11-Aug-19: What money can do: The Sbarro terrorists and the children of Ramot

Basing herself on the fine investigative work done routinely by Itamar Marcus and his colleagues at Palestinian Media Watch, Maayan Jaffe-Hoffman reported in the Jerusalem Post on the role played by money in the lives of the terrorists who destroyed Jerusalem's Sbarro Pizzeria exactly eighteen years earlier.

Here's how it starts:

Eighteen years ago, on August 9, female terrorist Ahlam Tamimi smuggled a bomb in a guitar case into Jerusalem and led a suicide bomber to the crowded Sbarro pizza shop in Jerusalem’s city center.

Suicide terrorist Izz Al-Din Al-Masri ate a slice of pizza and then blew himself up, murdering 15 people, seven of them children, and wounding close to 130 others.

“I have no regrets,” Tamimi told Channel 1 TV in an interview that was recently rebroadcast on Palestinian Authority TV. “No Palestinian prisoner regrets what he or she has done.”

Since that fateful day, in which two Americans – Malki Roth and Shoshana Yehudit Greenbaum – were among the murdered, the PA has paid the seven terrorists who helped orchestrate the attack as well as Al-Masri’s family $910,823 (3.2 million shekels), according to a report released Thursday by Palestinian Media Watch.

These payments include monthly salaries paid to the terrorists in prison; payments to the family of the dead terrorist; and payments to the terrorists, like Tamimi, who were released in the 2011 Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange deal, brokered between the Israeli government and Hamas...

The report concludes with some observations about the catastrophic policies of the Mahmoud Abbas regime:

“The Palestinian Authority glorifies all its terrorists, including child murderers and suicide bombers, as heroes,” explained Maurice Hirsch, PMW’s head of legal strategies in a related release. “In addition to granting the terrorist prisoners a monthly salary, the 2004 PA Law of Prisoners and Released Prisoners prohibits the PA from signing any peace agreement that does not include the release of all the Palestinian terrorists, including the child-murderers who carried out this attack.”

In 2018, the PA admitted to spending $134 million in salary payments to terrorists. Currently, every terrorist salary starts at a minimum of NIS 1,400 per month and can reach as much as NIS 12,000 month after 30 years.

J-Wire, an online Australian Jewish news service, gave Arnold Roth the opportunity on Friday to respond and published his comments here today:

In the park down the street from where we live in Jerusalem, the local teens are putting final touches today to the annual charity bazaar held every year the day after Tisha B'Av. The bazaar exemplifies how Israel and its children deal with the bitter experience of ultra-violent hatred like that which blew up the Sbarro pizzeria 18 years ago today and obliterated so many futures. My daughter Malki's life ended there that day.

How we manage and use resources says a lot about society. Money, spent wisely, would make Palestinian Arab lives better, improving their prospects in life, their health and education.

The chronically insolvent Mahmoud Abbas regime that lives from foreign aid chooses loudly, aggressively and without shame to devote a massive share of its budget to honoring the killers of children and to nurturing yet more of them. Tragically, this is one of the few ways the inept Palestinian Authority manages to change its hapless subjects' destiny.

The children on our street raise substantial funds each year from a fine event that remembers Malki and her dearest friend Michal Raziel. Their values symbolize and honour Israel and the Jewish people's efforts to create better futures - tikun olam. It's not an outlook our Arab neighbors share with us.

Eventually it will prevail. But only after the politicians behind the foolish funding policies of the governments refilling Abbas' purse understand the chronic damage they do and stop.

If you're in Jerusalem tomorrow, August 12, 2019, you won't regret coming along to the annual Ezra Charity bazaar that honors the lives of our daughter Malki Roth and her friend Michal Raziel. It's held in the northern Jerusalem community of Ramot: jumping castle, face painting, caricatures, live performances by Yam Refaeli and Harel Tal and the magic act of Lior Laufer. Proceeds of the bazaar benefit the Malki Foundation.

That's the official poster above, with details. Feel free to email us [click] if you need translation or directions.

