NAVAH in the News


'How is this night different? My son is no longer with me'

[Daily Edition]

Jerusalem Post - Jerusalem

Author:

MATTHEW WAGNER

Date:

Apr 12, 2006

Start Page:

01

Section:

News

(Copyright 2006 The Jerusalem Post)

"When a chair is empty on Pessah eve," says Yitzhak Boussidan, "it is tough to be at home." Boussidan is not referring to the chair traditionally left empty for the Prophet Elijah.

Palestinian terrorists killed Amit, Boussidan's son, while he was trying to evacuate a wounded fellow soldier from a Palestinian refugee camp near Jenin on April 9, 2002. Like every year since his son's death, this Pessah Boussidan will join others who would otherwise have one too many empty chairs at home.

Some 160 people will meet at the Etap Hotel near Kiryat Shmona for a Pessah Seder organized by NAVAH (Non- profit Association for Volunteering and Assisting the Hurt), a support group for terror victims. The retelling of the Exodus narrative will mingle with other stories of pain, loss and survival.

Zion Buskila lost his son Eliran on June 5, 2002, in a terrorist bombing that killed 17 people near the Megiddo Junction. The attack was intended to coincide with the anniversary of the beginning of the Six Day War.

"The Torah says, 'And you shall tell your son on that day,'" says Buskila, quoting from the Haggada. "But my son is no longer with me. The Seder is a constant reminder of that."

For Boussidan, the most painful part of the Haggada is the Four Questions.

"How does this night differ from all other nights?" asks Boussidian rhetorically. "My son is no longer with me."

Tehilla Friedman, who founded NAVAH with her husband in 2001, felt the best way to help those affected by terrorism - bereaved families and those wounded in terrorist attacks - would be to bring them together. Despite the group's success, however, this was the first year the group has not been able to meet expenses, she says.

"There is no need for psychologists," says Friedman. "Our guests raise each others' spirits."

Boussidan says of the night's significance, "Each of us lost a part of ourselves. A foot. An eye. A son. But no matter what they try to destroy, they cannot destroy our souls," she says.

 

Apr. 30, 2005 0:01  | Updated Apr. 30, 2005 15:03
Passover of pain
By JEREMY WIMPFHEIMER

Despite the Pessah holiday music playing in the background, the sorrow was palpable among the 150 people united by their losses in terrorist attacks over the past five years.

The Sunday evening program held at the Jerusalem Tower Hotel brought to a close a weekend Pessah getaway organized by NAVAH (Nonprofit Association for Volunteering and Assisting the Hurt), an organization which acts as a support group for victims of terror and their families.

They came from all over Israel. Most of them had never met each other before their personal tragedies, yet they all said that they were united now by a sense of loss and pain.

Said Yael Boussidan, who lost her brother when he fell alongside 12 of his IDF comrades in an ambush in Jenin in April 2002, "On the outside we carry on smiling, laughing and dancing, but we know that we will never again be able to feel that same degree of happiness."

They have formed a community, dependent on one another. Her bleary eyes masked by dark sunglasses, her voice quavering, Silla Naveypour of Netanya, whose son was killed in an attack at the Megiddo Junction in June 2002, said that this group of people had become the only real family she had.

Repeatedly stressing how difficult her days have become since the attack, Naveypour said, "I truthfully don't know how I'll be able to continue when I return home tomorrow."

NAVAH, founded by Yitzchak and Tehilla Friedman in 2001, has become known among families of terror victims for the emotional and social support it offers, in addition to financial and material assistance. This is the second consecutive year that NAVAH has hosted the Pessah program and the organization holds social events on a regular basis around the year. Additionally, NAVAH operates a telephone hot line which provides these victims of terror with an outlet to voice their emotions and speak with others who have shared their tragic experiences.

The organization began as a private effort of bringing gift baskets to hospitals after terror attacks and slowly developed into a fully operational nonprofit. Tehilla says there is no substitute for the social network that exists among these families, "Events like these allow the families to face others who suffered similar traumas and to strengthen one another."

Dalia Flistian lost her parents in the Park Hotel bombing on the evening of the Seder exactly three years ago. Flistian described NAVAH as the only real familial network she now has.

"Friends and even extended family members simply cannot understand what we continue to go through. What NAVAH can provide is spiritual assistance without which I simply wouldn't be able to cope celebrating the holiday with any degree of normalcy," she said.

"Pessah is undoubtedly the most family oriented of the holidays," acknowledged Nissan Raziel of Hadera whose son Dotan was killed at age 21 also in the bombing at the Megiddo Junction. "To be at home, with all the memories of the Seder where we used to sit and talk, having to face Dotan's empty chair would simply have been far too difficult. We share an intimate connection with these other families and we now truly see ourselves as one large family."

For Shiri Shefi, accompanied by her husband, two sons and an infant daughter, spending time with families who share her grief has been one of the factors which have sustained her. The Shefi family lost their five-year-old daughter Danielle in April 2002 when a Palestinian gunman entered their home in Moshav Adora, headed towards the children's bedroom and began firing.

A bullet grazed their son's head and he was seriously wounded, but has recovered. The scar is still very obvious, even as he danced and played his drums around the dance floor.

The Shefis, who have moved several times over the last three years in an attempt to escape the bitter memories, say that being with NAVAH for Pessah "fills our hearts so that we are able to continue."

All in attendance pleaded for the world not to forget the plight of these families. As Mordechai Lacham of Haifa tightly clutched a photo of his son Eli, a 21 year old elite combat soldier who was killed in the Megiddo attack, he urged people to realize that nothing will ever reverse what has already been lost.

"Even if the numbers of attacks are reduced, you must not forget the hundreds of people like us who have already been hurt. These are people who have been damaged for the rest of their lives and the world needs to recognize that this pain continues regardless of what is going on in the outside world."

As the families prepared to return to their regular routines, Yael Boussidan said that for this unique community, Pessah is one of the most difficult of all holidays.

"While Jews all over the world are celebrating being taken out of slavery, for our families this time of year is a reminder that we have become slaves to sorrow, pain and tears. When we reach that point in the Seder when we read about going out from bondage and freedom, we don't feel so free."

For further information: www.navah.org.il

 

 

Leavening the Pain
A Support Group Helps Israeli Survivors of Attacks Venture Back Into the World

By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, April 8, 2004; Page C01

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59805-2004Apr7.html

JERUSALEM

They came with broken bodies and broken hearts, survivors of bullets, suicide bombers and car bombs.

Ex-farmer Tzion Moshe raised his shirt to show a belly that looked like lumps of kneaded dough after eight operations to put his insides back together.

Two-year-old Shira Cohen's skin was purple where it stretched over the shards of metal embedded in baby cheeks.

Former secretary Pera Baruch's carefully manicured fingers shook so severely she could barely hold a glass of iced tea.

In a week that is supposed to be one of the most joyous on the Jewish calendar, 80 Israelis -- all victims of attacks that have spanned the past 31/2 years of conflict -- gathered Tuesday to share Passover celebrations at a Jerusalem hotel, courtesy of a support group called NAVAH (Nonprofit Association for Volunteering and Assisting the Hurt).

They sang boisterously at the Passover Seder table, laughed through a clown performance or chatted quietly at lobby cafe tables. But in rooms filled with the physically scarred and psychologically fragile, the invisible wounds surfaced repeatedly as survivors struggled to reconcile the normalcy and traditions of the holiday season with the abnormal lives they have come to face.

"We heard about terrorist attacks, but we didn't know what it was like for the families until it happened to us," said Tziona Moshe, 50, whose husband, Tzion, was shot in the back three times by Palestinian gunmen who opened fire on a polling station in the northern Israeli town of Beit Shean in November 2002.

Six people died in that attack.

"Sometimes it's better to be dead than alive and wounded," interjected 50-year-old Tzion, a small man with birdlike eyes and bristly gray hair who once tended cucumbers, tomatoes and onions in the Bet Yusef agricultural community where he lives in northern Israel. "I went to vote and I got three bullets for no reason. I used to be an independent guy, I worked by myself. Now, I sit at home and I'm in pain all the time."

"To see him in this state is very hard," said his wife, nodding toward her husband, who sat on a bench, an uncomfortable spectator in a lobby echoing with animated discussions.

"This is only the second time I've left the house, except to see doctors," said Tzion. He said he spent eight months in the hospital undergoing repairs to a leg that is paralyzed and to intestines and other organs that have yet to heal.

It was survivors such as Moshe whom NAVAH organizers recruited to join the Passover celebration in hopes of helping them reengage their lives.

"We had to push," said Yitzhak Friedman, 30, who helped found the organization two years ago with his wife, Tehila, 29, to dispense food baskets, financial assistance and, most important, companionship and emotional support to families of those killed or injured in attacks. "Some didn't want to come."

Adding to the challenge, the group held the three-day retreat that ended Wednesday at a hotel in an Arab neighborhood of eastern Jerusalem, where Palestinian waiters served the Passover meal. It was also the second anniversary of the most infamous of Israel's suicide bombings -- the 2002 Passover attack at the Park Hotel in Netanya that killed 30 people at a Seder meal, the highest death toll of any attack against Israelis during the conflict. "They came together here anyway and were able to step back into society," said Friedman, a New York native.

He noted that the organization had coordinated extra police security at the building entrance to help calm jittery participants.

Pera Baruch, a 38-year-old single mother who was hit by shrapnel in a car bombing in 2001, sat at a lobby table. With a tousled mane of brown curls and fire-engine-red lipstick, she smiled cheerfully with no outward signs of an ailment.

"I was only lightly injured," she offered. But within weeks, she was hit by the aftershock. She became so tired she could barely get out of bed. She lost her short-term memory and her ability to read. She began to stutter and lost all feeling in her chin and jaw. Nearly three years later, the symptoms remain.

Without warning, tears spilled over her black eyeliner.

"The worst part is the court took my son away because I couldn't take care of him," she said between sniffles. She said the 6-year-old was sent to a foster home and is allowed to visit her once every two weeks.

"It was hard to see the other children here when my child is not here," she said, holding a tissue to her eyes to dab tears and to avert her gaze from a small flock of youngsters in new Passover dresses and suits as they pattered past her table.

That flock belonged to Ora Cohen, a stern-faced Iranian native who had gone with her husband and five children to the Western Wall in Jerusalem's Old City to celebrate the couple's ninth wedding anniversary Aug. 19 and "to give God thanks for five healthy kids."

On the way home, a suicide bomber detonated his explosives inside their bus.

"All five of my kids were injured," she said, as were she and her husband. "They found my baby buried under three bodies."

Shira Cohen, looking older than her 2 years, wears wire-rimmed glasses over an eye she may still lose. Her face is scarred and lumpy; tiny pieces of metal fragments from the bomb remain beneath the surface of the skin. The mother grabbed her 7-year-old daughter. "Here, feel behind her neck."

Under the pale white skin is a hunk of metal.

"All of my kids are still in treatment," she said. "I need surgery in one ear, but I don't have time to do it. We spend all our time going to doctors. The kids are hyperactive; they're scared of every little thing."

But for a few hours Tuesday night, Shira, wearing a burgundy velvet dress, danced and laughed with her brothers and sisters as the broken and brokenhearted momentarily forgot their wounds.

Dalia Plastian-Karim, enjoys a song with Orit, Aviva and Oshra Ballas at a Passover celebration in Jerusalem for survivors of Palestinian attacks.