A New Shoah. Giulio Meotti

      Arnold has always felt that the life of his daughter was the continuation of another story cut short by barbarism sixty years earlier—that of Feige, his father’s sister, who was killed by the Nazis in Europe. “Malka herself saw a strong connection with Feige. I live in Israel, and I have chosen to come here to be with my wife and my children. Although our life in Australia was certainly comfortable and good, we wanted more: a place where Jewish values would be at home. Malka, like me, grew up knowing that she was part of Jewish history. She seemed very similar to the aunt that I never met. Feige’s upbringing was very similar to that of Malka; both of them prayed from the same book and mentioned Jerusalem in their prayers three times a day. Unlike Malka, who had the privilege of living in Jerusalem, Feige was murdered in the Nazi campaign of hatred that turned into something unimaginable on a vast scale.”

      Malka knew well what terrorism does. “She wept secretly for the victims; we found this out from what she had written. We found it out only after she was gone. Hers was a pain that was intimately connected with that of her people. She wept over the death of innocent Jews, and Malka’s tears have become our tears. Her life was taken away just as the life of my father’s family was torn from him, leaving him alone. It is therefore impossible for me to think about my daughter’s death without it reflecting on the stunning number of Jewish victims over the course of history, especially the victims of the Holocaust. My parents, victims of the Holocaust in which they lost everyone, tried to live productive lives after the horrors of the Nazi extermination. In the same way, my wife and I are trying to help people and to express an optimistic perspective on life.”

      Israel is a country that has become all too accustomed to digging graves for its children. Is the Holocaust really over? Those killed at Sbarro also included two-year-old Hemda, four-year-old Avraham Yitzhak, fourteen-year-old Ra’aya, their mother, Tzira, and their father, Mordechai—five members of the Schijveschuurder family cut down in a single stroke. They had come from Holland, where their Jewish ancestors had lived for more than four centuries, since the time of Baruch Spinoza. The children’s grandmother, who had survived the Holocaust, was called the next day to identify the bodies of her loved ones. “I had sworn that I would have another family after the war. Now Arafat is finishing what Hitler started,” said Naomi Friedman. Born in Czechoslovakia, she had gone through the concentration camps of Ravensbruck and Bergen-Belsen, while her husband was in Theresienstadt. “We survived that hell, but we lost seven brothers and sisters. Here we have found worse murderers than the Nazis.”

      During the funeral, a woman ran away weeping: “This isn’t a funeral, it’s a holocaust.” The chief rabbi, Yisrael Meir Lau, who had married the Schijveschuurders, turned to God: “How long will it last, O my God, how long? It’s been three generations.” Rabbi Lau himself is a survivor of Buchenwald, where he lost two of his brothers, while his father was killed in the gas chamber at Treblinka, where the Jews were exterminated in less than two hours.

      Mordechai Schijveschuurder had decided to live “on the front line,” in the Neria settlement. Shortly before he was killed, a friend asked him if he was fearful in driving that route every evening. Mordechai replied, “A bomb could kill me in Jerusalem, too.” He was a man of faith who loved the Torah and had been the principal of a religious school. His wife, Tzira, had taken care of deaf children. After the explosion, before he died, Mordechai recited the first line of the ritual prayer Shema Yisrael, “Hear, O Israel.” He died with those words on his lips.

      At the funeral, a friend of the family remarked that “the angel of death can reach wherever he wants.” Ten-year-old Leah wanted to take part in the ceremony for her parents and siblings. “I loved you so much, dearest,” she said. “I am sorry for how naughty I was.” The oldest child of the family, Ben-Zion, also spoke: “We will hold tight what you left us, love for one another. We love you. Watch over us from above, so we can remain united.” Meir, another son, remarked, “The terrorists want to kill the free world, and America and Israel are the symbol of the free world.” Grandma Naomi said, “Thanks to God, we had returned to the land of our dreams, to the land that symbolizes our freedom. Now that the bloody hands of our murderers have reached us, all of this is incomprehensible.”

      “To my father, Neria was a place to live like any other,” says Ben-Zion. “He made the aliyah from Amsterdam, and in his mind Israel was Israel. It’s not that Neria was a better place than Petah Tikva, where I was born. Israel was very important to him, but he never protested against the government because of the withdrawal from the Territories. He thought that Israel went from the bank of the Jordan to the Mediterranean.” Ben remembers his father as a businessman first of all, “and then a talmid hakham, a person who studies the Bible. Photographs show him with his black kippah like the Haredim, but he always thought that unless one is a genius, one must work. And he was a genius: every morning he learned something before going to work. He brought books with him every time he traveled. I think that one of his dreams was to be a teacher, but he knew that he could do better in business. But I am grateful that after the death of my father, a school was named after him. Everyone talks about him, never about her, my mother, who was the true genius behind my father. She loved to stay in the background, but he always listened to her. The school wouldn’t have existed without her. She loved her family, my father, and her job. The rest isn’t so important. The others in my family, the ones who are gone now—well, I was in the army, and I didn’t go back home often enough to talk with my sister.”

      Ben also talks about how it was possible to get over his mourning, to move forward. “My relationship with the State of Israel is not simply one of hope and strength. I live in Israel as the place of my birth, where my friends are. Those who have helped me have been the friends of the family and my personal friends, and also people on the street. Returning to normal life was very difficult, and at the same time very easy, because I had two sisters to think about. So you can’t beat yourself up all day and feel sorry for yourself. But this deprived me of my own space to mourn. Nonetheless, I must say that I am happy with the way I chose. For a whole year after the death of our family, we went from one place to another without any plan, like a ship without a captain.”