• Soumya Santosh, 32, a caregiver from India.
• Nella Gurevitz, 52, of Ashkelon.
• Leah Yom Tov, 63, of Rishon Lezion.
• Ilana Cohen, 67, of Rishon Lezion.
• Khalil Awad, 52, an Arab resident of a village near Lod, and his daughter Nadin Awad, 16.
• Omer Tabib, 21, an IDF soldier from Moshav Elyakim.
• Ido Abigail, 5, of Sderot
• Miriam Arie, 87, of Moshav Shtulim
• Orly Liron, 52, of Moshav Netaim
• Gershon Franco, 55, of Ramat Gan
• Weerawat Krunboorirak, 44, and Sikharin Sangamram, 24, farm workers from Thailand
Yigal Yehoshua, 56, a Jewish man critically wounded when Arab rioters hurled a brick at him as violent protests swept the central Israeli
city of Lod, succumbed to his wounds on May 17. Arab rioting broke out in the city on May 12 after an Arab man, Mousa Hassouna, was shot by Jewish residents. “Yigal was a paragon of coexistence,” his wife, Irena, told Channel 12., before his kidney was donated to a 58-year-old Christian Arab woman. Tensions between Jews and Arabs flared up in several “mixed cities,” including Jaffa, where a 19-year-old soldier, Leon Shranin, was seriously wounded after being beaten by an Arab mob, and Bat Yam, where Saeed Mousa, an Arab father of four from Ramle, was beaten by a Jewish mob. In response, dozens of demonstrations were held across the country in support of Arab-Jewish coexistence.
Jewish Agency Chairman Isaac Herzog and Israel Prize-winning educator Miriam Peretz will compete to be Israel’s 11th president on June 2, when members of Knesset vote in a secret ballot. President Reuven Rivlin’s seven-year term ends on July 9. Herzog, who received signatures from 27 MKs by the May 19 midnight deadline, hopes to follow in the footsteps of his late father, Chaim Herzog, who was Israel’s sixth president. “The next president of the State of Israel will need to heal the rifts among us,” Herzog said. Peretz, who received the backing of 11 MKs, said, “It is at this time when our country is torn and divided that we need unity.”
SWIMMING HISTORY
Israeli swimmer Anastasia Gorbenko, 17, won a gold medal at the European Championships in Budapest on May 22. Gorbenko came in first in the 200-meter individual medley, with a time of 2:09.99 to earn the first gold ever for an Israeli woman in the European Championships. Gorbenko is set to compete in the Tokyo Olympics this summer.
Two people, Binyamin Rubinstein, 23, and Meir Globerman, 13, were killed and dozens injured when a grandstand at a new hassidic synagogue in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Givat Ze’ev collapsed during Shavuot festivities on the night of May 16. Footage of the tragedy at the new premises of the Karlin-Stolin community showed hundreds of hassidim falling as the top rows of the bleachers collapsed as some 600 worshipers celebrated the induction of the new synagogue together with the grand rabbi of the Karlin-Stolin hassidic community, Rabbi Baruch Meir Yaakov Shochet. City officials had warned that the synagogue could not hold large numbers of worshipers and had not received approval from the Jerusalem Municipality.