30-Jul-15: For our friends in and near Jerusalem

The annual Aliyah Lakever (going up to the gravesides) and Azkara (memorial service) in memory of our daughter Malka Chana Roth and her friend Michal Raziel, may their memories be a blessing, will take place at the Har Tamir cemetery in Jerusalem on Wednesday evening, August 5, 2015 (Chaf Av) at 17:00. For driving and bus directions, please email us and we will be happy to provide some notes. As in past years, free bus transport is available to and from the ceremony. A bus will leave the Ramot 01 Jerusalem branch of the Ezra youth movement (corner Abba Hillel Silver and Harry Truman Streets, Ramot 01, Jerusalem) at 16:30 and will return to the same place afterwards.

15-Jul-13: Summer reveries don't have quite the same golden gentle glow for us as they do for others

Jerusalem: Last year's charity fair in memory of two murdered girls

In the world of Jewish memories and experience, this time of year has a stressful and difficult character. It’s a very hot Monday here in Jerusalem at this moment. When the sun sets this evening, Jews in Jerusalem - and everywhere else - will start the observance of the ninth day of Av. 

People who have a hard time relating in a personal way to the events of a year ago will wonder about this. But Av happens to be a difficult month for people who live by the traditional Jewish calendar. Why so? Because the ninth day of Av is when the Babylonians - in modern terms, the residents of ancient Iraq - destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. In doing so, they brought an end to independent Jewish life in what we call Israel today. They killed some 100,000 Jews here, while exiling almost all the others. 

Some 640 years later, in the year 70, it was the turn of the Roman empire to conquer Israel and for the second and last time the rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. This time, some two million Jews were killed; a million more went into an exile that lasted many centuries. An independent Jewish nation in its own land did not arise again until the establishment of modern Israel 65 years ago.

Av the ninth is marked by a sunset-to-sunset absolute fast that begins tonight. We say mournful prayers, deliberately allow ourselves to experience physical discomfort and engage in a great deal of personal and community introspection. Beyond the ancient history aspects, the same date has been associated with some of the Jewish people’s blackest moments. 

The Maale Adumim 2013 bazaar is advertised in this Hebrew handbill

On this day, the entire Jewish community of Spain was expelled in the fateful year 1492. On this day in 1942 in the city of Warsaw, Poland - a third of whose entire population was Jewish at the time - the Nazi Germans began to liquidate the ghetto and send its inhabitants to their deaths in the Treblinka factory of death.

The rest of the summer for most religiously observant Jews gets easier and more enjoyable once the ninth of Av is safely behind us. That relaxation does not quite impact our family in the same way, unfortunately. This is because twelve years ago, in 2001, our eldest daughter Malki, 15, was killed in a Hamas terrorist outrage in the center of Jerusalem. 

So even as most Jews breathe a sigh of relief with the end of the fast, in our home we prepare ourselves for the annual pilgrimage to Malki's grave and the public commemoration of the anniversary (called azkara in Hebrew) of her murder.

I don't mind sharing that we feel indescribable pain. But I say that we are not morose or neutralized. We’re terribly sad, even overwhelmed by the feeling of loss. But we have full, constructive lives to live.

This is not self-evident, or at least is should not be. With so much death and anger around, and a full-time industry of propagandists declaiming about the unbearable insults and shame suffered by their pride, a person might be forgiven for thinking that in a community like ours here in Jerusalem, where hundreds of innocent young people were killed in terrorist attacks, the mood would be characterized by vengeance and confrontation. 

It simply isn’t so.

Malki died alongside her best friend. They were two beautiful young girls, busy with a day full of good deeds, standing at the counter of a bustling pizza shop at lunchtime. For the past 12 years, they lie side by side in Jerusalem’s soil. Their friends from the neighbourhood and from their youth organization – many of whom were as close as teenage friends get to both girls – suffered an incomprehensible double blow which has marked their lives deeply.

We have heard people say over the years that they could easily imagine passionate young people reacting to the vicious and deliberate killing of their closest friends by resorting to their own acts of hate-based violence. The reality, as anyone who knows anything about Israeli society, is far from that. 

Here is what the friends actually do.

The 2013 bazaar in Jerusalem, set for this
Wednesday, is advertised in this version

Every summer for the past 11 years, the graduating group at Malki's youth organization (it’s called EZRA) sits down and organizes a public fun fair and bazaar. It runs from mid afternoon until late at night, and it takes place in a small and pleasant public park just near where we live on Jerusalem’s north side. A second version takes place in Maale Adumim, a desert community on Jerusalem's eastern edge where Malki was a youth leader in the last year of her short life.

