Harmony
“I get the shivers when I hear it,” says Tzippi the irreligious cashier at the local grocery story.
Tzippi was discussing the loudspeaker system that plays Shabbos-related songs twenty minutes before candle lighting on Friday afternoon. The loudspeakers are new to Afula and stab at the secular status of the city.
But Tzippi and the irreligious shopper she was talking to are enthusiastic. Despite their immodest dress, Shabbat is significant to them, and they enjoy the spiritual feeling that the traditional songs create.
This enthusiasm highlights the acceptance with which the Afula residents greet their new religious neighbors. They’re proud of their own Jewish background, proud of their religious counterparts, and proud of themselves when they decide to observe additional religious practices.
Sheli
“The cashier in Achim Zachor, the local supermarket, was killed in Migdal Ha’emek,” my son told me when he came home from school.
Busy with the other kids, I didn’t really understand what he was saying. But my husband came home and confirmed that a murder had taken place. A cashier at our small, local supermarket in Afula Illit was killed on her way to a job interview in Migdal Ha’emek – a neighboring city.
Her name was Sheli. My defense mechanisms went into play. I was sure that I didn’t know her.
But when I googled her name and found a picture, the murder hit me hard. Of course I knew her.
Sheli was a sweet, innately modest girl, who always smiled when I came with my kids to the checkout counter. When my baby was a newborn, I left his carriage next to her while I shopped. My foremost memory of Sheli is of her cooing at my little Uri between customers.
Sheli was born and raised in Afula. I moved here with my family eight years ago to join the team of Torah disseminators in the city. Sheli and her family represent the local population. My religious, Anglo-Saxon family represents the influx of religious residents. We live around the block from each other.
After Sheli Dadon’s murder, my neighbor Rav Aviad Arusi self-appointed himself as the Dadon family’s shiva rav. He helped them follow the halacha regarding tearing kriah and sitting shiva. He made sure that the demonstration held by the Dadon family and friends against government apathy wouldn’t take place on Shabbos, and he remains in close contact with the family during their year of kaddish.
Sheli died as a tinok shenishba. She had a precious Jewish neshama, but did not merit learning Torah.
During the shiva, her young friends gathered in her home. Throngs of people came to be menachem avel. Two religious men, new to Afula, reached out to the mourning teenagers. They started a shiur in Sheli’s memory. The shiur serves as an example of the harmonious interplay of the religious and irreligious elements of the city.