AISH: Celebrate Life by Sherri Mandell An open letter to Eva Sandler who lost her husband and two sons in the Toulouse terrorist attack.

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.

8-Year-Old Miriam's Mother: She Was My Sacrifice

Melanie Phillips - Laying the groundwork for the Toulouse massacre

When the Toulouse school massacre happened, the media rushed to say that the perpetrator was a white far-right racist. The lone gunman had mown down at close range a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school, wounding several others. He was thought to be the same killer who a few days earlier had murdered three black French paratroopers in two separate attacks. A killer who targeted Jews and blacks – must be a far-right white racist, right?

Wrong. The suspect who the French police have now cornered turns out to be a jihadi Islamic terrorist with self-declared links to al Qaeda, who has made trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the past. Well, there’s a surprise.

Jews throughout the world are all potential targets for attack in a terrifying manifestation of global incitement to murder. Islamists regularly declare their intention to kill Jews wherever they can find them. Hundreds of rockets fired from Gaza at southern Israel over the past couple of weeks bear out daily the frenzied attempt to murder as many Jews as possible. In the Mumbai massacre in 2008, it turned out that the attack on the tiny ultra-orthodox Lubavitch centre was for the Islamic perpetrators of that atrocity the most important target. There have been repeated Islamic terrorist attempts on Jewish targets around the world. Oh -- and Islamists have been murdering black people in Libya because they are black.

Yet all this is ignored by the mainstream media. Desperate to sanitise Muslim genocidal terrorism and prove that racism and Jew-hatred is confined to white people and the ‘far right’, the media simply did not entertain the possibility that the perpetrator of the French killings might have been a Muslim. So a range of likely perpetrators was canvassed – but they were all variations on white racists.

And even when the perpetrator turned out to be an Islamic terrorist the media were still trying to spin it away, with Sky News stressing the deprivation of the killer and his family and interviewing a French female journalist living in London who claimed that this was ‘an attack against diversity’.  As blogger Edgar Davidson observed here:

‘She said that it was all down to the racist climate in France which had been made worse by Nikolas Sarkozy in the last five years and she picked out, as an example of racist lack of tolerance, the burka ban he had introduced.’

Not only are the media and ‘progressive’ commentators in the west desperate to sanitise Islamic terrorism and genocidal incitement; they also join in. The Toulouse jihadist said he was

‘seeking revenge for Palestinian children and French military postings overseas.’

But no Palestinian children have ever been targeted by Israel for murder. Quite the reverse: Israel regularly puts its own soldiers in harm’s way in order to any minimise civilian casualties in military operations against Palestinian terrorists and their infrastructure which  it undertakes solely to protect its own people from further murderous Palestinian attacks. Any Palestinian child casualties in such operations occur solely as a tragic and inadvertent by-product of war – and as often as not because the Palestinians have put their own children in harm’s way.

Yet this deranged belief that the Israelis deliberately kill Palestinian children is not only pumped out daily by the Arab and Muslim world inciting their people to hate Jews and to murder them as a holy act; not only do western progressives ignore this incitement and pretend instead that Islamic terrorism arises from legitimate ‘grievances’; these same western progressives themselves pump out precisely the same lies and incitement -- and then suggest that the deliberate murder of Jewish innocents is the moral equivalent of attempts by Israel toprevent the slaughter of yet more innocents.

Thus the EU foreign affairs chief, the British Baroness Ashton, seemed to equate the murder of the French Jews in Toulouse with the deaths of Palestinian children in Gaza in Israeli military operations there. Although the EU now claims she was misunderstood and that she was merely referring to all violence against children, that does not let her off the hook – indeed, by underscoring the fundamental amorality of the remark, it not only attaches Lady Ashton to that hook yet more firmly but also now attaches the EU itself. And now Hamas itself, no less, has sprung to her defence:

‘“Ashton’s declarations are worthy of appreciation and support due to Israel’s attempts to pressure her,” said a senior Hamas official, Izzat al-Rishq, on his Facebook page.’

As a fine article in The Commentator points out:

‘No-one will ever know whether the tragedy in Toulouse would not have taken place if the atmosphere were different. But we can say that history teaches that mass demonisation can all too easily lead to the dehumanisation of the group or people or nation that is being demonised. From there it is only one single step to the belief that murder itself can be justified.’

The terrorist who carried out the French killings may now have been caught. But those in the west who provide an echo chamber for the diabolical discourse that incubates genocide have yet to be brought to account.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits the shiva of Eva Sandler, wife of Rabbi Jonathan Sandler and mother of Arieh and Gabriel, the victims of Monday's shooting in Toulouse. (photo credit: Amos Ben Gershom/GPO/FLASH90)

An Israeli Zaka volunteer stands next to the bodies of Monday’s shootings in a morgue before their funeral in Jerusalem today. Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, his sons Aryeh, 5, and Gavriel, 4, and seven-year-old Miriam Monsonego were gunned down.