The park in Jerusalem happens to abut the building that serves as the clubhouse for EZRA in our part of town. That building was still just a few weeks old back in 1997 when we rented it for an evening and held Malki’s bat mitzvah party there on her twelfth birthday. On the awful night twelve years ago, August 9, 2001 in the hours after the massive explosion that demolished the restaurant in the center of Jerusalem, that same building was filled with hundreds of youngsters. They spontaneously arranged a prayer vigil while the search went on for the two girls in other parts of our city. 

By the evening hours of that day, we already knew that Malki and her friend Michal had both been inside Sbarro that afternoon. But we did not know their fate for some time. In fact, it was 2 o'clock the following morning before the friends and families learned what had been done to Malki. 

In that same park, on a hot September 2001 night some thirty days after the Sbarro massacre, we held a public memorial event. This was an azkara, to allow our friends, our neighbours and us to express our grief, collectively and privately, at the loss of two such beautiful, innocent, good lives. 

The agony of that evening remains etched in our memories, greatly sharpened by what had kept most of us glued to our televisions throughout the afternoon and evening leading up to it. That's because this was the night of September 11, 2001: 9/11 as we now call it.

The EZRA fun day is held annually in memory of Malki and Michal; all the proceeds go to charity. This year’s will be the eleventh such fair. It is set for this coming Wednesday afternoon, July 17, 2013. The Jerusalem version will run from 4 in the afternoon until 10 at night; in Maale Adumim, from 5 until 8. A banner announcing it is already stretched across the road leading into our community to create awareness. The Hebrew words state the message of the fair: “To give when you love”.

It’s a message which puzzles us, year after year. Why do the children in our community here in Jerusalem and in nearby Maale Adumim who have lost parents, siblings, friends to acts of overt hatred, respond by doing acts of charity, declarations of love? 

It’s not so obvious. They’re busy kids at the end of their final year of high school. The boys are weeks or months away from starting their army service, so they probably are grappling with complicated thoughts. Most of the girls will be starting their national service (most girls of religious orientation do this in place of army service, but some do go into the military) and are aware of the challenges ahead. 

Still, when they take time out to do something as a cohort of friends, a collective action, it’s about charity and remembering and – their choice of word – love. Should that be obvious?

It’s hard not to make invidious comparisons with what we see in the news from other parts of our region: young men and women, strapping bombs to their chests and expounding on how anger and pride demand that they kill people and perhaps themselves as well. We’re all too familiar with the horrifying dynamic.

But over here, the dynamic is about recruiting vendors who will set up tables to sell school books, pens, small household appliances, decorative objects and works of art, clothing and gifts. They find jugglers, food-stall operators, people who will install inflatable bouncies in the shape of castles or large animals which delight the toddlers who are brought by their mothers. The volunteer team, high school kids all of them, advertise the event by flyers distributed throughout Jerusalem; by ads in bus stations, synagogues, message boards and other key locations. Emails, Facebook pages, word of mouth.

And it’s not just in our neighbourhood. People of all ages have addressed the painful memories of their own lost loved ones by creating worthy undertakings, concerts, park benches, small libraries, and on and on throughout Israel. Our Malki, all of fifteen years old when she did it, served as youth leader for a group of Maale Adumim's nine year old girls. On Wednesday, when the youngsters there hold their own memorial fair (of course, with proceeds to charity) in Malki’s memory as they do year after year, we remind ourselves that the cohort of friends now taking charge were only six or seven when Malki was alive. They cannot really have known her. Yet they understand the symbolism. It resonates with them.

There is an apocryphal tale told about Napoleon who was walking in the streets of Paris on the 9th day of Av. His entourage passed a synagogue and the sounds of wailing from within caused him to send an aide to ask what terrible thing had happened. The aide enquired, and reported to Napoleon that the Jews were in mourning over the loss of their temple. Napoleon asked with indignation: “How could this happen without me being informed? When did this occur? Which temple?” The answer given by the aide was that the loss occurred on this date 1,700 years ago and in Jerusalem. Napoleon was silent for a moment, and then is famously reported to have said: "A people that mourns its loss through countless generations will surely survive to see the rebuilding of its temple."

A society that chooses to honour the lives of its murdered children through constructive acts of remembrance, joy and charity has a special resilience. Their pain is not removed or even lightened; their hopes and dreams are not necessarily granted to them; and the men (and women… and children) with the bombs strapped to their chests are not thwarted. 

