I got into Ben Yishai’s car outside my Jerusalem hotel with butterflies in my stomach. We were headed north to make a shiva call in the Shomron. A few days earlier, a terrorist attack took the life of 35-year-old Rabbi Raziel Shevach. Twenty-two bullets punctured his car as he drove on Route 60 to his home in the community of Havat Gilad. Before he lost consciousness Rabbi Shevach called his wife and told her to call an ambulance. He died in that ambulance on the drive to the hospital.
On the way, Ben Yishai pulled off the road so we could look down on Nablus, the site of biblical Shechem. I had never seen it before. It’s a large city, with prominent buildings, soccer pitches, a sprawling UN facility, and Joseph’s Tomb.
Joseph’s Tomb is frequently in the news. Local Palestinian Arabs have tried to burn it down several times. They painted it green to turn it into a mosque, but it’s white once again. It’s been the site of bloodshed over the years. Rabbi Hillel Lieberman was murdered there as he tried to rescue Torah scrolls from a fire after control of the city had been turned over to the PA. And IDF soldiers lost their lives when their commanders didn’t act fast enough to come to their aid when they came under fire from terrorists.
After recent declarations by PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, it’s hard to believe he once condemned an attack on Joseph’s Tomb, saying it “violate[d] law and order, and…distort[ed] our culture, our morals and our religion.” Apparently that statement was not taken to heart by his constituents; over the past two years there have been many attacks on the site and on worshippers – and just last week security personnel discovered an explosive device that had been wired for remote detonation right outside the tomb as masses of people would be arriving to pray there.
As you look down on the southern part of the city, you notice a change in the architecture and layout. Suddenly, white multi-storied buildings give way to an area of low structures seemingly packed together like sardines in a can. What you are looking at is the Balata refugee camp. I cannot answer the question why, 20 years after control of the city was given to the Palestinians, Balata’s residents, some 30,000 of them, continue to live in the camp.
Back in the car we continued on to Rabbi Shevach’s community of Havat Gilad, which is called an “outpost” because it’s not recognized as a settlement by the government that sits one hour away in Jerusalem. Outside the shiva house, a family friend explained to me that because it is built on private land bought many years ago by a businessman in memory of another terror victim, its status is in limbo.
Since it’s an outpost, the community of 40 families with 130 children is not directly connected to Israel’s electric grid. Don’t misunderstand; they have electricity in Havat Gilad. But imagine a long extension cord running from Yitzhar, a settlement about two miles away, to Havat Gilad. That’s how the residents get their electricity.
However, that will now change according to Prime Minister Netanyahu, who ordered the Defense Ministry to connect the community to Israel’s national electricity grid. Said the rabbi’s widow in response, “It’s a joke that you’re trying to give us electricity when there is an entire village that needs to be legalized. I want to know that in 10 years’ time they will not move my husband’s grave because we waited too long [to legalize it].” I couldn’t laugh.
The community had no cemetery until the residents, at the request of Rabbi Shevach’s family, leveled a hill to create one. It’s not a pretty site, but neither is Havat Gilad after a rain.
The ground outside the shiva house was muddy, and the rugs that had been put down under a quickly erected blue plastic tarp to protect visitors from the sun sank into the mud.
The concrete patio in front of the house had muddy puddles and some young girls did an admirable job using a squeegee broom to move water into a drainage pit. It seems they were experienced at it.
An hour after the end of shiva, all the chairs were neatly stacked, the water and food pots and pans, were cleaned and removed. If you didn’t know that many hundreds of people had gone through the front door of the house over the preceding week, you could not tell from the way things looked now.
Survived by his widow, Yael, and six orphans – Renana, 10, Naomi, 8, Miriam, 6, Malka, 5, Ovadia, 3, and Benayahu, 10 months – Raziel Shevach was an incongruous man. He always dressed in a black suit, I was told, but wore a large white knitted kippah. He was a quiet man with a perpetual smile on his face who possessed many talents. He was a student, a teacher, the community rabbi, a mohel whose fees were turned over to the community children, a shochet, an emergency first-responder, and, to hear his neighbors talk of him, one of Hashem’s gifts to His people.
Rav Shevach’s senseless murder will not change anything for Palestinian Arabs, who praised it, other than lead to more death; the terrorist who murdered him has already been found and, in the IDF’s lexicon, “neutralized.” The residents of the Balata refugee camp will continue to be “refugees” under the thumb of the PA with the help of the United Nations.
We can hope the government recognizes Havat Gilad as a legal community, but as Kfar Darom and all the communities of Gaza were uprooted, including their graves, that does not guarantee anything. So you return to Jerusalem, you thank Ben Yishai for the ride, and you put a big smile on your face as you hug and hold tight your Israeli grandchildren, just as Raziel Shevach had held his children a week earlier.
May the memory of Rabbi Raziel Shevach be a blessing and may God avenge his blood.