I think all of our hearts were ripped to shreds this week. All of our tears flowed together with the Jews of France and Israel.
When the terrible news spread about a Jewish schoolteacher and three pure precious Jewish schoolchildren shot and murdered at point blank range in Toulouse, France, as much as the French media was spinning it with the nationalist right-wing neo-Nazi angle or the random-murder angle, in our heart of hearts we knew.
We knew from our Jewish intuition that whoever committed this heinous and monstrous murder intentionally went after Jewish children.
Of the hundreds of schools in Toulouse, the one Jewish schoolhouse was attacked. Although we couldnt be sure until it was confirmed, sadly we know this leitmotif all too well. We know what Jewish children being attacked means.
These moments of terrible tragedy reopen old wounds. It makes you immediately think of the Fogels from Itamar, just barely a year ago slaughtered on Shabbat, sleeping in their beds at home.
Makes you think of the bloodbath in the library of Yeshivat Merkaz Harav, and all those pure teenage yeshiva students also savagely murdered in cold blood.
Then, when you hear that the tiny toddler who was targeted was named Gavriel, this immediately sent us to the Holzbergs in Mumbai. I instinctively wondered whether little Gavriel Sandler of Toulouse was named for Gavriel Holzberg. There are so many little Gavriels just around that age who were named for Gavriel Holzberg. When I found out little Gavriel Sandler was, in fact, named for the terror victim in Mumbai, I was just speechless.
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