The strength of a society that knows how to remember is something to behold. It is a privilege to be living in its midst.

---

For times and locations of Wednesday's two charity fairs (one in Jerusalem, one in Maale Adumim), and for details of the annual memorial service at Jerusalem's Har Tamir cemetery in memory of Malki and Michal (set for Sunday July 28 at 5 pm), please email us at thisongoingwar@gmail.com

The Hebrew banner adjacent to the local EZRA youth organization branch reads "Latet K'sh'ata Ohev", "To Give When You Love". That has been the slogan of the annual bazaars in memory of Malki and Michal for 11 consecutive years.

[The post above is a reworked version of one we uploaded in a previous year. Most of what we said then remains relevant today.]

27-Jul-12: Reflecting on the power of memory

The park; the youth club building; the banner across the street. The
entrance to our Jerusalem neighbourhood today

In the world of Jewish memories and experience, this time of year has an especially stressful character. 

It’s a very hot Friday here in Jerusalem at this moment. The Sabbath will settle in as the sun sets, and the following 25 or so hours of disconnect from the surrounding world, always welcome, will be especially so because of what follows it on Saturday night: the observance of the ninth day of Av.

Av is a difficult month for people who live by the traditional Jewish calendar. The ninth day of Av is when the Babylonians destroyed the one-and-only Jewish temple in Jerusalem, bringing an end to independent Jewish life in what we call Israel today and killing some 100,000 Jews while exiling almost all the others. 

Some 640 years later, in the year 70, it was the turn of the Roman empire to conquer Israel and for the second time the rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. This time, some two million Jews were killed; a million more went into an exile that lasted many centuries. An independent Jewish nation in its own land did not arise again until the establishment of modern Israel 64 years ago.

Av the ninth is marked by a sunset-to-sunset absolute fast that begins this coming Saturday night. There are mournful prayers, deliberate physical discomfort and a great deal of personal and community introspection. Beyond the ancient history aspects, the same date has been associated with some of the Jewish people’s blackest moments: on this day, the entire Jewish community of Spain was expelled in the fateful year 1492. On this day in 1942 in the city of Warsaw - one-third of whose entire population was Jewish at the time - the Nazi Germans began to liquidate the ghetto and send its inhabitants to their deaths in the Treblinka factory of death.

Once the ninth of Av is safely behind us, the rest of the summer for most religiously observant Jews gets easier and more enjoyable. The relaxation doesn’t quite reach our family, unfortunately. In 2001, our eldest daughter Malki, 15, was killed in a Hamas terrorist outrage in the center of Jerusalem. Even as most Jews breathe a sigh of relief with the end of the fast (this year, that means this coming Sunday night) we prepare ourselves for the annual pilgrimage to her grave and the public commemoration of the anniversary (called the azkara in Hebrew) of her murder.

We feel indescribable pain, but we are not morose or neutralized. We’re terribly sad, even overwhelmed by the feeling of loss. But we have full and constructive lives to live.

It’s not self-evident. With so much death and anger around, and a full-time industry of propagandists declaiming about the unbearable insults suffered by their pride, a person might be forgiven for thinking that in a community like ours here in Jerusalem, where hundreds of young people were killed in terrorist attacks, the mood would be characterized by vengeance and confrontation. It simply isn’t so.

Malki died alongside her best friend. They were two beautiful young girls, busy with a day full of good deeds, standing at the counter of a bustling pizza shop at lunchtime. For the past eleven years, they lie side by side in Jerusalem’s soil. Their friends from the neighbourhood and from their youth organization – many of whom were as close as teenage friends get to both girls – suffered an incomprehensible double blow.

I have heard people say over the years that they could easily imagine passionate young people reacting to the vicious and deliberate killing of their closest friends by resorting to their own acts of hate-based violence. The reality, as anyone who knows anything about Israeli society, is far from that. Here is what the friends actually do.

Every August for the past ten years, the graduating group at Malki's youth organization (it’s called EZRA) sits down and organizes a public fun fair and bazaar. It runs from mid afternoon until late at night, and it takes place in a small and pleasant public park just near where we live on Jerusalem’s north side.

The park happens to abut the building that serves as the clubhouse for EZRA in our part of town. 

