Many of our family had gathered in Israel to attend a wedding; instead, that day they attended a funeral. On Tuesday, the day before my cousin Nava was to be married, she and her illustrious father, Dr. David Applebaum, became the 850th and 851st Jews murdered since September 2000 by Palestinian Arabs bent on methodically killing innocent and productive Jews living in Israel.
Having just returned from a short visit to the United States to brief American doctors on how to save the lives of people attacked by terrorists, Dr. David scheduled a late night get-together with his daughter at Jerusalem’s Cafe Hillel to proffer his blessings and meet one last time before she left his household to set up her own. All that was left for him to do after that was to walk by Nava’s side down the aisle to her chupah. Father and daughter were together that next day – eternally, not at the chupah but buried in the graveyard – almost side by side.
David Applebaum was the director of the Emergency Unit at Jerusalem’s famed Shaarei Tzedek Medical Center. Over the years he developed innovative medical techniques for saving the lives of those rushed through the doors after Arab death squads attacked Jewish civilians. At other times and in other venues he simply ministered to those needing immediate medical care, be they Jew or Arab. He never differentiated. But his murderers, the Arab jihadists, do differentiate, specifically targeting Jews, often delighting in snuffing out the lives of those like Dr. David who routinely sustain life.
Years ago, after leaving Cleveland for Israel, David established Terem, Israel’s first walk-in neighborhood clinics, more accessible to many than the ones located at big hospital centers such as Hadassah or Shaarei Tzedek. He also pioneered procedures in preventing blood clotting in heart attack victims. Nava continued the tradition by working with children with cancer as part of her sheirut leumi, the national service for army-age girls.
Ironically and grotesquely, these cousins who were devoted to sustaining life are dead, while the terminator of life, the mastermind behind decades of Jew killing, Yasir Arafat, is allowed to live.
What comes to mind when writing this is the chapter in Samuel which describes how King Saul spared the life of Agog, the king of Amalek, who led his people in a vicious campaign of killing Jews during the First Commonwealth. For political reasons or out of fear of what others might think or due to misguided ideology or ancient realpolitik, Saul spared the life of Agog and simply expelled him from the land. Agog refreshed, and the Amalekites rose once again to afflict the ancient Israelites. Saul lost his kingship, for G-d let it be known that Saul’s lack of grit at the moment when courage was needed disqualified him for continued leadership of the Jewish nation.
The buried can no longer feel. But the living, David’s five remaining children, and Debra, his widow and the grieving mother of Nava, will live daily with the ache for which there is no medicine, no doctor; with the loss that can never be made whole. Nava’s future generations will never be. And so it is with the thousands similarly robbed of life by Palestinian Arab terror as well as the thousands of other victims wounded for life.
Debra was born and raised in Cleveland, the daughter of Rabbi Shubert and Iris Spero. Rabbi Spero, one of Modern Orthodoxy’s preeminent philosophers, was for 35 years the rabbi of the Young Israel of Cleveland, was chairman of the Orthodox Rabbinical Council of Cleveland, and not only is a superior darshan and lecturer but also a prolific writer on scholarly matters. He is an ardent religious Zionist and, through his Shabbat drashot spanning decades, influenced tens of families from Cleveland to make aliyah. He did so years ago and his two sons, Dr. Moshe and Jonathan, and daughter Debra, Dr. David Applebaum’s wife, did likewise. As a docent, Nava’s grandmother Iris has been a familiar face to those frequenting Jerusalem’s museums.
