This year on Yom Kippur, as in the previous 12 years, I watched most of my friends walk out of the synagogue as I prepared for the unending pain of the Yizkor services. During Yizkor those of us who have lost relatives pray to remember the dearly departed and for their souls. It always seemed heartbreaking to me that the synagogues divide into two for the Yizkor services, i.e. those who have living parents, siblings and children walking outside for idle chatter and friendship while those unfortunate enough to have lost someone close to them staying inside praying and crying.
However, this year was particularly painful, more than my previous Yizkor experiences. This year, in addition to praying for my parents and my aunts and uncles and grandparents who died during the Holocaust and left no one to pray for them, I added the name of Danielle Shefi to my prayers. Danielle Shefi, as a representative of the over 600 men, women and children who were murdered in cold blood by Arab terrorist murderers led by Yassir Arafat over the past two years.
During our last solidarity mission in July of this year, our group visited the Shefi family in Adura. Mr. and Mrs. Shefi greeted us in their home in a small community on top of a hill and showed us their house. They told us that no one from outside the community had yet visited them. They led us into the tiny living room where we crowded in to watch perhaps the most heartbreaking home video I?ve ever seen - a film about the life of Danielle Shefi - very similar to a bat mitzvah video using film clips from different stages of Danielle?s life, a birthday party at 2, a performance in a play at 4, with the beautiful music of the Israeli song, ?The Most Beautiful Girl in the Kindergarten Class? playing in the background. However, this bat mitzvah video didn?t end with the bat mitzvah ? this bat mitzvah video ended with terrorists walking into the Shefi house on a Saturday morning, finding Mrs. Shefi and her three children, Danielle being the oldest, age 5, in the bedroom curled up in her bed. The terrorists looked at the family straight in their eyes, a mother and three babies, and shot to kill all four. Mr. Shefi told us how lucky he was (a man whose five year old daughter is murdered in cold blood is lucky?) that the rest of his family was alive and had recovered from wounds suffered as a result of the gunshots. All 55 of us sitting around the living room cried like babies as we felt even a measure of the pain of the Shefi family, as well as the pain of the families of each and every one of the victims of terrorism. The end of the film which showed the news clips on the morrow of the murder - the bedroom right upstairs from us covered wall to wall in blood, with pools of blood on the bed, our hearts were filled with an indescribable sorrow.
We are now approaching the holiday of Succot during the last days on Shemini Atzeret/Simchat Torah we say Yizkor once again. I ask each and every one of you to add a special thought in your Yizkor prayers, whether you stay in or go outside ? a thought about the prettiest girl in the kindergarten class and the 600 other gems that were viciously and cruelly taken from their families over the last two years in particular. At the same time I ask you to think about whether ?The New Middle East? is any different from the Middle East of the 1929 Hebron massacre or from the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe during the pogroms and from the communities of Europe during the Holocaust. Jews who were/are murdered just because they are Jews ? men, women and children, including the prettiest girl in the kindergarten class.
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The author is the Chairman of American Friends of Likud, a member of the
Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and the
Chairman of Media Watch International.