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Sherri Mandell, the mother of terror victim Koby Mandell HY"D (May God Avenge his blood) has blasted President Hussein Obama for his silence on the kidnapping two weeks ago of three Israeli teenagers. I received this by email from Jack W.
Sherri Mandell ~ "Say Something."
I would like to know why President Barack Obama has still failed to publicly condemn the kidnapping of Naftali Frenkel here in Israel, who is both an Israeli and American citizen. Two weeks ago, Naftali, Gilad Shaar and Eyal Yifrach were kidnapped by terrorists on their way home from school. There has not been any word from them since. I would like to know why President Obama and the First Lady don’t say that Naftali and the other two boys are like their children, as they said about the girls who were kidnapped in Nigeria. Michelle Obama said she was outraged and heartbroken about those girls. I would like to know why the President and First Lady have made no public statements at all about our boys, and especially about Naftali, an American citizen.
After my 13 year old son Koby, also an American citizen, was killed by terrorists in 2001, a law was introduced in Congress called the Koby Mandell Act. It later passed as an omnibus rider (my son’s name was erased), which opened an office in the Department of Justice called the Office of Justice for the Victims of Overseas Terrorism (OVT). The office’s mandate was to actively pursue terrorists who murdered Americans abroad.
At about the same time, the government initiated a Rewards for Justice Program to pay for information leading to the arrest of overseas terrorists. Yet, no terrorist killers of Americans in Israel have ever been apprehended under that program. In fact, today when I checked the Rewards for Justice website, there was not even a listing for my son’s name. His murderers have not been found, yet the Justice Department has seemingly deleted him from their consciousness. They are not looking for his killers. In fact, according to their list of atrocities, no Koby Mandell was ever killed in Israel by terrorists. They have closed his case, if it was ever opened. And if you search the Office of Victims of Overseas Terrorism, you will not find his name either, except in reference to the first version of the law.
Yet the Koby Mandell Act promised that the US government would vigorously pursue the killers of American citizens, including those killed in Israel. So far, not one of them has been brought to justice with the help of the American government.
The OVT’s primary responsibilities are to work to ensure that when Americans are injured or killed in terrorist attacks overseas, investigations and prosecution remain a high priority. Another responsibility is to honor and respect the rights of victims and their families. The office is also meant to monitor the investigation and prosecution of terrorist attacks against Americans aboard.
With these lofty goals, you would think that there would be a picture or at least a mention of Naftali on the website. Or a mention of Koby. Or of the many Americans citizens killed by Palestinian terrorists in Israel. But when it comes to Americans who are the victims of Palestinian terrorism, the Justice Department, like the President remains silent.
Please write to the President at whitehouse.gov and demand that he make a statement about Naftali and the other two boys. Ask him why the Office of Justice for Victims of Overseas Terrorism is silent.
Ask the President simply…to say something.
Then again, I think we can do without Michelle holding any stupid signs....
In 2001, when my son Koby was 13 years old, Palestinian terrorists murdered him with his friend, Yosef Ish Ran, here in Israel. Unfortunately, the horror of that act made me and my family part of Jewish history. Now you and your family are part of history too.
Eva, you are obviously a remarkable Jewish woman already transforming your pain, writing to us telling people to increase their learning of Torah, to light candles before the time Shabbat begins, so that your tragedy brings more light into the world.
And through your generosity of spirit and empathy for the Jewish people, it’s not just the terror perpetrated on your own family that we will remember. Because you named your son Gabriel after Gavriel Holtzberg, who along with his parents was murdered in a terror attack at the Chabad House in Mumbai, we remember him too.
But the question that people are asking me and the question I am asking myself is personal. How are you going to survive this loss? How are you going to survive, period? It’s like being disabled, Binyamin Netanyahu told you after your two children and husband were murdered in a terror attack in Toulouse last week. “It’s like missing a limb.” He is telling you from personal experience because he, too, is bereaved. His brother Yoni was killed in the Entebbe attack.
Like Netanyahu, I can tell you from experience. The pain is indescribable. Nobody wants to imagine it. Everybody is terrified of the pain.
People are also afraid of my family’s pain. Koby and Yosef were cruelly murdered, beaten to death with rocks.
It’s a truck crushing you, a tsunami, an earthquake.
When Koby was murdered, for me it was the feeling that life was not worth living, that everything I counted on was gone.
Evil had invaded my home.
When I grew up in the 1960s in New York, I heard that the Jews suffered. But me. I didn’t suffer. I didn’t understand the Jewish history of suffering.
During the shiva we asked a bereaved father, a rabbi, how we would survive. He told us, “You have to use your pain to grow.”
You are already doing that.
Eva, you remind me of Oscar Pistorius, the South African runner who runs on carbon fiber artificial limbs, blades really. Critics claim that he has an unfair advantage: he’s faster than a regular runner.
You refuse to allow disability to paralyze you. You are already learning to walk while missing limbs.
You see, and most people don’t realize this: you have the ability to do great things.
To go beyond.
Most people are not aware of post traumatic growth – some people who experience tragedy believe that it gives them a kind of wisdom. Some go on to do great things.
But greatness in Judaism has to do with acts of kindness.
Years ago, when I met the actor Christopher Reeves, who played Superman in the movies, he told me that before he was paralyzed in a horse back riding accident, he thought that greatness had to do with heroic activities: sailing around the world alone, climbing high mountains, equestrian jumping.
And then when he was gravely injured, unable to move his limbs, he understood: greatness had to do with everyday kindness and overcoming everyday obstacles.
It’s not surprising that a synonym for kindness in Hebrew is gedula, greatness.
Greatness sometimes means just that – becoming bigger.
The pain and terror of the chaos and darkness and evil of loss is so great it threatens to unbalance you. At first it will.
But you will become greater in order to recalibrate your center of gravity. One day your happiness, too, will become greater. We see that at Camp Koby, the summer camp we run for 400 bereaved children in Israel. Their happiness is tremendous, wonderful. It is, one counselor said, “the happiest place in the world.”
Despite the fact that every kid there has lost a mother, a father, a sister or a brother to terror or tragedy.
I have a handicapped friend who is an excellent swimmer.
She told me, “If the world were a pool, I wouldn’t be disabled.”
There are ways to circumvent the feeling of disability.
Everything now needs to be redefined. You are already doing that.
At our shiva, a general in the IDF came to see us. We had never met him before and as he sat at the edge of the couch, ramrod straight, he told us: “Everybody will go away. And you will be alone in this.”
It’s true. We bereaved are all in the end alone. But we Jews are all also surrounded by a community that refuses to let us fall, that supports us and nourishes us.
Related Article: A Letter from Toulouse
As a people we have experienced centuries of rising from the ashes of sadness and redeeming ourselves with a love of Torah and Jewish learning and values including a love for the land of Israel, where your husband and children are now buried. Please God, Israel will also be the site, for you and for all of us, of great simcha, great happiness.
Because the secret of the Jewish people may be this: we are masters in post-traumatic growth. Out of the ashes of the Holocaust, Israel was reborn. We build from pain. While our enemies celebrate destruction, we celebrate creation. We celebrate life.
