I know Passover is coming when Rosalyn, my wife, announces, on Purim, “No matzah until the Seder.”
Although I’ll miss my matzah pizza for 30 days, her announcement sets in motion another awareness, that of the approaching yahrzeit of our daughter Alisa, who was murdered in a terror attack five days before Passover in 1995.
Thirty years is a long time, but as anyone who has lost a child can tell you, a parent feels the child’s death as if it were yesterday.
I vividly recall the telephone call we received telling us that Alisa and her traveling companions had been victims of a bus bombing. I see myself flipping through the telephone book and calling, first, the Israeli Consulate in New York City (the line was busy) and then the US State Department, for information. I hear the voice of a State Department official telling me that Alisa had been located at Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba – and of two doctors there telling me to “come right away”; I see myself staring blankly at the video screen during my 10-hour flight to Israel. Once again, I am climbing into the back of an American Embassy SUV for the drive to Beersheba.
I am sitting by her bedside holding her hand and saying, “Alisa, everything will be all right, Daddy’s here.” I am again holding a cup of orange drink as the doctors explain that Alisa is dead from her head wound and then ask me to donate her organs.
I hear West Orange’s Rabbi Alvin Marcus’s voice as he looked at me on the morning of the funeral and stopped me from asking “Why?” by saying “Alisa died al kiddush Hashem (“sanctifying God’s name”), and that’s all you have to know.”
I see myself sitting in the synagogue an hour later and hearing my daughter Francine say, “Daddy, you have to speak, people have to cry.” And I hear myself doing just that.
Shiva was a blur. We sat for only a day and a half because a chag [Jewish holiday] overrides the week of mourning.
Our West Orange neighbors came to our home on Thursday night and proceeded to turn the house over to make it kosher for Passover for us. Down to the basement went the regular dishes, pots, pans, and baking equipment. Up came the boxes marked “Passover.” It was done in less than two hours.
I was extremely grateful for everyone’s help, but to this day I cannot find the little metal tray from the bottom of our ice bucket.
We disinvited some people from the first night’s Seder to make it a bit easier but did our best to read through the Haggadah and sing the songs. It’s hard to make Kiddush, though, when your mind keeps playing the sound of the first shovelful of dirt that hits your daughter’s coffin.
In the weeks that followed, I learned a lot about what grief can do to you. It can keep you up into the morning’s early hours; or, in my case, I drifted off into dreamless sleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.
Tears are the body’s relief from grief, and I shed plenty, sometimes as I drove, sometimes as I sat in my office, and sometimes as I stared out kitchen doors to the woods beyond.
For 25 years, I dreaded that month from Purim to Passover. I would keep the depression brought on by the pending yahrzeit hidden from those around me. I would lose my concentration and patience for people and events. But once the yahrzeit was over, I was back to “normal” (admittedly, a relative term).
The last five years have been emotionally quiet. There was no depression. I have no explanation for that, other than that I threw myself into writing weekly columns about Israel, terrorism, and other subjects that would pique my interest. I worked at what I do every day, and I gave people and situations a miss when necessary. Maybe things changed because Rosalyn and I made aliyah in March 2020.
Last December, I thought it would be a good idea to make the 30th yahrzeit something special. Nothing changes the Hebrew calendar, and I knew we’d have to deal, again, with the fact that the anniversary of Alisa’s death is still only five days before the Passover holiday, and I knew that my America-bound family would be unable to be with us in Jerusalem.
Honoring Alisa Flatow's 30th yahrzeit at the Nishmat campus
So I thought of another family that we could involve in our planning – the students at Nishmat, the Jeannie Schottenstein Center for Torah Study.
To attend Nishmat, Alisa had taken a leave of absence from Brandeis University beginning in December 1994. By all accounts, she was the same Alisa who started yeshiva in 1979, anxious to learn. But this was her sixth trip to Israel, so she was also eager to do other things.
During her brief time at Nishmat, Alisa would slip away from the campus to pray at the Western Wall and attend more than one ceremony for IDF recruits. And on a short trip to Israel in January 1995, the last time our family would all be together with her, she took me to the low ledge at the rear of the Kotel plaza where she liked to sit and watch the goings-on. That ledge is gone.
Importantly, Alisa was living in an apartment with several other women. She managed her bus rides, found a gym to join, and learned – on a trip to the shuk – that a chicken for Shabbat was more than cutlets; it had a neck, legs, and wings, and stuffed inside it was a paper packet with its heart and liver.
Nishmat’s faculty, staff, and students quickly prepared for a siyum mishnayot [celebration upon completion of a set of Mishna] for the yahrzeit, and we arranged a dinner at the Nishmat campus in the Alisa M. Flatow Building.
We were pleased that many of the faculty who knew Alisa 30 years ago were with us, and it was joyful to be able to invite other expats from West Orange. With our son Etan and our Sabra granddaughters with us, it was a night that I do not want to erase from my memory.
And now, in the midst of Passover this year, I can only feel gratitude to that young child who decided that she was going to a “Jewish school” for kindergarten. Alisa was the leader of all things religious in our family. And now, when one of the grandchildren comes up with a new humra (“religious stringency”), we laugh and say, “It’s Alisa’s fault.” But all is good.
Some have ascribed Alisa’s murder on a bus near Kfar Darom to being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I see it differently. Because Alisa was in the Land of Israel, studying the religion of Israel, and among the people of Israel when the end came, she was in the right place.
The writer is an attorney and father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is author of A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror and is president of the Religious Zionists of America-Mizrachi.
