Thousands of people packed a Jerusalem cemetery to bid farewell to the victims of Monday’s shooting outside a Jewish school in Toulouse, France.
Both of Israel’s chief rabbis joined a rabbinical delegation from Toulouse, community rabbis and Torah scholars from across Israel, Israeli Interior Minister Yudi Edelstein, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe and other officials at the Wednesday morning funeral, which saw sobbing throngs of individuals of all walks of life come to share in the grief of the family members of 30-year-old Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, his two sons, Aryeh, 6, and Gavriel, 3, and seven-year-old Miriam Monsenego, daughter of Ozar Hatorah high school principal Rabbi Yaakov Monsenego.
Also paying his respects was Rabbi Shimon Rosenberg, whose grandson Moshe Holtzberg was orphaned when a gunman murdered Chabad-Lubavitch of Mumbai directors Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg and four of their guests three years ago.
Earlier in the day, the bodies of the Toulouse victims arrived at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport aboard an El Al flight, and were carried into Jerusalem by ZAKA ambulances.
Back in France, investigators concluded that the man responsible for the attack was an Al Qaeda-trained operative also behind the shootings of three French paratroopers in and around Toulouse. As 24-year-old suspected gunman Mohammed Merah’s victims were buried, police forces found themselves in a standoff outside his Toulouse apartment.
At the funeral, speeches focused on the tragedy of yet another Jewish community falling victim to the machinations of Islamist terrorists.
Israeli Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar spoke in epic terms, categorizing the hatred shown to Jews as the same as that shown by the biblical Esau to Jacob. The struggle, however, would not last forever, he said, as G‑d would “avenge the spilled blood” of those struck down by terrorists.
Monsenego’s older brother, Avishai implored the Almighty to give his parents the strength to “endure the worst trial that can be endured,” reported The Associated Press.
In his remarks, Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin bemoaned the fact that the Jewish people “once again find themselves facing wild animals with hatred in their hearts.”
Juppe, meanwhile, said that his nation was doing everything it could to ensure “safety in our schools and synagogues, so that a criminal act such as this will never happen again.
At the end of the ceremony, Sandler’s widow Eva Sandler approached the graves of her husband and children. Wailing in French, she cried out three words: “Come back home.”
the land of milk and honey We know honey comes from the honey bee, and we know about the sting. We also marvel at the organization of the bee, how bees communicate over long distances, how their cells are beautiful and geometric, and how we need them to pollinate our flowers. And as flowers reach for the light, so do, we. We are all, it could be said, flower children, a word used here in the Sixties.
The word "be" itself is redolent of bee and we do know, life is bittersweet. It is in the cruel affairs of man that we bend, as a bough is bent, and we are then on our knees, beseeching explanations.
I am saying it's all connected, and the connective tissue that binds us to this terrible beyond unspeakable event, is They ARE us.
We are ONE. We need to affirm this wherever we go, and it's a deep truth, that is reiterated everywhere I go. I am seeing this.
So in going to the WALL this Passover, may it be to get answers to the deepest of questions about this. And I believe it's not over, when it's over.
Passover.