israel & gaza
> mideast Rage and resilience in Kiryat Malachi in face of rocket fire from Gaza young Sephardic men in T-shirts and jeans. Elderly religious women wearing headscarves walk alongside secular kiryat malachi, israel | They pick Russian immigrants. through the tangled foliage, Orthodox Shteiner calls Kiryat Malachi “one big men with long beards and black kippot, neighborhood.” More than 100 resiwearing white gloves and bright yellow dents pack a small, exposed building to vests, searching for body parts. mourn 24-year-old Itzik Amsalem, a A few yards over and four stories up, newly religious yeshiva student. construction workers drive drills into a Men sob on each other’s shoulders in bombed apartment building. They a tight embrace. A woman walks arm in speak to each other in Arabic. Can they arm with a girl, lamenting the “hit after read the Hebrew banner hanging one hit, hit after hit,” that southern Israel has floor above them vowing to exact a absorbed in the days and years before price for Jewish blood? Or the sign on that Friday afternoon. the other side of the building calling on The weeping continues while a Israel to conquer Gaza? Chabad rabbi, Yaakov Shvika, eulogizes It is noon on Nov. 16, a little more Amsalem, calling his death, “a great than 24 hours after the apartments on wound, an incredible wound.” the top floor had taken a direct hit from Minutes after Kiryat Malachi’s mayor, one of Hamas’ Grad missiles, killing Moti Malka, takes the podium, another three people. siren blares. Mourners scramble in the Operation Pillar of Defense started crowded building. Most take cover once with the killing of the senior military photo/jta-flash90-yossi zeliger more under the roof and against its only commander of Hamas and has targeted A volunteer goes through a wrecked apartment in Kiryat Malachi where walls. the terrorist group’s governing infra- three people were killed last week by a rocket from Gaza. The chaos only grows after the rocket structure and left more than 100 Palestinians dead. It aims to stop the rocket the next tree, inside clothes that are hang- Unlike Shteiner, Zackles wears the tradi- from Gaza explodes in the distance. After tional Chabad uniform — a black wide- the siren, the sadness turns to rage. fire raining down on Israel from Gaza. Last ing from burnt branches. “They go all over the place,” Shteiner brimmed hat and matching suit. “Disengagement criminals!” scream the week, those rockets reached the outskirts of says. “I feel bad, but this is what you have to The tefillin serves, he says, as a spiritual men who had been crying, turning their Tel Aviv and Jerusalem for the first time. antidote to the raw physical tragedy — the curses against those who led Israel’s 2005 In Kiryat Malachi, the ill-fated building, do.” Kiryat Malachi’s deputy mayor, Shteiner, “expression of the Jewish people, a sym- withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, the solike others in the low-income Har Chabad neighborhood, contains aging apartments also is a member of the city’s haredi bol.” Now Chabad needs some and a peeling yellow exterior. Now its Orthodox Chabad-Lubavitch community, highest floors look like a scene out of founded about 30 years earlier to reach out outreach as well. Two of the 1980s Beirut: a bare skeleton of concrete to a growing population of Russian immi- three victims — Aharon Smadja and Mira Scharf — framing a gaping hole where people used grants here. As Shteiner picks through leaves, were Lubavitchers. Along to live. “Can you get a ladder?” yells Chaim 22-year-old Moshe Zackles stands next to a with her husband, Scharf Shteiner, one of the men in a yellow vest. small table on the building’s other side, had been a Chabad emisMaybe the remains of the dead are stuck in offering a pair of tefillin to passers-by. sary in New Delhi, India, where four years earlier to the day terrorists had killed the Chabad emissaries in Mumbai, Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg. Shteiner says he feels shaken but undeterred. photo/jta-flash90-miriam alster “This is holy work,” he Mourners attend the funeral of 27-year-old says. “We feel we are on a Mira Scharf, who was killed when a rocket mission. When you’re on a from Gaza hit an apartment building. mission, you get strength from the people who sent you and from called disengagement, into a chant. above.” Calls for silence add to the cacophony. Minutes later, a siren blares across the “Conquer the strip!” the men yell, neighborhood, growing louder as the sec- obscuring the rest of Malka’s eulogy for onds pass. Shteiner and his crew leap over Amsalem. a ledge and press their backs against the Quiet returns by the time Likud Party building’s rear wall, taking cover under an Knesset member Michael Eitan, a Cabinet overhang. After half a minute that feels like minister, addresses the crowd. But the 10, they hear the boom, nowhere near mood has not changed. them. Shteiner exhales. While Eitan declares that the terrorists “They don’t give us rest,” he says. The “want to rain fear on us, but they won’t crowd is already dispersing. The third vic- succeed,” the chants of the crowd and the tim’s funeral begins in 10 minutes. sound of the siren linger in the air. For the The slow procession to the cemetery roomful of mourners, the next rocket is brings together Lubavitchers in suits and not far away. ben sales
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