<em>Yahrzeits fall on the same date on the Jewish calendar but with gradations of feeling. One year after the initial loss, a mourner’s tears generally flow in more restrained rivulets rather than uncontrollable torrents. The beginning of healing has often taken root in the heart.
But sometimes a death is so violent that the heart is unable to stop its shuddering. That’s how many of us will feel on March 11, the first yahrzheit of the senseless slaughter of five members of the Fogel family in the West Bank settlement of Itamar.
On that late Shabbat night one year ago, parents Udi, 36, Ruth, 35, and three of their six children — Yoav, 11, Elad, 4, and three-month-old Hadas — were knifed to death. There was so much blood in the house that even PA President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the killings as “despicable, inhuman and immoral . . . A human being is not capable of something like that.” But the Palestinians responsible for the atrocities — members of the Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades of Imad Mughniyeh — assumed very human forms, the type Abbas has seen and nurtured. Who is he kidding?
Three Fogel children survived: two sons, ages 8 and 2, who were sleeping inside a room that escaped attention; and Tamar, 12. She returned home late after a Bnei Akiva program to a locked house and ran for help. ZAKA volunteers described the scene as “absolutely horrific . . . everywhere the smell of death mixing with the aroma of the Shabbat meal.”
This is the story. How well we remember the Fogel family is our ending. Death claims people of every age, but when toddlers, children and adolescents are murdered just for being Jews it is especially hard to close the book. This is not our task — not yet. Somehow, we must remember the Fogels’ end, inscribed in blood and hate, and yet sweeten their memory.
As long as the Jewish people live, the Shabbos before Purim — Shabbat Zachor — will always be associated with the Fogel family.
Copyright © 2012 by the Intermountain Jewish News