When the building was still just a few weeks old back in 1997, we rented it for an evening and held Malki’s bat mitzvah party there. On the awful night of August 9 eleven years ago, the same building was filled with hundreds of youngsters conducting a prayer vigil while the search went on for the two girls in other parts of our city. We knew by then that Malki and her friend Michal had both been inside Sbarro that afternoon. But it took some hours (12 in the case of our daughter) for the friends and the families to learn the bitter outcome.

And it was in that same park, on a hot September night some thirty days after the Sbarro massacre, that we held a public memorial event there, an azkara, to allow our friends, our neighbours and us to express our grief, collectively and privately, at the loss of two such beautiful, innocent, good lives. The agony of that evening was greatly sharpened by the events that had kept most of us glued to our televisions throughout the afternoon and evening leading up to it: this happens to have been the night of September 11, 2001.

The EZRA fun day is held annually in memory of Malki and Michal, and with the stated intention of giving all the proceeds to charity. This year’s will be the tenth such fair. It is set for Monday afternoon, July 30, and will run from 4 in the afternoon until 10 at night. The banner announcing it is already stretched across the road leading into our community to create awareness (photo above). The Hebrew words state the message of the fair: “To give when you love”.

It’s a message which puzzles me, year after year. Why do the children in our community here in Jerusalem who have lost parents, siblings, friends to acts of overt hatred, respond by doing acts of charity, declarations of love? It’s not so obvious. They’re busy kids. The boys are weeks or months away from starting their army service, so they probably are grappling with complicated thoughts. Most of the girls will be starting their national service (most girls of religious orientation do this in place of army service, but some do go into the military) and are aware of the challenges ahead. Still, when they take time out to do something as a cohort of friends, a collective action, it’s about charity and remembering and – their choice of word – love.

It’s hard not to make invidious comparisons with what we see in the news from other parts of our region: grief stricken young men and women, strapping bombs to their chests and expounding on how anger and pride demand that they kill people and perhaps themselves as well. We’re all too familiar with the horrifying dynamic.

But over here, the dynamic is about recruiting vendors who will set up tables to sell school books, pens, small household appliances, decorative objects and works of art, clothing and gifts. They find jugglers, food-stall operators, people who will install inflatable bouncies in the shape of castles or large animals which delight the toddlers who are brought by their mothers. The volunteer team, all of them barely out of high school, advertise the event by flyers distributed throughout Jerusalem; by ads in bus stations, synagogues, message boards and other key locations.

It’s not just in our neighbourhood either. People of all ages have addressed the painful memories of their own lost loved ones by creating worthy undertakings, concerts, park benches, small libraries, and on and on throughout Israel. Our Malki, all of fifteen years old when she did it, served as youth leader for a group of nine year old girls in a city that is an hour’s bus ride from here. This coming Monday, the youngsters of that city too are holding their own memorial fair (proceeds to charity) in Malki’s memory as they do year after year. The cohort of friends now taking charge were only seven or eight when Malki was alive, so they cannot really have known her. Yet they understand the symbolism and it clearly resonates with them.

There is an apocryphal tale told about Napoleon who was walking in the streets of Paris on the 9th day of Av. His entourage passed a synagogue and the sounds of wailing from within caused him to send an aide to ask what terrible thing had happened. The aide enquired, and reported to Napoleon that the Jews were in mourning over the loss of their temple. Napoleon asked with indignation: “How could this happen without me being informed? When did this occur? Which temple?” The answer given by the aide was that the loss occurred on this date 1,700 years ago and in Jerusalem. Napoleon was silent for a moment, and then is famously reported to have said: "A people that mourns its loss through countless generations will surely survive to see the rebuilding of its temple.”

A society that chooses to honour the lives of its murdered children through constructive acts of remembrance, joy and charity has a special resilience. Their pain is not removed or even lightened; their hopes and dreams are not necessarily granted to them; and the men (and women… and children) with the bombs strapped to their chests are not thwarted. But the strength of a society that knows how to remember is something to behold. It is a privilege to be living in its midst.

Click here for pictures of last year’s EZRA charity fair in memory of Malka Chana Roth and Michal Raziel, of blessed memory, which was attended by nearly a thousand people. For information on times and locations for Monday’s two charity fairs (one in Jerusalem, one in Maale Adumim), please email us at thisongoingwar@gmail.com

The Hebrew banner adjacent to the local EZRA youth organization branch reads "Latet K'sh'ata Ohev", "To Give When You Love". That has been the slogan of the annual bazaars in memory of Malki and Michal for ten consecutive years.

4-Aug-08: On Al-Jazeera and professorial mindsets

Two days ago, a newspaper called "The National", published in one of the Gulf states, carried a serious analytical piece critical of Al-Jazeera. In particular, it focused on the way Al-Jazeera covered the release of Samir Kuntar, the convicted terrorist murderer of a four year old Jewish child whose head he bashed to pieces. (We wrote about this sickening individual two weeks ago - see "22-Jul-08: The once and future child murderer".)

The critical article was penned by someone called Sultan Al-Qassemi, a man whose home is in the United Arab Emirates and who is chairman of Young Arab Leaders. The fact that we know about it is due to the excellent work of MEMRI , the Middle East Media Research Institute. It's an independent, non-profit organization that translates and analyzes the media of the Middle East, and publishes some of what it finds. No one else comes close to the range and quality of the work they put out. Without them, we would be exposed to a mere fraction of the news and analysis that's published in the Arabic-speaking world. More power to MEMRI.

Sultan Al-Qassemi quotes a revealing statistic. A Jordanian poll says 98 percent of political science and media professors in the Arab world claim to watch at least three hours of Al-Jazeera daily, labeling it as the 'the most respected news agency.'

He says:

"What is frightening about that number isn't that 98 percent of Arab
political science professors admit to watching three hours of television a day,
but that they watch three hours of the same television each day. The problem
with watching Al-Jazeera in Arabic isn't just that the channel gives ample airtime to militants and terrorists to share their 'perspective,' but because its conspiracy theories and controversies give the station so much influence on the easily swayed Arab mindset. "

He refers to Al-Jazeera's 'Code of Ethics' posted on its website. "The very first pledge by the Qatar-based channel" he says "includes 'giving no priority to political considerations over professional ones.'

An example of what nonsense this is can be seen from what how Al-Jazeera dealt with Kuntar's release from an Israeli prison:

"The station not only repeatedly interviewed 'the hero' but brazenly threw
Kuntar, live on international television, a surprise birthday party to celebrate
the occasion. The party, organized by Al-Jazeera came complete with fireworks, a
full band, and a giant birthday cake along with the picture of the Hizbullah
leader Hassan Nassrallah. "The channel's Beirut bureau chief, Ghassan
Bin Jiddou, sporting a pink tie for the occasion, repeatedly addressed the
terrorist as 'my brother' saying: 'You deserve even more than this.'

Reflecting on whether Qatar, Al-Jazeera's sponsor, comprehends the dangers that come from associating with events like a birthday party for a convicted child murderer, Sultan Al-Qassemi suggests that

"All Arabs should re-examine their understanding of what characterizes a hero;
take a look at your own child and imagine just how frightened the four-year-old
[murdered Jewish child] must have been... Although we may never know what
psychological pressures Kuntar endured during his incarceration in Israel's
prisons, we do know that he was allowed to marry and to graduate from Israel's
Open University with a degree in political science, rendering him an ideal
Al-Jazeera viewer... The privileged treatment that Kuntar received courtesy of
Al-Jazeera was the coup de grace to their claims of neutrality... Which
brings to mind a friend of mine's adaptation of the famous Joseph Goebbels'
dictum that characterized so much of Nazi Germany's propaganda: 'When you
want to get away with a lie,' he said, 'you must repeat it many times
over and believe it to be the truth. Only then will others believe
you.' "It certainly works for Al-Jazeera. Just ask 98 percent of Arab
political science professors."

Sultan Al-Qassemi's incisive comments are timely. Later this week, we mark the seventh anniversary of a terrorist massacre in a Jerusalem pizza restaurant that ended the beautiful life of our fifteen year-old daughter and her best friend and 13 other innocent people. What's the right way to honour their memories and violent deaths?

We don't expect the show-business giants of Al-Jazeera to understand this. Nor do we think that "98 percent of Arab political science professors" will comprehend the following: As they have done each year for the past seven years, the teen leadership of the EZRA youth organization here in Jerusalem's northern suburbs will hold a public charity bazaar on the afternoon of Monday 11th August. All proceeds - from the sale of arts and crafts, back-to-school equipment, music disks, fast food, a pet-the-animal corner and other similar attractions - will be given to charity, including to Keren Malki, the foundation we created in our daughter's memory. (Please point your friends to the Keren Malki website.) Visitors to the bazaar can also donate blood.

