Читать книгу A New Shoah - Giulio Meotti - Страница 8
ОглавлениеThree Righteous Men
There is one image that explains Israel better than an abundance of words: it is the dance for disabled members of the army. During the grand opening ceremony for the celebration of independence, the disabled dance in their wheelchairs, led by young people who leap around them, take them by the hand, dart away and back again. There is joy, not sadness, on those faces that are at once so young and so mature. Their pain, their disabling, is part of Israel, a citadel-state that for more than half a century has tragically walked between life and death.
On Israeli television we saw a celebration of the return to life of three people in a bar on a pedestrian street in Jerusalem. In 2002, a suicide bomber had blown himself up there, killing eleven people. A girl who had been there, and had believed herself dead but then recovered, cajoled her friends into having a little party. Another victim had returned almost to normal after four years of therapy; he brought along his brother, who was hit in the head and could no longer talk or move normally, and who will never get better. The one young man didn’t let go of his disabled brother’s hand for a minute; he hugged his brother, made him eat and smile. The others in the group joined his efforts.
Disabled war heroes are often the protagonists of Israeli soap operas. Much attention goes into sports for the disabled; at the Special Olympics in Athens in 2004, Israeli competitors obtained first-place results. Among them were Keren Leibowitz, a swimmer whose legs were paralyzed in an accident while she served in the army, who won a gold medal and two silver. Yizhar Cohen, a forty-one-year-old blind swimmer, came home with three gold medals. Yitzhak Mamistalov, who has cerebral palsy and swims with only his right hand, earned two gold medals and one silver. Inbal Pezaro, eighteen years old and wheelchair-bound due to a malformation of his dorsal spine, won a silver and a bronze medal in swimming.
More than ten thousand people have been wounded by terrorism; Israel itself is a giant wound. During the darkest times of terrorism, the hospitals have become repositories of anguish and ravaged bodies. The victims arrive in shreds. Staff have been hired to help the relatives of the victims recognize what is left of their loved ones. Those who plant the bombs are aiming for total destruction. It is a war against the hearts, souls, and bodies of the Jewish nation. Nearly four in ten Israelis have survived attacks, lost family members, or had family or friends wounded. Civilian victims and survivors often come from disadvantaged families. The most vulnerable are deaf and blind people.
Immediately after an attack, while the ambulances are taking the injured away, they are classified as anush (serious), benonì (moderate), and kal (light). The classification includes psychological trauma. Pieces of metal are added to the explosive in the terrorist’s vest or backpack, and the blast sometimes completely severs limbs. Many children have had their faces burned or their hands rendered useless; some have had their sight ruined forever. There are trembling elderly people, totally dependent. There are people who go insane and don’t want to live anymore because they are haunted by the sound of the explosion, and they seclude themselves in their homes. Naturally, the focus has been mainly on the people killed in terror attacks, but more than eight times as many have been wounded. This is the true face of the war against the Jewish people: Jews scathed and scarred, living reminders of the horror of the bombings. They require years of costly and complicated physical and mental rehabilitation. Israeli doctors estimate that 40 percent of the injured will have permanent disabilities. In a small nation like Israel, the wounded produce a ripple effect through society.
Some Israelis are still hospitalized from injuries sustained in suicide attacks years ago; many more require repeated hospital visits and multiple operations. Many are unable to work. Thousands of families have been forced to alter their lives to care for a wounded family member. Eran Mizrahi was celebrating his sixteenth birthday at a restaurant in Jerusalem when a suicide bomber blew himself up. A nail went through Eran’s skull, leaving him paralyzed and in a catatonic state.
Dr. Michael L. Messing’s remarkable report “Radiology of Suicide Bombing Terrorism” permits us to understand how the perfect weapon of the Palestinian “martyr” has literally and figuratively destroyed thousands of lives. He gives the example of Sharone K., who went to Ben Yehuda Street to meet a friend, Sharone M., for his birthday celebration. They stood fifteen feet away from one of the suicide bombers and were knocked unconscious by the blast. Sharone K.’s entire body, from head to toe, was imbedded with metal fragments measuring from millimeters to centimeters. Sharone M. was similarly wounded, but with one critical exception: a nail penetrated his skull and lodged in his brain. “From the X-ray images I saw, I estimated that Sharone K. had approximately 300 individual fragments, including many still recognizable as nails,” Messing writes. “Several of the fragments penetrated his vital organs. He sustained a punctured colon, a collapsed lung and a lacerated liver and kidney. I could actually feel the nails under his skin where they had burrowed and lodged.”
