Yesterday morning, two Arab terrorists armed with knives, axes and guns walked into a Jerusalem synagogue and murdered four rabbis in the midst of morning prayer services. The four victims, Rabbis Moshe Twersky, Avraham Shmuel Goldberg, Kalman Ze’ev Levine and Aryeh Kupinsky, were pillars of their community, leaving their families and neighbors reeling from shock.
Har Nof (meaning ‘Scenic Mountain’ in Hebrew), the Jerusalem neighborhood where the terror attack took place, is home to a vibrant Jewish community devoted to Torah study and the service of God. Founded in the 1980’s, it is Jerusalem’s largest modern ultra-Orthodox neighborhood, with some 22,000 residents, many of whom are immigrants. The four victims all lived on the same street, Shimon Agassi Street, named for a great Baghdadi rabbi and scholar.
Members of the Har Nof community came out in droves to mourn the loss of four great men. Eulogies for three of the men, Kupinsky, Levine and Goldberg, were held in the synagogue where they were cut down in their prime. Rabbi Yitzchak Mordechai Rubin, chief rabbi of the synagogue, bemoaned, “We are here, standing in front of these three holy men, the best of our community, Torah scholars whose blood flowed like water… How many widows and orphans were added to the Israeli nation this morning: four widows, 24 orphans on one street!”
Some of the mourners in attendance spoke to Haaretz newspaper reporters. One teen said he was on his way to prayers when he heard the commotion nearby.
“I ran out and I saw the dead and the wounded — old and young men, wrapped in talitot [prayer shawls] and tefillin [phylacteries]. It reminded me of the most horrible times in Jewish history, of the Holocaust, of the Jews who throughout the centuries have died for the sanctification of God’s name,” the young man said.
A teenage girl in her religious school uniform expressed, “My prayer book is wet with my tears. They were murdered at the most holy moment of the service, the Amida [central prayer recited silently three times daily]. I cry because it is so sad, but I know that this is God’s choice. We cannot know why He called these men to Him at that very moment. It is His will, and it is our role in life to fulfill His commandments.”
An elderly woman vowed that the community would look out for the victims’ families. “The community will provide them with professional counseling, with financial support if they need it, with attention and love.”
Terrorism anywhere is heinous, but there is something particularly galling about attacking people in prayer. “To see Jews wearing tefillin and wrapped in the talit lying in pools of blood, I wondered if I was imagining scenes from the Holocaust,” Yehuda Meshi Zahav, veteran leader of United Hatzalah, Israel’s emergency responders, told The International New York Times. “It was a massacre of Jews at prayer.”
According to those present at the time of the attack, the two terrorists shouted “Allahu Akbar [God is great]!” before beginning the massacre. This stands in sharp contrast to the determination of the Jewish community to serve God peacefully. As one young woman put it to Haaretz, “That is why most of us have returned to our regular duties — because our regular day is a way of praising God. In other places when this happens, there are calls for revenge, but not here, not in our neighborhood.”
All four Torah scholars were killed by two knife- and gun-wielding terrorists who entered the synagogue and study hall Tuesday morning. Both terrorists were killed in the ensuing gunfight, but not before taking the lives of the four men and wounding at least a dozen others. One of those, a Druze police officer who struggled with the terrorists, succumbed to his wounds later that night. Zidan Sayif leaves behind a wife and infant daughter. Several of the wounded remain in hospital, including one in serious condition. The Jewish community of Har Nof has arranged to send multiple busses of residents to Sayif’s funeral later today.
