Texas Jewish Post (Fort Worth, Tex.), Vol. 65, No. 14, Ed. 1 Thursday, April 7, 2011 Page: 3 of 32
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TEXAS JEWISH POST #SINCE 1947
IN FOCUS
April 7, 2011 I 3
TWin peaks: Itamar's mayor
knows the blessing and curse
By Jonathan Mark
NEW YORK (N.Y. Jewish Week) —
From the highest elevation in Ita-
mar you can see everything but the
future. On a clear day, says Rabbi
Moshe Goldsmith, Itamar's mayor,
"We can see the three seas": the
Dead Sea, the Mediterranean and
the Kinneret (Galilee). To the west,
"We can see Gerezim and Ebal," the
twin mountains linked in the Bible
to "the Blessing and the Curse," but
untrained eyes can't tell one from
the other.
To be the mayor of Itamar is to
be the mayor of a yishuv, a settle-
ment of about 160 homes deep in
the rocky Samarian highlands,
where more Jews have died from
Palestinian bullets, knives and
bombs than have died of old age: 22
murdered Jews in the last 10 years,
including five members of the Fogel
family on March 11.
Three weeks ago, Goldsmith was
in shul on a Thursday night, study-
ing Gemara, when he looked to his
right and saw his friend, Rav Udi, a
teacher in the local hesder yeshiva.
Rav Udi had some 24 hours left to
live.
"I turned to look at him, twice,
three times," says Goldsmith. "He
had a white light radiating from
him; I couldn't figure out what it
was. I couldn't know it then, but his
soul was already so connected to
the Upper World."
Now, in the United States, the
mayor can't see Israel's seas and
hills, but he sees the Fogels before
him always. He sees the Fogels as
he drives the long miles from Long
Island, where the mayor explained
Itamar to Rep. Carolyn McCarthy,
driving along to New Jersey's Route
4, where he explains Itamar and
that nightmarish Friday night to
the Ma'ayanot Yeshiva High School
for Girls in Teaneck and the eighth-
graders of the Moriah School in
Englewood. The mayor, his long
tzitzit visible below his black suit
jacket, has been going from morn-
ing to night, from one school and
shul and living room to another.
"The young people in America,"
says Goldsmith, "they need to see
that we're not giving up, that we'll
still be building the land." He's
hoping that others, in the shuls he's
visiting, will help Itamar with more
and better security cameras.
He's in America to talk about the
Fogels, but he'd rather not tell all
that he saw in those bloody rooms.
He was one of the first responders,
but soon left it to others.
"I didn't want to look at children
slaughtered in their beds," says
Goldsmith. Gun in hand, "I started
checking each house [in the town],
each room, in case the terrorists
were still in Itamar."
When dawn broke that Shabbat
morning, Goldsmith went to shul
and while davening, "I broke down
crying. I couldn't control my tears
and pain. I said to God, 'I really
would like an answer.' At that mo-
ment a verse came to mind. Moshe
Rabbeinu asked to see the presence
of God, and God tells him, 'No one
can see me and live.'
"I realized," said the mayor, "His
ways are hidden to us. Yet there's
the chai in that sentence, 'and live.'
Right now we're going to live and
build and strengthen. One day we'll
have answers."
It wasn't supposed to be like
this in 1985 when Moshe and Leah
Goldsmith, sweethearts since sev-
enth grade in Brooklyn's Rambam
Yeshiva, made aliyah. They spent a
Shabbat with friends in the then-
new settlement of Itamar and "it
felt like a blessing," like home.
A settlement? The mayor pre-
fers to call it "a town." He knows its
more than 1,000 residents and vis-
iting students; its programs for the
learning and physically disabled; its
farms with their chickens and sheep;
its yogurt and cheese factory; the
small perfume factory; the stained
glass workshop; the hothouses for
the vegetables. This was his town.
He explains to anyone who will
listen that the demonized settlers
are not demons; they're not even
settlers. To Goldsmith they are
Jews, as indigenous to the West
Bank as Aborigines are to Australia
or the Sioux to the Great Plains.
His wife, Leah, tells the girls in
Ma'ayanot, "You know what we see
from our living room window? The
parashah," the weekly Torah read-
ing. There in the hills and valleys is
where Abraham and Sarah walked.
Down the road, Joseph is buried.