Earlier generations of bombs were packed with small ball bearings; during the Second Intifada, terrorists used heavier, deadlier metal. From screws and nails, to scrap metal found at construction sites, to rat poison, the additives boost the devastating impact of each explosion. The poison works as a blood thinner, causing victims to bleed profusely and die quickly. Shock waves from the explosion, especially in enclosed places like buses or restaurants, reverberate violently through the human body, collapsing lungs, breaking small bones, and destroying internal organs. Nuts and ball bearings are packed into the explosive vests to inflict unbearable pain and suffering on Jewish bodies.
Victoria Ogurenko was severely wounded in the Dolphinarium bombing that claimed the lives of twenty-one teenagers, including two of her close friends. They were standing outside the nightclub in Tel Aviv when a suicide bomber detonated his deadly explosives. A bone jutted out of Victoria’s left arm. Her body was peppered with nails, screws, and ball bearings. A nail had pierced the bone near her heart. A screw penetrated a bone in her left leg, and ball bearings punctured the length of her left arm and leg.
Unlike people in a conventional war zone, the victims are often riding to work or eating a meal. Nahum Barnea, the premier Israeli newspaper columnist, gave this description of the scene of a suicide bombing. “Everything is fast, so businesslike, so well executed, that it seems for a moment that it was all a show prepared in advance. A few dozen yards away life went on supposedly as usual. People sat in cafes. Bought books. Sat in their offices. That is an optical illusion. Concealed beneath this energetic routine lies deep despair.” The randomness of the attacks, the bombers’ ability to strike anywhere at any time, has created among Israelis a sense of living a kind of collective Russian roulette. Many avoid taking buses or going to movies, shopping malls, any crowded place. The terrorists’ aim is to force Israelis to place armed guards at kindergartens, to search bags at the entrance to movie theaters, to be afraid of sitting in their favorite cafes or restaurants. Crowded pedestrian malls, bar mitzvah celebrations, pool halls, foreign workers, public transport—these have been very popular terror targets. Islamic terrorism has tried to demolish Israel’s right to exist in its ordinary activities.
Aharon Barak, as chief justice, made this point in the summer of 2005 when he opened his judgment on a petition brought by Palestinians who were appealing the legality of the separation fence: “Most of the terrorist attacks were directed toward civilians. They struck at men and at women; at the elderly and at infants. Entire families lost their loved ones. The attacks were designed to take human life. They were designed to sow fear and panic. They were meant to obstruct the daily life of the citizens of Israel. Terrorism has turned into a strategic threat. Terrorist attacks are committed inside of Israel and in the area [Judea, Samaria, and Gaza]. They occur everywhere, including public transportation, shopping centers and markets, coffee houses, and inside of houses and communities.”
Every bomb is followed by a flurry of cell phone calls: “Are you all right?” Emergency workers are often traumatized and need counseling. Some unconscious children have been listed as “anonymous” because they didn’t have identification cards and the doctors were searching for their parents. For all those killed, there are many, many more left alive but burned, scarred, blinded, hearing-impaired, or missing limbs. Many sustain fractures, vascular injuries, paralysis, or brain damage. Magen David Adom, the Red Star of David, has been putting aside extra blood. Hospitals have purchased walkie-talkies, ventilators, outdoor showers, and all sorts of antibiotics.
During the Second Intifada, Israeli hospitals continued to provide medical care to Palestinian patients without interruption, although in the first year of terrorism, seventy-one Israeli ambulances that arrived to treat the injured in areas of confrontation were attacked and damaged by terrorists. The number of Gaza Palestinians being treated for medical conditions of all sorts in Israel’s hospitals has increased significantly, despite the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip and the barrage of rocket attacks. In 2007, according to an Israeli report published on January 13, 2008, more than seven thousand Palestinians were able to travel to hospitals in Israel and in the West Bank—an increase of 50 percent over the figure for 2006. Close to eight thousand more Palestinians were allowed to accompany them. Israeli officials commented that Israel took great risks in encouraging such visits, which on numerous occasions had been abused by Palestinians to attempt terrorist attacks on Israeli hospitals or other targets. Israeli medical cooperation with the Palestinians has resulted in the total eradication of tetanus and measles from the Palestinian population, a dramatically reduced death rate among Palestinian infants, training projects for Palestinian doctors in cardiac and brain surgery, and assistance in opening intensive care units.
