls’ school in Rehovot. “She is a very important person,” he said.
The widow and bereaved mother of all of her five children told the rabbi, “I am left by myself, with my husband, without my children, without anything. This pain is greater than I can bear. May HaShem, have mercy on them, and we should not know more sorrow. There never has been anything like this – an entire family going up to Heaven in flames."
The Shaer family lived on Najara Street, named after a Torah scholar who was the rabbi in Gaza until Arabs forced him and other Jews out.
After the Hevron massacre of Jews at a yeshiva and homes in 1929, the Arabs in Gaza warned Rabbi Najara, “If you don’t leave, we will do the same to you as was done in Hevron,” Rabbi Kook said.