Over there, in the village of Awarta,
are the tombs of the 70 Elders from
the time of Joshua and the tombs of
Aaron's sons, Elazar and Itamar, for
whom the settlement is named.
There, in Awarta, visible from
Itamar, is where the Israel Defense
Forces has been focusing the hunt
for the Fogels' killers. The hunt has
expanded to another nearby vil-
lage, Hawara, where as many as 40
Palestinians were fingerprinted and
given DNA tests by the IDF. Some
are still in custody, including Ha-
wara's deputy mayor and two of his
brothers, according to the Palestin-
ian news service Ma'an.
For months, according to Gold-
smith, Palestinians had been casing
Itamar, testing the security fence,
looking for blind spots, teasing
with Molotov cocktails thrown
over the barbed wires, daring to
steal sheep, staring with telescopes
and binoculars.
It gnaws at Goldsmith that the
Palestinians in these villages, per-
haps even the killers themselves,
have been able to build homes while
Itamar was subject to a freeze on
building and "all natural growth"
as the result of American pressure.
"I'm not a prophet," says Gold-
smith, "but I see a lot of trouble for
Israel and for the world. Itamar rep-
resents the state of Israel. The fact
that we're being targeted, that so
Photo: Courtesy of ZAKA
ZAKA volunteer holds a body bag containing one of the victims of the terror at-
tack in the West Bank settlement of Itamar, March 11, Itamar Mayor Rabbi Moshe
Goldsmith was one of the first responders to the attack.
many people have been murdered
in Itamar, reflects Itamar's holiness.
That evil feels the need to attack It-
amar shows that there is something
good in Itamar. All we want is to
live a life of peace and tranquility in
the land of Israel."
Instead, people are saying,
"Promise me you'll lock your doors.
Promise me you'll carry a gun."
Everyone is brave after an at-
tack. Years later, fears are confessed.
Goldsmith's son, Joseph, told his
father after the Fogels were killed,
"Abba, I was worried about you"
back in 2002.
That was some stretch, in 2002,
when Goldsmith went to the fu-
nerals of nine Jews from Itamar in
three weeks, including burying a
mother, Rachel Shabo, and her four
children — like the Fogels, killed
by a terrorist in their home.
Over the years, the mayor says
he's gotten a lot of help and sym-
pathy from American Christian
Zionists.
"They come to visit Itamar,"
he says. "We appreciate it greatly.
We're fighting a war."
Many in Itamar don't believe
Itamar will be given to the Palestin-
ians in the end. And they don't say
"give back" but "give away" because
they believe the land isn't Palestin-
ian but was Jewish in the first place.
As one Itamar resident said in a vid-
eo shown by Goldsmith to the high
school girls, "You don't give away
your mother. You don't give away
the land of your forefathers."
Goldsmith showed the students
a slide show: "Here," he says, show-
ing a basket of laundry on the Fo-
gels' porch, "the last laundry the
mother did before she was mur-
dered."
If laundry could ever break your
heart, that was it.
"We don't want anyone to feel
sorry for us," Goldsmith tells the
students. "Itamar is a strong place.
Nothing is going to break our spir-
it."
He adds later, "No one knows
what tomorrow will bring for [any]
of us."
Just one thing, Goldsmith asks
the students: "Speak up for Israel.
Speak up for Itamar."
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IT] Community Spotlight
LUErmm _~r—.. ■;—
For the past two years, a selfless group of individuals has met repeatedly to shape the celebration
of Rabbi William Gershon's 13th anniversary as Shearith Israel's spiritual leader and the synagogue's
rich 125+ year history. Sandy and Howard Donsky, Stefani and Gary Eisenstat, Marcy and Lew Lefko
and Jill and Jeff Rasansky used the support of fourteen sub-committees and hundreds of volunteers
with spectacular results. Highlights will include Friday night Kabbalat Shabbat Unplugged, and Shab-
bat morning service honoring Rabbi Gershon. Sunday will be a day of fun-filled day with games for
children, an archives exhibit, picnic and Craig Taubman concert for all. Yasher Koach for making this
weekend a wonderful moment in history for the Shearith Israel community!
120 on the button! Hope your family is coming to the concert!
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Wisch-Ray, Sharon. Texas Jewish Post (Fort Worth, Tex.), Vol. 65, No. 14, Ed. 1 Thursday, April 7, 2011, newspaper, April 7, 2011; Fort Worth, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth188339/m1/3/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .