Following Crowds, The Funeral of the Three Murdered Teenagers

In my many decades, being of pension age I'm no youngster, I've learned that at times one must just go with the flow. There are many times we just find ourselves in places or opportunities unplanned.

I must admit that I don't make it a principle to go to funerals or shiva (condolence) calls when I'm not actually acquainted with the people. If anything my "principle" has been to avoid those public occasions. I've been to too many funerals of terror victims whom I actually knew and visited and helped at homes of the victims. Before the three teenage boys' bodies were discovered (davka by a civilian crew led by a Shiloh neighbor) I kept feeling haunted by the similarities of the photos the families Fraenkel, Sha'ar and Yifrach had given to the media to show of their sons hiking the Land to photos of Yonatan Eldar, Shmuel Yerushalmi and Avi Siton, HaYa"D. Those three teenagers were all from my neighborhood and all three had also been murdered by Arab terrorists, and the pictures were so familiar. All one needed to do was to Photoshop their faces, and you'd think they were the same exact boys, Eyal, Naftali and Gil-Ad, HaYa"D. Deja vu...

When I got my schedule for this week, I was surprised to have Tuesday off, since I had been working Tuesdays of late. I do work part-time and had given my boss a lot of leeway in scheduling me. I really didn't know what to do. It was too hot to try to visit a cousin in Tel Aviv; the Israel Museum isn't open Tuesday morning. And my daughter had asked me to babysit on Monday. So then when it was announced Monday night that the boys's bodies had been discovered, I began pondering the idea of going to the funeral. It was cinched when I got a message that there would be buses from Shiloh. We were to only attend the last part, the joint burial. That made sense, and was logistically the most sensible, also the safest, health-wise, for us to do. No doubt that most of the people who needed medical care had been to one of the earlier eulogy parts of the funerals in the various communities the boys were from. Our bus picked up people on the way who already looked close to collapse. They told us that they were coming from Talmon and their bus had broken down.

Since I'm not going to repeat/copy the article I posted on Shiloh Musings, please click here to read it. And of course I'm interested in your comments. Please share it, too, thanks.

Funeral of Eyal Yifrah, Gil-Ad Sha’ar and Naftali Fraenkel, HaYa"D