Did we mention that the annual bazaar is to honour the memory of our daughter Malki Roth and her friend Michal Raziel? (The simple brochure, in Hebrew, is here.)

For those of us who don't operate global news networks or teach politics in Arab universities, this is just another reminder of how different our society and its values are compared with theirs.

Can you imagine Al-Jazeera trying to make sense of a society that commemorates the victims of a terrorist massacre this way?

27-Nov-06: Today would have been our daughter's 21st birthday

Malki in 2000, standing in one of the galleries of

the Jerusalem Theatre. Her mother's art was on
display there that day and Malki came to watch

as visitors admired the pictures.

Our daughter Malki was born twenty-one years ago today on 27th November 1985 in Melbourne, Australia. 

Her life ended in a roaring explosion the center of Jerusalem on 9th August 2001. A Hamas barbarian exploded his guitar case inside one of the city's most popular and crowded restaurants, the Sbarro pizzeria. 

The human bomb had been brought there by the attack's mastermind, a Jordanian woman who was herself just 21 and possessed of evil beyond description.

We hope you will take a moment to remember Malki's beautiful life by paying a visit to the website of the foundation that bears her name. It does a good deal of practical work for families from all parts of Israeli society who care at home for a disabled child. The website address is www.kerenmalki.org

Malki's mother wrote the short essay below soon after the murder:

How can I compress my Malki's fifteen years into a mere few words? How can I sing her praises without sounding hyperbolic? And, the greatest challenge, how can I endure the pain that this will undoubtedly bring? While the task seems daunting, I will attempt it nonetheless.

Since a Palestinian Arab suicide bomber snuffed out her life on August 9th, talking about my Malki is all there is left for me to do for her. And helping her was something I so enjoyed.

The opportunities were usually limited; she was a very independent girl. I used to tell friends that she was "fifteen going on eighteen." Malki handled all her school and teacher problems on her own. Shopped for her clothes without me. Conducted a very active social life at Horev Girls school and in her youth movement, Ezra. During her last two years, she was rarely at home. So I had to look hard for ways to lend her a hand. A lift by car to her flute lesson now and again to save her the short walk. A quick dash in my car to hand her the lunch she made but forgotten on the kitchen counter. A pretty new blouse I thought might grab her. A few packets of her favorite gum. Small gestures.

But the help she gave me was always on a grand scale, in ways that truly mattered. I could count on Malki to calm down her eight year-old sister who has a tendency to become irate or rebellious. Taking her into her bedroom, they'd chat a while; this would somehow win her over. Malki would then proudly present me with a cooperative little girl eager to brush her teeth, finish her homework or do whatever it was I'd been insisting upon in vain. When I would collapse on the couch after an exhausting day, Malki appeared at my side with my pillow and blanket, and gently settled me down.

She never missed a chance to compliment me when I dressed up for a simcha or wore a new outfit. When my husband would phone home from one of his overseas business trips, Malki would first ask him how he was feeling and how his meetings were panning out. Only then would she enquire about the items she'd asked him to buy her. (I, on the other hand, would launch pell-mell into my long shopping list, along with a litany of the woes I was enduring on the home front by myself.) If she were spending some time downtown, she would call home and offer to do errands for me, aware that I rarely get out of the house.

Then there was her unique relationship with Haya-Elisheva, our youngest child, now six-and-a-half, who suffers from global and profound retardation as well as an extreme epilepsy condition called Lennox-Gastaut. Early on, when Haya was hospitalized, Malki spent many hours at her side, relieving me or simply keeping me company. She was only eleven at the time but once alerted me to the fact that a nurse had hooked Haya up to the wrong IV drip. On another occasion she was the first to notice a croupy cough that turned out to need antibiotics.

As a result of her competence, I grew to lean on her - perhaps more than I should have. In one of several diaries she left behind, she confessed that she would be happy if we had put Haya away in an institution-though to me she insisted that she preferred to keep her at home.

Despite the challenges, Malki was well-balanced enough to develop into a wholesome, active teen-ager. Her ability to see the bright side of things, to concentrate on the "half-fullness of the cup" became her trademark.

