We walked a few trailers down, and we came to the kollel of Ohr Shlomo. Rabbi Shlomo Rannan, grandson of Rav Kook, was murdered in his trailer home five years ago by an Arab terrorist. Today his wife Chana keeps the kollel open to ten boys who are post-s’micha, learning to be dayanim under the tutelage of Rabbi Yisroel Schlisel, the son-in-law of Rabbi Rannan. The kollel is situated in the very room in which Rabbi Rannan was murdered. There are bullet holes in the kollel’s windows, but the learning continues.
We then went to the old cemetery of Hebron where the victims of the massacre of 1929 are buried. My great uncle was one of the survivors. But there were two graves in particular that touched us deeply. We saw the grave of Elazar Lebovitz, a 21-year-old soldier who was born and buried on the 18th of Av – the date of the massacre so many years ago. Everyone who knew him knew he was special. He was so special that he knew his time in this world was limited. He died al kiddush Hashem one year ago. The next grave we saw was that of Shalhevet Pas, the infant shot by an Arab sniper as she lay in her baby carriage.
Rabbi Simcha led us in prayer and the song of Av Harachamim, Father in Heaven have mercy. We all cried – and again we asked, WHY?
A Promise Redeemed
We came to the Avraham Avinu neighborhood, so named because of its shul. Rabbi Simcha took to the bima and told us the story. One Yom Kippur several hundred years ago, there were only nine men in shul for the davening. As the chazan sang about the yeshiva shel ma?allah copying the actions of the yeshiva shel ma?atah, an elderly gentleman walked in and stayed the entire Yom Kippur, serving as the tenth man needed to complete a minyan.
This visitor, Rabbi Simcha told us, was none other than Avraham avinu – Abraham our father – who could not stand to see to see Jews davening in Hebron on Yom Kippur without a minyan while the Heavenly Minyan went on. He begged Hashem to allow him to come down to complete the minyan in Hebron, and Hashem acquiesced.
During the 1929 Arab riots in Hebron, all the sifrei Torahs burned except one, which a student somehow managed to save. This student vowed that when the shul was rebuilt, he would return the sefer Torah. In 1983, some 54 years after the massacre, he was able to fulfill his promise when, at the age of 92, he carried the Torah in to the aron kodesh.
His story finished, Rabbi Simcha stepped down from the bima, ran to the aron kodesh, swung open the paroches and pulled toward us a beautiful ancient Sephardic Torah. We sang Eitz Chaim Hee Lamachazikim Ba together and again we all realized that we truly belong here. We walked down the street to where tiny Shalhevet Pas was killed by the sniper, and we saw exactly where the killer had been standing across the hilltop. He murdered her not because she was a settler, or because she was carrying a gun or even because she was a threat. She was slain because she was a Jew.
Again the question: WHY?
We continued walking until we reached the old Arab vegetable market which has recently been turned into a Jewish neighborhood named after the Pas baby – Rinat Shalhevet. It is occupied by ten families and has a kollel consisting of twenty men under the guidance of the rosh kollel, Rabbi Uzi Sharbof.
