The phenomenon known as “Jewish geography” is very often a pleasant thing — an international sense not only of peoplehood but of familial closeness that brings, and keeps, Jews together.
It can also be very tragic.
That fact was cruelly driven home this week when news reached Denverites Sarina and Brian Kopinsky that their niece, 26-year-old Dalia Lemkus, was murdered by a Palestinian terrorist on Monday evening, Nov. 10, on the West Bank.
Lemkus was stabbed to death at a bus stop at the Alon Shvut junction in Gush Etzion, at the same junction where three Israeli teens were kidnapped last June,and three weeks later found dead near Hebron.
Lemkus was one of two Israelis killed by terrorists on Monday in rising and increasingly violent Palestinian unrest. The other was a 20-year-old soldier, Almog Shiloni, a member of the Nachal Haredi, the haredi Orthodox army unit. [See Page 20].
The assailants in both cases were captured by Israeli forces.
The killer of Lemkus was identified as Maher Hamdi Hashalamun, 30, of Hebron, affiliated with the terror organization Islamic Jihad. He spent more than four years in prison in Israel for throwing firebombs. Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the attack.
Hashalmoun is being treated in a Jerusalem hospital.
Brian Kopinsky, Dalia’s uncle by marriage, spoke to the Intermountain Jewish News this week from his Denver home while his wife was en route to Israel to attend her niece’s funeral on Tuesday, Nov. 11.
He said that he and his wife have lived in East Denver for 24 years and consider the DAT Minyan and BMH-BJ their primary synagogues here.
BMH-BJ extended condolences to the Lemkus and Kopinsky families in a statement sent out Tuesday. EDOS expressed its sadness at “the untimely and tragic loss” in a statement Tuesday.
Kopinsky described his niece, who was single, as a sabra who had only recently earned a degree in occupational therapy and was working in that profession in Kiryat Gat, southwest of Jerusalem. She lived in the Jewish settlement of Tekoa on the West Bank.
Dalia, he added, was also an amateur artist.
She was a survivor of an earlier terror attack, also a stabbing, in 2006, Kopinsky confirmed.
The trauma of that experience did not deter Dalia from her Orthodox beliefs, her religious Zionist orientation or her determination to continue living on the West Bank, Kopinsky said.
She believed fully in the right of Jews to live in that controversial and contested region.
“She said that she was not going to let them [terrorists] dictate how she lives her life,” Kopinsky said.
Dalia visited Denver on an extended vacation of two months some 12 years ago, he added.
“We were close,” he said of the relationship he and his wife had with her.
The Kopinskys spent time with Dalia as recently as October when they visited Israel.
Although grief-stricken at news of her death, Kopinsky said he and his wife are very grateful that they had what they now realize was an opportunity to see her for the last time.
“She was well,” he said. “She had just graduated from college. She was the only college graduate in her entire family.”
Dalia, who was murdered at a bus stop, often used that mode of transportation to get to school and work, which worried her aunt and uncle.
“She was taking buses and hitchhiking,” Kopinsky said.
“Everybody does that around there. She happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
The Kopinskys are not only saddened at the news of Dalia’s death but proud of what she stood for.
They share her determination that Jews have the right to live wherever they choose in Israel and her defiance to those who oppose that right.
“In 1945 we said never again,” Kopinsky said. “And the same things are happening in Tel Aviv today. But if we were to withdraw from the West Bank that would just be an extra piece of territory for the Arabs.
“It would not appease them one bit. It would embolden them.”
The Kopinskys believe that Arabs who practice or advocate terror against Israelis will never be satisfied until they gain the entire state of Israel, not just the territories.
Dalia, Kopinsky says, was a religious Zionist but wasn’t actively working against the Arabs or fighting for a cause.
“It was terrorism against her,” he said.
“She wasn’t fighting. She was just living her life and refused to cave in to demands that she change her lifestyle and go live somewhere else.”
Copyright © 2014 by the Intermountain Jewish News
