Yakuta Madar immigrated to Israel with her six children after she was widowed, and paid an unbearable price in Israel. • Two of the children - Judith and David - were among the 22 students murdered in Maalot, and her son was killed in the first Tzur disaster in Lebanon. To relieve the mother

At the end of a plot of grade children in Safed's cemetery stands one grave different from the other 22 beside it. On the tombstone, which distinguishes it from the rest of the children's graves murdered by terrorists who invaded Lebanon in 1974, lies the "pillow" identified with IDF victims.

20 years have passed since the IDF's withdrawal from Lebanon, and behind the last void in this section of children stands the story of the event that later became one of the symbols of 18 years of fighting in the Land of the Cedars. A war began in Operation Galilee, aimed at stopping the massive Katyusha shooting and stopping the murderous terrorist incursions From Lebanon to Israeli territory.

"We asked the army for life to be buried here, alongside his brother David and his sister Judith who were killed eight years before. They told us that it is not customary to bury the IDF outside the military section, but we explained that this mother, our mother, comes here every day to visit her two children. ", Explains Menachem Madar (67), the brother of David and Judith who were killed in the Maalot disaster, and of a life killed in the first Tzur disaster. 

"The military plot is uphill, and this plot is at the foot of it, and many times it would come down here every day from home on foot," Menachem adds, "We explained to them that it would be very difficult for her if she had to reach two separate plots every day, so far away. That and finally agreed to bury it here, next to them. "

Yakuta Madar (92) immigrated from Tunisia with her six children in 1964, two years after being widowed by her husband Sassi. The late Chaim, her eldest son, served for 20 years as a father figure to his brothers and younger sisters. But ten years before he fell, Yakuta paid the heaviest bereavement price among the people of Safed, in one of the most traumatic terrorist attacks. 

David jumped out the window - and was shot

In May 1974, David (15) and Judith (17) went on an annual trip with their friends from the State Religious School in Safed. During the trip in the Western Galilee, the students were supposed to stay overnight, but due to the warning of terrorist incursions, the security forces were required to copy the accommodation to a closed and covered site. 

On the night between May 14 and 15, as the students slept in the Meir Nahav school in Maalot, the three terrorists who entered Lebanon began their murder campaign. At 20:30, they fired at a workers' van at the intersection of Hosen and murdered one of them, and by 3:30 in the morning they had already knocked on the Cohen family's door, in fluent Hebrew, asking to open, claiming they were police searching for terrorists.

Zafina Cohen, who opened the door, was murdered immediately, followed by her 4-year-old son and husband Joseph, who was later found with a taurus rod with which he apparently tried to fight the terrorists.

From there, the murderers proceeded to the nearby Meir Path school to wait for the students, who thought they would arrive at eight in the morning, and take them hostage. But the 105 students, teachers and lenders were already there, and from 4:30 in the morning and for about 13 hours, they were held hostage when the terrorists demanded that the government release 20 of their members imprisoned in Israel. At 17:15, IDF fighters broke into the building, but the rescue operation became complicated and became a massacre during which 22 students were murdered, including David and Judith.

"I was in sixth grade," recalls Yinon Medar, 58, the youngest brother, "before leaving school I heard in the news that terrorists had taken over a school and taken students hostage, but I did not link it to Judith and David's trip. I hear shouts from the homes of the student families who were on the trip.

Only then did I realize that it was really ours. The police and the army have started coming, and I have had a blackout since. The rumors started. At first, they said that Judith was killed and David was injured because he guarded her. And I walk around like a sleepwalk. Just hear echoes and shouts, as if in the distance. "

His sister, Esther Amar, 72, continues: "My older brother, Haim, served at the Border Base at Nabi Yoshua Citadel. He went to Ma'alot to see if anything could be done and was there all day. We didn't talk too much about it. Maybe he Just two weeks earlier, I gave birth to a baby girl. At night, I felt I couldn't do any more, I told my husband 'Take the girl' and went down to my grandmother's house, where the whole family concentrated. Until then, we only knew about Judith, but on the way I saw life coming back. When he swings and barely manages to stand in. Straight I realized. 