Dr. Mario Goldin, who had immigrated from Argentina, treated dozens of terror victims and helped them get back to their lives again. His objective in life was to reduce “the pain of those who suffer.” He was considered a pioneer in pain management and “every patient’s best friend,” according to his coworkers. A bomb killed Dr. Goldin while he was waiting for the bus, planning to visit a few shut-ins. He had treated many Arabs and Palestinians at the Beit Levinstein Rehabilitation Hospital, some of them seriously injured in terror attacks. “He treated everybody equally,” said Ya’akov Hart, the director of Beit Levinstein. “A patient recently sent me a letter saying that Dr. Goldin had treated his pain, which was so bad that he couldn’t walk for six months. He went to Dr. Goldin for treatment and he was up on his feet again. He asked me to thank Mario, who he said had called him every three days to see how he was feeling. He was very caring and humane, charming, and dedicated. His death is a terrible loss.” Dr. Goldin was one of many doctors killed by terrorist bombs.
The terrorist attacks in Israel have produced images that never go away. When the smoke cleared from the explosion on Allenby Street in Tel Aviv, Jacob Heyn saw a heart, still beating, lying on the sidewalk amid the shattered glass. “There was no body, just a heart beating. I didn’t think such a thing could happen. But I saw it and others saw it,” said Heyn, eighty-seven years old. He had been standing with his son in front of a bookstore that his family owns, filled with displays of children’s books. It was a normal day on a busy street. Bret Stephens, then editor of the Jerusalem Post, called it “the amazing and horrifying quiet—that was the quiet of ten murdered souls.”
Seconds after a suicide bomber killed a woman and her granddaughter, Danit Margolinski, standing with her five-year-old son at a video arcade next door, sprinted to offer help. Bleeding and broken bodies lay everywhere, as screaming women protected shrieking babies. Margolinski scooped up one baby from a mother sprawled on the floor and swaddled her in her shirt. Margolinski remained frozen on the spot, as if she were in a coma. “Slowly, I will become myself again, but the problem is: How will I forget the babies crying, and the women screaming, ‘Save me. Save me!’?”
Added to the physical injury is mental trauma, which some experts say is particularly acute in the case of suicide attacks. Post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety affect not only the victims of the attacks, but all of Israeli society. There has been a significant increase in antidepressant and sedative use by the general public. Studies after the 1995 bombing that devastated a federal office building in Oklahoma City found that 16 percent of Americans living within a hundred-mile radius of the blast suffered from post-traumatic disorder, including acute stress, flashbacks, or anxious reactions to loud bangs. In Israel, the number of people who find themselves in similar circumstances is enormous. According to Dr. Danny Brom, director of the Israel Center for the Treatment of Psychotrauma, thousands of Israelis are affected by difficulty sleeping, nightmares, anxiety, fear of leaving home, light or severe depression, chronic headaches and terrible flashbacks.
In 2004, one report estimated that 40 percent of the population in Jerusalem have some degree of post-traumatic stress disorder. Some cannot sleep because the smell of burned flesh will not leave them. More than half of those surveyed said they felt a “loss of control on factors that influence” their lives due to the violence. There are very few studies examining the psychological impact of mass terrorism in Israel. One is an extraordinary document by Marie-Thérèse Feuerstein, Burning Flowers, Burning Dreams: Consequences of Suicide Bombings on Civilians in Israel, 2000-2005. It is the culmination of a research project involving specialists in trauma and bereavement counseling, as well as frontline health professionals at the cutting edge of emergency medicine in Israel following terrorist attacks.
Among the hundreds of people disabled by terrorism, there are many stories of redemption that bear witness to the victory of Israel. One is the story of Tomer Gamadani, a police officer who suffered from serious burns caused by a terrorist bombing. After months of struggling heroically to overcome pain and despair, Tomer married the love of his life. “He was completely burned,” said Irit, his wife. “We had already set the date of our wedding, but I saw death nearby, and I prayed that Tomer would not die.” She asked Tomer, “What will we do about the wedding?” He embraced his fiancée and promised her, “We will get married, Irit.” And they did.
Eyal Neufeld was injured in an attack in Meron. After being in a coma for two months, he woke up blind and deaf, not knowing where he was. “Angry?” he said. “It was a miracle. I was sitting next to the terrorist, and I survived.” Nine people were killed in the attack. Eyal’s lungs were damaged, his spleen had to be removed, and his jaw, eye sockets, and nose were broken. His skull was fractured in two places, two of the vertebrae in his neck were collapsed, and at first it was thought that he would be paralyzed. His disabled right hand has been operated on dozens of times. The terrorists took away his eyesight, but it took him only two weeks to learn to read Braille and to get around with a cane. As soon as his hearing aid was put in, he was able to hear again.
