Address by Rabbi Marvin Hier
Community Memorial Solidarity Rally
For the Victims at Yeshivat Mercaz Harav

Young Israel of Century City

Everyone who has ever studied at a Yeshiva or Hebrew School has a special affection for the month of Adar, the month in which the joyous festival of Purim occurs.

In 1976 when we were on a Sabbatical to Israel we lived in that very neighborhood and celebrated Purim in the Yeshiva where the attack took place. Today my granddaughter attends a Yeshiva High School for girls nearby. She left from school at 6pm that day.

It was going to be an uplifting celebration for the students and their friends. But it never happened. Eight of the young men, most of them teenagers, would never sing the beautiful Hallel service chanted the next morning because the next day would be their funerals.

What is our world coming to? When will it wake up and say to the purveyors of hate, to those who teach children to dance in the streets when a school is attacked? When will world leaders say to them, you’re on the wrong side of morality and decency, the wrong side of history and we’re not going to cover up for your misdeeds anymore?

When will the UN stop the hypocrisy that it only takes a few hours to convene an emergency session if it’s about condemning Israel? But not once, despite decades of horrific terrorist attacks does the Council have the courage to rise up and in simple language say, we condemn the terrorism of Hamas, Hezballah, Islamic Jihad.

Why do we continuously give Islamic terrorism a free pass in the Middle East, focusing all our energy on a small country acting in self-defense, a country that pulled out of Gaza giving the Palestinians an historic opportunity of a lifetime to build a new society, to choose a different path, to spend their energy developing Gaza as an international tourist site. But instead, they bequeathed to the world Hamas and Kalid Meshal.

Just today some NGOs have charged Israel with creating the worst humanitarian crisis in Gaza causing shortages of basic necessities. But whose fault is that – Hamas never has any shortage of money to smuggle in weapons and no shortage in lobbing rockets at innocent civilians in Sderot. Whatever crisis there is in Gaza is because they made the wrong decisions and chose the wrong leaders.

We keep on reading in the media about how frustrated Palestinians are, about how their backs are to the wall. For thousands of years Jews were the targets of oppression, Pogroms, Crusades, Inquisitions and the Holocaust. But we pulled ourselves up by the bootstraps, rebuilt our lives, worked hard and never taught our sons and daughters to go out and murder students in schools, bomb innocent people in restaurants and buses, and have the chutzpah to assure them that these acts are their entry tickets into Paradise, as VIPs at G_d’s table. What a perversion of religion.

That is why we urged Secretary General Ban that the time has come to convene a special session of the General Assembly to deal with suicide terror just as the UN has held special sessions on Apartheid, on Aids, on Global Warming, because if we don’t act decisively these Islamic terrorist will bring about the destruction of all civilization.

Our hearts go out to the parents and grandparents, to the brothers and sisters. There are no words that could comfort them. Nothing that can ease their pain.

But to those apostles of inhumanity and their supporters, you have callously plucked the finest fruits from our tree of life. But you should know that this tree will never die. It will always replenish itself with generations of young men and women who will carry on, who despite everything will show a reverence for life over death, for compassion over hatred, and for freedom over tyranny.

Like some Jews in the Kovno Ghetto whom the Nazis forced to sing on their way to extermination, one Jew began singing a tune, with the others joining in, to the words “Mir velen zey iberlebin” We shall outlive them.

We say to you, the terrorists, like Hitler and Stalin before you, you will be deposited in the dust bins of history, while the Jewish people and the State of Israel live on and thrive. “Mir velen zey alla iberlebin” We shall outlive them all.