"In retrospect, it turned out that it took a long time to identify David's body, because he was wearing an IDF uniform and thought he was a soldier and not a student. For years I didn't want to know what happened there, only recently did I open up and listen to the stories. The friends said that Judith was not hurt by the shooting and grenades but collapsed and died after seeing her best friends without a spirit of life around her. They said David didn't want to run away and leave Judith alone. Only when he saw that she was lying on the floor and not moving, he jumped out the window, but then the terrorists shot him in the back of the neck and he was also killed. "

"This is, let's go meat to mom"

"At the Safed police station, the hustle was crazy. All the time, reports and rumors about what was happening on the ground," Brother Menachem recalls, "Judith was the first to report being killed. I returned home on foot, all wanted. Only when I arrived burst into tears. It was only about Judith, about David did not know yet, I went back to the police and only reported around 23:30 to 23:00 that David was also killed.Mama only knew about him at a funeral the next morning.We did not tell her that the news of David also arrived that way very late at night, and we wanted you to digest first The first disaster. "

Since that bitter day, the mother has been sitting daily in the cemetery and perched on the graves of her late son and daughter. Eight and a half years passed from disaster until another catastrophe knocked on its door: Her firstborn son was killed in the first Tzur disaster, which occurred at the beginning of the First Lebanon War. On Thursday morning, November 11, 1982, the military government building collapsed in Tire. An IDF inquiry has determined that the cause was a gas leak that caused the explosion; another version, also based on evidence of several injured, says a car bomb raced quickly into the building's shaft and exploded. 

Either way, 91 people were killed in the disaster, 34 of them border police including Haim, who was 36 at the time of his death and left a wife and three children 5, 3 and one year old. 

"A good friend of life from the unit asked him to replace him for the weekend because he had a close family wedding," says Esther Amar, Haim's sister. "My brother said he just had to let his wife know, but the weather was stormy and all lines collapsed that day. "But exactly when he called her there was a line, and she answered and ran."

"The same friend left for a few minutes before the building collapsed, but exactly a year later, in November 1983, a second Tzur disaster was killed. We didn't know there was life in Lebanon. We were told that the unit was told not to come in, but he insisted. "Two of your brothers have already been killed." In addition, we learned in retrospect that he would even go into searches of homes of wanted or suspected terrorist activists. Everyone thought he wanted to avenge the murder of his brothers in the Maalot disaster. " 

Menachem: "I knew that a servant at Border Police base in Nabi Yehoshua, but even though we saw a lot and we all lived within a 500m radius of each other, he never told me he was serving in Lebanon and went in there early in the war. On the day the disaster happened, around 9pm, Yaffe (Haim's wife) called me and told me that he was there in a building that had collapsed in Tire and was going to the police station.

"I went there, and there was a group of officers in the room. The most prominent of these was Itzik Aharonovich (later Minister of Public Security) who was Haim's commander. It was only around seven in the morning that he came out of the room and told me, 'Menachem, this is it. Let's go to Mama.' In his jeep we met her halfway. She returned from the cemetery. Itzik got out of the car and even before he spoke he realized she already knew. She walked, knocked on herself and sobbed. He accompanied her to the house. "

"When exactly killed, I was released from the army, but throughout my childhood he was really a father to me and knew to soften my mother, because after Judith and David were killed, she didn't let me out of the house for anything," says Yinon, the younger brother. My mother wouldn't let me go on trips, not bike trips and play ball with friends, didn't let me join Bnei Akiva. When I was feeling hard, I turned to life and he would tell her, 'Mom, it's okay. Leave him alone.' "

War with God

Exactly 25 years after Haim was killed, the Mader family held another funeral, but this time there were tears of excitement and joy. After three years of bureaucratic proceedings and arrangements, the bones of the family's father, Sassi, from Tunisia were buried for burial in Safed's cemetery. His bones were buried in a second funeral ceremony held in 2007, just a few feet away from his three children, in a section reserved for parents who lost their children in a degree of disaster. 

"In the last few years, Mum told us she dreamed she saw Dad cut black bread into two halves, and told her, 'I took my half and left you half.' Today Dad, two brothers and one sister are buried underground, and we two brothers and one sister stayed here with Mom "Esther says," Mother survives all this bereavement thanks to her strong faith.

"Since David and Judith were killed, I started having children every year. At the time of the disaster, I had two daughters - a 3-year-old and a 2-week-old baby - and today I have eight children in total. I was constantly asked 'Are you pregnant again?' Can bring my brothers back, but I can fill my house with noise and joy and make sure I keep busy with childcare. "

Even today, many years after the bereavement that has befallen them time and time again, Menachem Vinon Madar continues to process the heavy loss they have experienced. "Since then, I have moved away from religion a little bit, and today I mostly keep the tradition," says Menachem. "The war between me and him (pointing to the sky) is not easy. I grew up in 'Hyder' all my life, but you say 'Kabinimt,' we came to the Holy Land to keep Our life as Jews, "and all of a sudden all of this is happening to you. You are not enough to recover, and then another blow comes and another. I am at war with him to this day. Like - how much this body can absorb and absorb. That too has its limits, I think."

Yanon testifies that he found the stability of his life precisely when he began working in Safed's cemetery some 20 years ago. "Working in the cemetery has helped me a lot in coping. We get proportions. Here we see funerals that are even happy, in the case of a deceased who has passed the age of 100 and left behind grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-grandchildren. On the other hand, you see babies who die.