“There are difficult times,” Eyal acknowledges. “There is this darkness that drives me crazy twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. A total obscurity—an unmoving black space, without end, without form, without color. I try not to think about it. When I am attacked by dark thoughts about what to do with my life, about what would have happened if I hadn’t been injured, I try to distract myself. Someone else might have jumped out the window, but me? I may be deaf and blind, but I’m not retarded. Life is too important to me now; I try to see the glass as half full. I’m alive.”
The doctors struggled for five days to save the life of Orly Virani, a survivor of the massacre at the Matza restaurant in Haifa in March 2002. They were afraid she wasn’t going to make it. “My body was full of shrapnel,” Orly said, “and they told me that a person with those kinds of injuries had less than a 20 percent chance of survival. At that time, no one talked about the possibility of getting pregnant and having a child, but I knew that I would survive. I fought for my life. It is a great victory.”
Orly’s story is very similar to that of another miraculous survivor. In June 2002, a terrorist entered the home of the Shabo family in the settlement of Itamar and fired a hail of bullets, killing Rachel Shabo and three of her children. Asael, nine years old, was hit by a series of bullets that took off his leg. Today he walks thanks to a sophisticated prosthesis designed in the United States. At first he was depressed and didn’t want to hear about wearing an artificial limb. Then he met Shlomo Nimrod, a disabled veteran who wears a prosthesis designed to allow him to run and play sports (similar to the one used by the South African Olympic champion Oscar Pistorius). Nimrod convinced Asael to have a prosthesis like his own made. “Dad, I can run on two legs,” Asael told his father before returning to Israel.
Since a Palestinian rocket hit her clinic in Ashkelon, Dr. Mirela Siderer lives with a piece of shrapnel an inch and a half long lodged in the left side of her back. The doctors say it is too close to the spinal cord to be removed. “I felt something like a ball of fire whirling inside of me, and all of my teeth were knocked out,” Siderer told the United Nations commission set up to investigate the Israeli counteroffensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip in January 2009. “What was my offense? That I am a Jew living in Ashkelon? I studied medicine to help people all over the world, and I have also helped many women from Gaza.”
A volunteer from Zaka, David Dvir, removed a young woman who had just died from the ambulance to make room for an injured person. “And then I recognized her: it was my friend Nava Applebaum. She was twenty years old; she was supposed to get married the next morning.” Her father, Dr. David Applebaum, had saved dozens of people torn apart by the bombs. He had immigrated from Cleveland more than twenty years earlier along with his wife, who like him was a scholar of the Torah. After directing Magen David Adom in Jerusalem, Dr. Applebaum founded an innovative emergency care center. The Knesset honored him for helping the injured in an attack on King George Street, before the flames had even been extinguished.
“His entire life was dedicated to saving the lives of others. Thousands of Jerusalem residents owe their lives to him.”
Dr. Applebaum had just made a presentation at a conference on terrorism in New York, two years after the September 11 massacre. Israelis have been advising American hospitals on how to prepare for a terror-related mass casualty event, and the country has sent and received international delegations for hospital visits. In New York, Dr. Applebaum had shown slides illustrating how it is possible to treat “forty-four injured people in twenty-eight minutes,” as he had done after one attack in Jerusalem. Then he returned home immediately and took his daughter Nava to Cafe Hillel, the day before her wedding was supposed to take place. Both of them were killed by the explosion at the cafe, along with five other people. Nava had just finished her national service with an organization that helps children who have cancer. “She will be an eternal bride,” said her brother.
One year after the attack, fifteen American doctors emigrated to Israel in the name of Dr. Applebaum. It is one of the many legacies of this extraordinary doctor. His coworkers call him “revolutionary,” a man who was always first to help the victims. Todd Zalut was his assistant for many years at the Shaare Zedek Medical Center. “David was the kind of doctor everyone dreams of becoming,” Zalut tells us. “During the 1980s, David was the first volunteer doctor to work in the ambulances. He slept with a defibrillator next to his bed in case of emergency. He helped many to stay alive. At the end of the 1980s, he was frustrated because the Israeli health care system couldn’t guarantee standard treatment for all. Regardless of their ability to pay, David gave everyone access to his intensive care unit. No waiting, quality medicine, and helping the patient as if the doctor were a friend.” These efforts eventually led to the creation of the David Applebaum Memorial Foundation for the Advancement of Emergency Medicine.
