‘Your grand finale, Evyatar’

31- year-old Evyatar Borovsky, stabbed to death in a terror attack, was the father of five and a stage actor remembered for always having a smile on his face.

By BEN HARTMAN
Evyatar Borovsky 370 (photo credit: Nir Elias/Reuters)
Evyatar Borovsky 370
(photo credit: Nir Elias/Reuters)
“This is your final show, your grand finale,” said the teary-eyed brother of terror victim Evyatar Borovsky on Tuesday as he eulogized the father of five who was stabbed to death by a Palestinian at the northern West Bank’s Tapuah Junction.
“Look at all the people who came to say goodbye to you, Evyatar,” his brother said, bursting into tears before the crowd of mourners at the Kfar Hassidim cemetery.
It was a dramatic end for the 31- year-old Borovsky, who had been a stage actor for several years. The setting – a tree-lined cemetery as the sun went down over a valley at Kfar Hassidim – brought a certain level of beauty to a day mixed with bitter anger and sadness for those who knew him.
People spoke of Borovsky as always having a smile on his face, always able to light up a room.
“I can’t believe I’m seeing you like this, not moving, [no] sign of life – it’s not you,” said his father, Baruch.
“Your greatest joy was when someone laughed at your jokes.”
Yosef, a neighbor of Borovsky’s, said of him, “I knew you for seven years, and there were only two times I saw you without a smile – one of these was today.”
Yosef described hearing about the stabbing attack at the Tapuah Junction and how, on seeing the picture of Borovsky released to the press, he found himself unable to recognize his friend and neighbor.
“I saw the picture, and I couldn’t tell it was you – you didn’t have that smile on your face,” he said.
Standing next to a row of buses waiting to take mourners back to Yitzhar and points beyond in the West Bank, Safed Chief Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu said he had known Borovsky well from the years the latter had studied at the city’s hesder yeshiva. During his time there, Borovsky started a men’s theater troupe, a move that met with serious skepticism from the rabbis at first, Eliyahu recalled.
“This is something that’s not accepted, not usually done,” he noted. “But he won us over, in a big way.”
Eliyahu said Borovsky had always been one of the main actors in the plays, beginning with his first – a Hanukka production that he, his friends and the theater troupe produced, using money out of their own pockets in addition to support from the yeshiva.
Like the other mourners, Eliyahu spoke of Borovsky as a man constantly possessing an inner joy that was often contagious.
“He always smiled and had this light about him,” the rabbi said. “It was like he was on some sort of mission.”