Rabbis and other public figures gathered in Jerusalem Sunday evening for a special event marking one week since the passing of Esther Pollard.
The event, held in the Kiryat Moshe neighborhood of the capital, featured addresses by prominent rabbis, including former Israeli Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger and Rabbi Yosef Eliyahu - son of the late Israeli Chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu - along with an address by former spy Jonathan Pollard.
“I’m speaking through a lot of pain right now. But it is very important for everybody to understand who and what my wife was," Pollard said.
“She was my wife; the most loyal, caring, considerate, loving wife any man could ever hope to marry.”
“But she was also my morah [teacher] for over three decades.”
“A lot of people knew her from her writing and her protests and her speeches. But what she told me over those three and a half decades was not just for me. It was for everybody, it was for the Am [the people].”
“I’ve told this story so many times, I can’t even recall how many times I’ve said it. But is important to remember, because it sets out who she was.”
“Towards the end of her life, she suddenly woke up and said in a very, very clear voice: ‘My neshama volunteered to come back for two missions. One, was to bring you home. The second mission was to bring you home as a Jew, and not a goy’.”
“She said the first mission, of bringing me home, was actually the easiest one of all, which came as a surprise to me. But she said the second mission, ‘to bring you home as a Jew and not a goy’, was the hardest one of all, because it is very easy to bring a Jew from galut [Exile] to Eretz HaKodesh [the Holy Land], but is very, very, very hard to get the galut out of the Jew.”
“She said: ‘Baruch Hashem [Thank God], I have completed my missions, and now I can go home’. And she started to die.”
“Her insistence of bringing me home as a Jew and not a goy was the essence of her life. And as the pain of her departure recedes a bit, the farther away I go from the levaya [funeral], the more of what she said to me over those three-and-a-half decades is coming back. It is going to take a while, I’m sure, but here is what she said. When we came home I felt as if she had followed me into the midbar [wilderness] for 35 years.”
“She fought many battles, like Rephidim, against Amalek, both in Hutz La’aretz [outside of Israel], and, unfortunately, here as well. With God’s help, she won every battle.”
“Even when I was offered, perhaps sincerely, the opportunity, to cooperate and in exchange for that I would go free, in Hutz La’aretz [outside of Israel], she said: ‘Remember the Meraglim [Biblical account of the Spies]. They cursed the Land and the Am [people], spent decades until that decades was finished’.”
“And she reminded me that it was the women that stayed loyal to Hashem at the Egel HaZahav [Golden Calf]. So she said: ‘Listen to me. You have to stay loyal to the land, you have to stay loyal to the people, and you have to stay loyal to Hashem. Which means if you have to stay here for another ten or twenty years and you come to Eretz HaKodesh [the Holy Land] as an old man, that’s what you have to do, because we live for Shamayim [heaven], not the present.”
“When we came home finally…she said to me: ‘I need to talk to you about something important’. She couldn’t breathe very well, because her bone marrow had been burned out. So every breath was [from heaven]. But it was so important what she wanted to share with me, she would share her breath to get it to me. She said: ‘There is a war coming. The most terrible war you could imagine. And I won’t be here to help you’. And that got my attention very, very quickly. The fact that there’s a war coming shouldn’t come as a surprise to any one of us. But the fact that my wife wouldn’t be there to help me was a bit traumatic.”
“She said: ‘There is a wall around the Land. It isn’t like the Iron Wall of Jabotinsky. But it is a wall, nonetheless. And in this wall, there is a very small gate.’”
“She said: ‘Let me explain: In every international airport…they have passport control. You arrive, you show your passport, they ask you questions: who are you, when were you born, what is your business here. And if you pass,’ she said, ‘you get to come in, as a visitor. And then you can leave’.”
She said that the wall around [Israel]: ‘Is Halacha [Jewish law]. And the small gate that guards the entrance, the passport control, is Shaar HaRabbanut [the gate of the Rabbinate]. Inside the walls,’ she said, ‘is the Am [the people], protected by Halacha and the Shaar HaRabbanut’.”
“’It is very important,’ she said, “very important, that the Am be kept pure and unpolluted’. She said that the greatest danger to the Am is from those coming in through the gate under false pretenses and who serve to divide the Am, brother against brother, sister against sister’.”
“’Why?’ she said. ‘Because we need the purest Am possible to generate the emunah [faith] and bitachon [trust in God], so that we can have a Jewish army and a Jewish government and Jewish generals who will lead our army to victory in God’s wars’.”
“And she said: ‘If we have this, then Hashem will watch and will say: Okay, I will bring the geulah [Redemption] with a kiss and not through suffering and pain.’”
Pollard ended his week of shiva by visiting the grave of his wife Esther, who passed away last week after a long battle with cancer and contracting the coronavirus.
Pollard also visited the grave of Yehuda Dimentman, the yeshiva student who was murdered in a terrorist shooting attack in Samaria in December, and who is also buried at the Har Hamenuhot cemetery in Jerusalem.
At the end of the shiva, Pollard said "Esther took me to Geula and Mea Shearim and then to Tel Aviv and told me - in both places you saw people who are not like you, but they are all your brother. Only in unity can we face all the difficult challenges before us. Please remember Esther and remember this message: unity unity, unity."