Many of her close friends have written to tell us how Malki constantly inspired them to fight despondence, be happy, utilize every moment for fun but worthwhile activities. She achieved this in a variety of ways. One was the cards she sent to her friends: birthdays, holidays, returns from vacations, a disappointment, whatever. On the cover, an artistic decoration alongside an apt poem or quotation she had read somewhere that had touched her. On the back - a personal, original note.

Another was the intense, empathetic heart-to-heart talks she had with her friends. In her diaries, these are often mentioned as the highlights of her day.

Yet a third medium of uplifting was music, an area in which she was multi-talented. She studied recorder and flute for some ten years and acquired impressive skill in both. When her school or youth movement organized some event she never failed to contribute with either solo or group performances. At mid and end-of-year concerts of the neighborhood conservatory where she took lessons, Malki's playing always reduced me to tears of nachat. She also taught herself to play guitar and, I've been told, would lug it around practically everywhere, and strike up group sing-a-longs at every opportunity - even on the school bus. Needless to say, the songs she and her friends sang were what are dubbed here "shirei neshama" - songs of the soul.

Once Haya's condition stabilized somewhat and I leaned on Malki's help in that area a lot less, I made a great effort to "normalize" our family life as much as possible. Malki's contacts with Haya were more pleasurable, and her love unadulterated. On those rare occasions when she was home relaxing, Malki would sit Haya in her lap on an armchair. At night, she often took her into her bed and slept beside her. She became the only other family member capable of feeding Haya and relieved me thus from time to time.

Her relationship with Haya did not satisfy her urge to help those less fortunate than herself. She exhibited an amazing sensitivity to all kinds of disabled people. One summer she helped a local single mother with her profoundly disabled child suffering from the degenerative Canavan's Disease. His limited responses were hardly noticed by others but elicited enthusiasm from my Mali (the name we used inside the family).

At school, she gravitated towards the group of learning-disabled girls who study in a separate but parallel class. She developed genuine friendships with them and urged her teachers to include those girls more frequently in joint activities with the other students.

Two weeks before her death, Malki volunteered with a girlfriend at a sports camp located in the Galilee (arranged by the Etgarim organization) for disabled children. During the five days they were there assisting the counselors, Malki's gentle, caring way touched everyone. Many of the people associated with Etgarim travelled long distances to comfort us during the Shiva - one trekked all the way from Kiryat Shmona at Israel's northernmost edge and back in one day, a four hour drive each way-and related incredible stories to us about Malki.

One of the counsellors who had supervised her remembered the farewell chat he had conducted with the volunteers the night before their return home. When he asked each of the volunteers to stand up and tell the group what they viewed as the most important feature of their stint, they all emphasized the importance of and satisfaction gained from giving to others. Malki was the last one to speak. We were told that she was the only one who spoke of what she had gained - of the happiness she had experienced in working with the children.

Nearly a year before she was murdered, Malki and her friends, at the behest of their youth movement leader, wrote personal letters addressed to G-d, in which they expressed their prayers and requests for the upcoming Jewish New Year. They submitted them to her in sealed envelopes, the intention being to open and read them aloud the following year. The madricha (leader) brought us Malki's sealed letter during the Shiva. Arnold, my husband has not yet managed to bring himself to read it but, despite a torrent of tears, I did. In it, Malki prayed for success in school and in her youth movement as a counselor (which she was to become several months later). She added the hope that our family would remain close and supportive of one another. Her request for Haya was particularly striking: not for a miracle, a cure or even a dramatic improvement. Ever modest, she asked that Haya learn to somehow convey to us which of our actions please and which disturb her. In the final line of Malki's letter, in small script because the page had already been filled, I read: "…and that I'll be alive and that the Messiah should come".

People have told us that our precious memories will eventually bring comfort. But at this point that seems impossible. I cannot conjure up even one of those I have mentioned without crying over the tragic loss that has befallen us, her friends, and the many others she surely would have helped had she been allowed to live out her life to its full course.

Frimet Roth
Jerusalem (October 2001)

In her memory, we would be glad if you would listen to a song Malki wrote in the last year of her life. The words and the music are hers; the spirit is the indomitable spirit of the Jewish people. Malki's Song in MP3 form is downloadable (in multiple versions) from here.