Ezra Schwartz Z"L

Yesterday, after school and ballet and bath time.  After I had watched a live stream video of the funeral of Ezra Schwartz Z"L, the 18 year old boy from Sharon, MA who was murdered last Thursday by a Palestinian terrorist spewing bullets from an automatic weapon.  Ezra had been volunteering with Israeli soldiers, and was killed in an instant along with one other Jew and an Arab just standing on the side of the road.

I listened as the Rabbi, Ezra's father and mother and siblings, his grandparents and baseball coach and friends,  all talked about this boy who will not get the chance to become a man. This potential adult who has become a symbol for the growing cost of terror here in Israel and around the world.

I did not know him or his family, despite having attended the same high school as Ezra Schwartz in Boston (some odd 30 years ago).  But as an Israeli and a mother I feel the pain of the loss, and I cannot imagine (nor do I EVER want to imagine) how it feels for a parent to bury their child.

Ezra was apparently a mega sports fan and tonight, the New England Patriots will hold a moment of silence;  to remember a boy, a Jew, a brother and a son and a cousin, an innocent lost.

Good for them and shame on the ineffectual President Barack Hussein Obama.  A man who has insisted that he is "practically Jewish" and Israel's good friend;  a leader who decried the act of terror in Paris as a global call to arms. He has yet to personally acknowledge, in the international forum, that an American died on his watch.  Obama has yet to admit that terror is terror, and that the life of a Jew has the same value as the life of a Parisian, an African, a Syrian or a victim of the Beirut bombings, or the recent tragedy in Mali. The silence in the face of daily senseless death in the Middle East is deafening.

And just one day later, a 21 year old Israeli named Hadar Buchris was stabbed to death in the exact same location.  The New York Times reported "One Israel and three Palestinians killed in Attacks," thus equating the victim with her murderers.

Last night Raphaela wanted to sleep in bed with me and I did not refuse. I wanted to hold her close to me, to feel the warmth of her body, to watch her breathe and to play with her wisps of curly hair.

I needed to hold her tight.