“Everyone had his cell phone number; they called him in the middle of the night, on Shabbat and holidays. He was always there to help. Sometimes he took the patient to America simply because it was too risky to operate on him in Israel,” recalls Zalut. He describes Dr. Applebaum as “more than a boss—he was a mentor, he was a friend. We will continue to fight for every patient, Jewish or Arab. And we will win this fight, because it is just and because we had a good teacher.”
Dr. Margalit Prachi says of Applebaum, “I worked with him for seventeen years. The patients’ families adored him. When he became head of the department, he revolutionized everything: he eliminated inefficiencies and organized a system for gathering family members quickly at the same hospital, children with their parents, in case of attacks or major catastrophes. It is difficult to express what he meant to us.”
Dr. Yonatan Halevy, director of Shaare Zedek, remarks, “The fact that a man, three days before his daughter’s wedding, would go to America to teach others what he had learned about medical preparation for a terrorist attack—a field in which the Israeli hospitals unfortunately have extensive experience—speaks of the stature of this person and of his complete dedication to both his work and his family.” Professor Halevy was Applebaum’s supervisor for many years. “David was an extraordinary human being,” he says. “Outside of his medical profession, he was known as a scholar and a man of vision; he cared for every human person with respect. In the field of emergency medicine, David was a pioneer and developed many of the systems that are used in emergency rooms. He also organized a network for clinics that don’t have access to the resources of the big hospitals. David wanted every patient to receive equal compassion and attention, always. No case was ever too much for him, and he stuck to this until the last days of his life.”
Asked how Applebaum reacted to suicide attacks, Halevy replies, “David lived a few minutes from our hospital, so he was always one of the first to arrive. His presence helped to manage the chaos that follows such an attack. Although these attacks are sensational in their scope and nature, it is essential for a doctor to remain calm and give everyone the same attention. David always had the same level of compassion for the victims of attacks.”
Dr. Applebaum always showed the close connection between medicine and Judaism, says Todd Zalut. “David was a rabbi, and studied with one of the greatest rabbis of our time, Aharon Soloveitchik. David also taught at the seminary for women. He was an ardent Zionist who thought that Jews all over the world should come to Israel, the land that God gave to the Jewish people.”
Applebaum’s name has been placed alongside those of the great Jewish masters. According to Yonatan Halevy, “David was a teacher of religion, and, like Maimonides, he was also a doctor. Medicine and Halakhah, the Jewish law, complement each other. There is no doubt that David’s faith in the tradition and values of Judaism had a great impact on his role as a doctor, and in particular on the sense of compassion that he demonstrated to all.” His death was a tremendous loss for all of Israel. “There are no words to explain this tragedy. The irony is that he was killed in an attack, when he had helped many victims to recover after similar attacks. The medical community will never get over his death. He was a true giant, and his example inspires many students of medicine here in Israel and all over the world. His witness lives on in the Weinstock Department of Emergency Medicine here at the Shaare Zedek hospital.”
Applebaum’s father-in-law, Shubert Spero, said this at his funeral: “Dear David, you should have accompanied your daughter to the khupah (wedding canopy), and instead we are accompanying both of you to your final resting place.” Nava’s fiancé, Chanan, put the wedding ring on her finger, saying, “She will always be my wife.” Nava’s grandfather said that “God gave man the ability to weep, but sometimes the tragedy is so painful that the mind refuses.” There are many ways to mourn the dead. “At the celebration of the Tabernacle, the high priest Aaron saw his two sons die, but remained silent. When Job saw his family die, he said, ‘God gives and God takes away, may the name of God be blessed forever.’ We must talk about those who have passed away. David was a born leader, a wonderful father, a husband, a scientist, a teacher, and a friend. He saved human lives every day.”
Addressing his family, someone quoted the words of Rabbi Soloveitchik, who said that Applebaum wanted them to live “a life according to the Torah, in the Holy Land.” Israel’s chief rabbi, Yisrael Meir Lau, compared Applebaum to the greatest saints of Judaism: “He was a true descendant of Maimonides. David and his daughter were great souls.” His grandson Natan called him “one of the thirty-six just of the earth.” According to an old legend, every generation has thirty-six righteous people, lamedvavnikim or tzadikim, upon whose piety the fate of the world depends. It is the minimum number of righteous men required to prevent the destruction of the world. The biblical book of Proverbs (10:25) says that the just man is the basis of the world’s existence: “When the storm wind passes, the wicked is no more, but the righteous is an everlasting foundation.” A tzadik is a just man, a saint and a sage, chosen by God to share his gifts with the rest of humanity. That was David Applebaum.
Israel’s determination in tackling head-on the physical problems that arise either from natural causes or from war is astounding. There is an amazing quantity of research, inventions, new techniques for curing the ill and helping the blind and the paralyzed return to normal life. It is common to see children with Down syndrome or other disabilities on television programs and in the military. One leader in this work was Moshe Gottlieb.
“A tzadik,” sobbed the mother of one of Gottlieb’s patients. In Israel, Moshe was known as the healer of Down syndrome children and someone who could help people deemed by others to be untreatable. He was murdered on his way to another day’s work of charity in behalf of the sick and disabled. Moshe Gottlieb was one of the nineteen victims of the suicide attack in Jerusalem on June 18, 2002.
After leaving a high-paying job at a fur coat factory in New York, Moshe had studied chiropractic in Los Angeles. He visited Israel in 1972 and fell in love with it. Six years later, he went with his wife and children to live in Jerusalem, where he expanded his medical practice and began an intensive study of the Torah. It was in a Jerusalem clinic for the chronically ill that he saw most of his patients, including a girl who was diagnosed with a brain tumor, whose wedding he attended as a guest of honor.
“We moved to Israel after spending a summer there a few years before,” says Dr. Gottlieb’s son, Seymour. “Simply put, my father ‘fell in love’ with the land and the people there. His love for community service was so great that he would usually prefer to stay home for the Sabbath and tend to the religious and social services of his community in the Gilo neighborhood of Jerusalem rather than take a weekend off to visit his children and grandchildren living elsewhere. He was also instrumental in creating the core of the neighborhood community services, and he continued to play an active role in these services for over twenty years, until his very last day.”
Moshe Gottlieb lived at the far southern end of Jerusalem. For months, during the Second Intifada, the neighborhood was hit day and night by rockets and mortar rounds from the Palestinian suburb of Beit Jalla. Moshe always kept his chair in front of the window, where he could see all of Jerusalem. “His chair will always be there,” says his wife, Sheila.
Every Tuesday, Moshe Gottlieb took the bus to Bnei Brak, the impoverished suburb of Tel Aviv inhabited by Orthodox devotees, and worked free of charge in a center for children with Down syndrome. He chose Tuesdays because in the Jewish tradition it is a day “twice as good,” and therefore one must give twice as much glory to the Lord. Every other day, Gottlieb saw patients in his office starting at 8:15 on the dot. Many of them were desperate cases, chronic patients and the seriously disabled. “Moshe started working with one girl with Down syndrome when she was two years old,” Sheila recalls. “At first she was completely withdrawn and terrorized; she didn’t even want to be touched. She had been abandoned by her natural parents, and Moshe cared deeply about her adoptive parents. He always worked with special people. Well, to make the story short, the girl is about ten years old now and she plays the piano very well.”
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Moshe worked with seriously ill patients at Tel Chai. He cared for a woman in a vegetative state for thirteen years, with impressive dedication. Every time he visited New York, he bought expensive medical equipment to help that woman. He also worked at Aleh, a residential care facility for disabled children, always bringing gifts; and he did charity work for orphans.
Moshe woke up at 3:30 every morning, studied the Torah, and prepared the lessons on the Mishnah that he would be giving to a class of Russian immigrants. At sunrise and sunset, he went to pray at the synagogue of Gilo, which he had helped finance. “The synagogue was home to him,” said Eliyahu Schlesinger, the chief rabbi of Gilo. “He was the first to arrive and the last to leave, and he was always ready to teach and to encourage us with his wisdom and his smile.” A painting in his honor had been unveiled in the synagogue a short time earlier; now it is dedicated to his memory, and his eulogies were delivered beneath it. Moshe helped the ultra-Orthodox Haredim families in which the men didn’t work so they could continue to study. He was never without his religious books. It was the same way that fateful June day, as he walked serenely to the bus stop with his books under his arm.
“He was a very special person, my husband,” Sheila tells us. “Two years before his death, Moshe had begun to work with children who had Down syndrome. He had two hundred patients from all over Israel. Everyone loved him. Moshe used to say, ‘the body speaks.’ . . . And with his hands and the divine guidance of Hashem, he was able to help many people. He was very close to our rabbi in Gilo, Eliyahu Schlesinger. Moshe had financed his synagogue. Now everyone misses his love, his guidance, his presence. His patients, friends, and family, they all mourn him. I hope that one day we can all be together again in techiyat hametim, the resurrection of the dead. And to be witnesses to the coming of the Messiah.”
Sheila says, “My faith in Hashem, in God, and my love for my children and their families have sustained me during the years after Moshe’s death. Now, in his memory, I volunteer with Alzheimer’s patients.” The famous biblical commentator Rashi said that when a tzadik leaves a place, everyone senses his absence, but a roshem, a spiritual presence, remains behind.
Dr. Shmuel Gillis lived in Gush Etzion, the most important bloc of settlements south of Jerusalem. “For us,” says his wife, Ruthie, “Gush Etzion was part of the national consensus; there were settlements there since the 1920s.” Dr. Gillis was killed on February 1, 2001, while returning home after work in the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. One of his Arab patients, Omrina Pauzi, called him “the angel in the white coat.” At his funeral, Ruthie told her children that their father had built bridges across religious, ethnic, and political differences. For a hematologist, all blood is the same, and Gillis was a pioneer in hematology. He might not have met his death that day on his way home if he had not waited for one of his colleagues, Dr. Hussein Aliyan, an Arab, who had asked him for help on a case of childhood leukemia.
Dr. Gillis had a warm, contagious smile; he loved the land and hiking in the desert of Judea. He was a humble person, but also a luminary. “Shmuel dedicated himself in everything to the preservation of human life,” says his brother David, a pediatrician in the same hospital. “He would always look at the surrounding villages and say, ‘I have a patient there, and two there.’ It was hard on him that he couldn’t go visit them without risking his life. What he loved about the hospital was that all divisions disappeared there; he could be a human being taking care of another human being.”
Shmuel was born in England and he arrived in Israel at age eleven. He joined the air force and served in the Lebanon War. “He is still remembered for his compassion for the Arab prisoners of war, for how he treated them,” his brother says. “Many years later, he would treat some of Yasser Arafat’s associates in the same way.” According to one of his patients in Tel Aviv, “He was the closest thing to an angel. He made no distinction between Arabs and Jews; he treated everyone wonderfully.” His approach to his patients, his care for children with cancer, his attentiveness to infertile women, his joy at the circumcision of wailing little boys, and the happiness with which he greeted victory over the most terrible illnesses are still associated with the Gillis name.
“Shmuel was a very simple man, famous only among his colleagues and patients,” says David Gillis. “As his brother and a doctor, I can tell you that I heard many times about his brilliant solutions during hematology conferences. Colleagues would often stop me in the hallway to tell me, ‘You really have a special brother.’ The hematologists tell me that Shmuel would reach a certain diagnosis through a Talmudic form of reasoning; they use a term for him that indicates a genius in the Talmud, iluy. Professor Pollack, a well-known hematologist who specializes in the diagnosis and treatment of lymphoma, once said that he felt as though he could consult with Shmuel over a difficult case for help in making a diagnostic decision. Shmuel’s specialty was blood coagulation, and in this field he often came into contact with gynecologists and traumatologists. He helped the gynecologists to realize that in many cases, miscarriage is caused by blood coagulation problems, and Shmuel was close to women with problems in pregnancy. After his death, I came into contact with some women at Hadassah who recognized me because of my resemblance to Shmuel. Without waiting for me to tell them my own stories, these women told me, ‘Look at this child—he is alive thanks to your brother.’ In traumatology, Shmuel was involved in treating patients who had lost a lot of blood. The head of the traumatology ward at Hadassah talks about Shmuel’s contribution to survival rates.”
David describes Shmuel as “an incomparable researcher and teacher. He authored some pioneering works, becoming famous at the international level. Shmuel taught many students, including one Palestinian doctor. One year after his death, this doctor went to a conference in the United States through a fund established in Shmuel’s memory. And this is what my brother would have wanted; he was a great humanist who never nursed any hatred toward the Arabs. He never mixed medicine and politics. He had served in the Israeli army as a doctor in the special forces, taking part in spectacular military operations, but he never lost his humanity or dignity during those actions. He always wanted to be sure that the soldiers were treated with dignity, even the enemy soldiers. Many of the things he did in the army became known only after his death.”
