Jews, too, have annual traditions. My family is no different. This month marks the 20th anniversary of the murder of my daughter Alisa and seven others in the 1995 Palestinian terror attack at Kfar Darom. But unlike the Palestinians celebrating their “martyrs,” we won’t be celebrating how Alisa and the others were murdered by Islamic Jihad – not by a long shot.
Instead, we will join mothers and fathers in Israel by quietly lighting a memorial candle in our kitchen. We will visit a lonely grave in the cemetery and go to synagogue to say the Kaddish – mistakenly thought of as a prayer for the dead – and exalt God’s name.
We will all remember the laughter of the good times of families together, the tears of joy and sadness as we bandaged their scraped knees and watched our children grow into upright human beings.
In my home, we will continue to work in Alisa’s name to help provide a Jewish education for as many students as we can, to advocate for the rights of terror victims to obtain justice against those responsible for so much evil in this world, and to see her memory kept alive in our growing family.
And we’ll think of the residents of Neve Eliyahu as they spend a quiet evening in the Alisa Flatow Rose Garden, which was dedicated to Alisa not because of her death, but because of her life.
That’s our 20-year-old “normal.”
(The attack at Kfar Darom took place on April 9 and Alisa died on April 10, 1995, according to the Gregorian calendar. On the Jewish calendar, Alisa’s death took place on the 10th of Nissan, which this year coincides with March 30.)