On Purim night, I stood on the Mount of Olives and watched a father bury his three children. There were very few people. Just a father, the wind, the Jerusalem stone, and three small bodies wrapped in white.
Yaakov was 16. Avigail was 15. Sarah was 13.
On Sunday afternoon an Iranian missile struck a synagogue in Beit Shemesh and collapsed the bomb shelter beneath it. They and six others were killed. They had run there for safety.
I will not repeat what the father said. Some words belong only to the darkness in which they are spoken.
The Mount of Olives is stone and slope and silence. From that ridge you can see the Old City, the Temple Mount, the valley where the dead have waited for centuries. History is not an idea there. It is underfoot.
Afterward I walked the streets of Jerusalem for a long time, unable to go home. Somewhere along that walk, my mind returned to Washington.
A visit to the Holocaust Museum
Years ago, when I was 32, I stood in the Holocaust Museum on a grey, rain-soaked Friday afternoon. At the entrance they handed me a passport—a simple booklet bearing the name of a young man who had lived through that time. His story became my guide.
The journey began in an elevator shaped like a cattle truck. As the doors closed, I felt my breath tighten.
I am the child of refugees. My father escaped Germany; my mother fled Poland. My grandfather, my mother’s father, lost everything. His parents, his brothers, his sisters. All murdered. The family tree that once stretched across generations narrowed to a single fragile branch: my grandfather, his wife, their children, and now me.
I came to the gate of the Warsaw Ghetto. I read the story of Mordechai Anielewicz, leader of the uprising, who was my age then. And I wept. Not only for him, but for myself: for the unbearable knowledge that I would never stand inside a moment of history the way he had.
I believed that then. I believed that history belonged to those who were forced into its center, to those who had no distance from it and no escape from it. I believed that my place would be to remember, to carry, to stand outside the gate and bear witness.
I was wrong about the distance.
History does not remain behind glass.
It closes that distance in its own time.
Last night, on Purim night, I stood on the Mount of Olives while a father buried his three children. Persia was not a word in a scroll but a state at war with mine. The hatred that pursued my grandparents was not memory but missile. The shelter beneath the synagogue had become a grave.
To touch history is one thing. To have it lay its hands upon you is another.
In Washington, I could walk out into the afternoon. The gate stayed behind. The moment remained contained.
On the Mount of Olives, there was no containment. There was only a father speaking his children’s names into the wind, and a country listening for sirens even as it lowered three bodies into the earth.
I still believe it is a privilege to live in a time when history touches us. But privilege is not a gentle word. It carries weight. It carries consequence. It carries the knowledge that some of what is asked of us will not feel like meaning at all.
Today is Purim. We read the Book of Esther, the story of a decree cast from Persia and a question placed before a queen: “Who knows whether it was not for such a time as this that you came to the kingdom?”
The verse does not answer itself. It does not promise that the moment will be survived, or that the burden will be shared evenly. It simply asks.
I do not know why this is our hour. I do not know why that father stood above three small graves on Purim night. I do not know why history comes when it does.
I know only that it has come.
Yaakov.
Avigail.
Sarah.
May their memory be a blessing.
The writer is a businessman active in communal life in Israel and abroad and an oleh from England.