The story of the Gillis brothers begins in Eastern Europe and winds through England. “One of our relatives was a rabbi in Lithuania, the last in a chain of rabbis that had spanned twelve generations,” David tells us. “He was one of the ohave Tzion, the lovers of Zion, predecessors of the Zionist movement. And he wrote a book proposing that the Jews be brought back to their ancient land, in a movement in which the majority of Orthodox rabbis said would have to take place through divine intervention. He titled it Love of Zion and of Jerusalem, and demonstrated that most of the Jewish laws and traditions favored a physical return to Zion by means of human enterprise. Thanks to his fame, he was invited to Manchester, England, to become the rabbi of the main synagogue. Nonetheless, he never gave up on his Zionist ideals, and raised his children in the dream and ideology of returning to Zion. Our father and his brothers and sisters were raised as fervent Zionists, and over the years they all came to Israel. The first was my father’s brother Joseph Gillis, who immigrated in 1948 and became a great mathematician, the designer of Israel’s first computer, and the dean of the mathematics faculty at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. Our father was very active in the Zionist movement in England, and we made the aliyah in 1970. Shmuel was eleven years old, and he quickly became one of the best students. We immediately fell in love with this land and this people.”
David says that “Shmuel believed in the sanctity of the land of Israel, and after he married Ruthie they decided to build their house in the settlements of Judea and Samaria. The historical connection between the Jewish people and these places dates back to the time of the patriarchs. Shmuel was an enthusiast for the history and geography of these places, and he believed in peaceful coexistence with the Arab inhabitants. His view was that there was room for everyone in Israel, and that everyone should be able to live in peace.”
After one year in the farming settlement of Beit Yatir in the Hebron Hills, the Gillises moved to Carmei Tzur. “In the first settlement, Shmuel was always happy to lend a hand with the ‘dirty work,’ like cleaning the chicken coop,” his brother recalls. “Carmei Tzur also has a core of academics, scientists, and teachers, all people who believe in the idea of inhabiting the land while enhancing their Jewish ideals. Shmuel was always sought out by the other inhabitants of the settlement when they needed medical help, even on Shabbat, when they couldn’t take a car to Jerusalem, or the roads were blocked by snow.”
Shmuel was a man of great faith. “When he went to conferences all over the world, my brother always ate kosher, observed Shabbat, and took part in religious services. To those who asked how he was able to be an Orthodox Jew in a secularized world, Shmuel mentioned the extremely difficult dietary laws and the rules of Shabbat. Unlike some religious fanatics, such as the many Muslims who have a fundamentalist view hostile to everyone, Shmuel and Ruthie tolerated other people’s ideas. Their love of neighbor was strong; they considered it their central religious principle. Tolerance was a way of life for Shmuel. His last patient before he died was an Arab woman. She had thanked him, calling him ‘an angel of heaven.’”
Ruthie Gillis is the principal of a religious school in Jerusalem, and her family went through the Holocaust. “Shmuel was a very brilliant man, the first in his class in medicine,” she says. “But at the same time, he was a very humble man; he never said ‘I’m the best.’ He was a man of science, an angel who wanted to take care of every patient. He felt that everyone, Arabs and Jews, had the same dignity.”
In a 1997 interview with the Jerusalem Post, Shmuel said, “We were looking for simplicity, and Carmei Tzur fascinated us.” Ruthie comments, “For us, Israel is everywhere. Shmuel and I thought that as Jews, we had the right to live anywhere, and that if we had left Carmei Tzur, one day they would also have asked us to leave Tel Aviv. We have to protect ourselves. Every morning, I pass the place where my husband was killed. And I know that we will never be able to live completely at ease.” Ruthie has never thought about leaving her village in Gush Etzion, however. “I have to move forward. Every day is a battle, but I could never leave Carmei Tzur. Where would I go? Tel Aviv? Ashkelon? Terror is everywhere here. Shmuel got up every morning to pray; he believed in the Torah and that living in Eretz Yisrael is part of the Jewish faith itself. He was an optimist, and he always said that he had to do everything he could for the good of Israel.”
Ruthie Gillis believes that the conflict with the Palestinians is not a conflict over land. “Anyone who lives here, like me and like many others, sees how many bare hills and valleys there are here. There’s plenty of room for everyone, for us and for them. What is missing is room in their hearts. That’s why the murderers are not fighting to obtain territory. The murderers murder Jews because they are Jews. That is anti-Semitism and racism for its own sake. Their war is against a different identity living alongside them, here in Carmei Tzur, and in Haifa and in Tel Aviv and in Jerusalem and in Tiberias—to them there is no difference. They are fighting against the Jew because he is a Jew. The land is a secondary factor in their struggle.”
