Sixteen-year-old Aryeh Shechopek (Schupak) was laid to rest in Jerusalem’s Har HaMenuchot cemetery on Wednesday afternoon in an emotional funeral attended by hundreds of people.
“A year ago, I eulogized a member of Aryeh’s class; I didn’t think I would be eulogizing another student from the same class,” lamented Rabbi Naftali Schreiber, the principal of the Beit Meir yeshiva the boy attended.
The rabbi said that in fact, Schupak didn’t feel well that morning, and couldn’t decide whether to go to yeshiva. “The mashgiach told him, ‘Don’t come. I see you don’t feel well; rest a little.’ He overcame it and got up and decided to go. To go to what? To put on tefillin, to pray at the yeshiva, to learn. He didn’t have an easy life,” the rabbi said.
“There were witnesses to his greatness. There is no one in his whole year, in his whole class, who can say that during the years he was with him that there was ever anger in Aryeh. He didn’t know what anger was. He would walk on the street helping every person he could.
“Your soul floats here above us,” the rabbi said. “Until the burial you are here above us looking and seeing. Aryeh, you are here with me.”
The boy, a Canadian Israeli resident of the Jerusalem neighborhood of Har Nof, was on his way to yeshiva and was waiting for a school bus when a bomb planted by the terrorist exploded at the bus stop, near Jerusalem’s central bus station.
Twenty other people were injured in the attack, several of them seriously.
“I want to say goodbye to my son, to say goodbye to Aryeh,” his father Moshe said in his own eulogy. “I’m sorry to you. God gave and God took away. He was a boy who taught us a lesson. I appreciate every moment that he was with us as a child in our family. Thank you to everyone who came here.”
