A hot summer afternoon

Malki

The letter below, dated August 9, 2024, was sent to supporters and friends of the Malki Foundation in English and Hebrew versions. It is written by Arnold Roth, Malki Foundation's honorary chair.

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Some of the most difficult moments in our lifetimes have acquired code names. I mean the sort of short-hand titles that help us bring momentous events into our conversations without addressing the significance of the date or its history.

With no sub-title, “9/11” means something deeply traumatic to most people. All on its own, “7/7” has a powerful resonance to the British and so does “3/3” for the people of Spain. For Israelis and Jews, mentioning “October 7” has required no additional words since 2023.

For my family and me, August 9 is like that.

On that date in 2001, a hot school-vacation afternoon, our lives were shattered in stages, a kind of slow-motion car accident that changed everything forever.

Initially, like all Israelis, we were stopped in our tracks by the devastating media bulletins suddenly emanating from the center of the nation’s capital about an explosion at a fast-food shop. Then the scenes of victims, mostly children, being treated by first-responders and loaded onto ambulances that screeched across Jerusalem en route to the hospitals.

Then at the more personal level, the realization among the members of my own family that no one had managed to reach our middle child, Malki, 15. Then the increasingly desperate search through the afternoon and evening hours to find her. Then the rush to the Hadassah hospital emergency room ten hours later because we heard she might be there getting urgent life-saving care. Then the phone call long after midnight, twelve hours after the massacre, from our sons who had located their sister at Abu Kabir, Israel’s national forensic medicine center in Tel Aviv, and the search was over.

We buried Malki in Jerusalem the following afternoon just before Shabbat arrived.

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For my family, one part of the process of getting our lives and the lives of our children back to stability was centered on how to remember Malki. As it turned out, one part of that was to connect her beautiful life to good things that would go on and on after Malki was taken from us.

Establishing something that looks like today’s Malki Foundation – Keren Malki – wasn’t part of our plan until then. We were already dealing with the reality of a child, our youngest, who was catastrophically disabled – not from birth but later and not all at once but in stages. But the way we saw it, the challenge of dealing with this was personal.

We certainly didn’t see it as a campaign. We never thought the stresses and tensions, our arguments with people in authority, the despair of being ignored and humiliated, were things that would affect, or even be noticed by, other people. Dealing with a very sick or very disabled child is after all not rare and rarely adds pleasure to families’ lives. How you handle it is a personal issue that comes without a roadmap. You make decisions as best you can. Sometimes this is done in ways that are consistent with your values. But sometimes not.

When we began to think about how we could make Malki’s memory live on, it made sense to us that some of the things we learned in the battle to get better care and a better life for our youngest child could turn into a project that might help other families facing similar challenges with their own children.

We knew from experience as parents that for many families, dealing with busy medical professionals can be maddeningly frustrating. That a child with life-impairing disabilities can seem to be just another part of an overworked day for the nurses, the therapists, the technicians and the doctors. But we also knew that, for the families, that child is a world. Malki, only fifteen years old when her life was already over, understood and did wonderful things that were illuminated by that understanding.

I could easily go into details. And there are times when I do. I want as many people as possible to understand what makes the Malki Foundation special. But not in this letter.

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As parents, my wife Frimet and I remember Malki’s life with love, longing and deep pain that doesn’t go away. But August 9 is not central to that. It’s the Jewish calendar and not the secular one that provides the context. The twentieth day of the month of Av is when we assemble beside the adjoining graves of our beloved Malki and her life-long friend Michal Raziel. It’s when we light memorial candles, say Kaddish, gather our children and their children around us, and mourn the lives that were extinguished in that grotesque, almost-incomprehensible manifestation of hatred-without-end.

The work of the Malki Foundation, like the life of the vivacious teenager whose name it carries, has no political dimension – absolutely none. It was brought into existence, and continues until today, to do good, constructive things. The goal is to ensure families who make the challenging decision to raise a child with disabilities in the family home are empowered to do that and are helped in practical ways to make their efforts as effective as possible. Those families come from literally every part of Israeli society.

But August 9 is the civil anniversary of the date when the Battle of Sbarro Pizzeria took place. I regularly write and speak (via the media) about it at a different level – a level in which politics has a large part.

I want people who know about the Malki Foundation and the very fine things it does to know that those other issues exist. They involve very harsh realities that continue to be part of my life and my wife’s. In particular, the reality that the terrorist who plotted the massacre is a woman who is alive and well, living free in Jordan today. She has spent years encouraging support for more terror of the kind that she herself inflicted on us 23 years ago. And she is America’s most wanted female fugitive.

Frimet and I write about that side of our lives regularly at a site called This Ongoing War. If you have questions about it or comments to share with us, we can be reached at thisongoingwar@gmail.com

So to be clear. The Malki Foundation doesn’t exist to advance a political agenda. Via the fine work done by its dedicated small staff and the volunteers whose invaluable inputs have been part of our story since the very first day, it exists to do one central thing – to enable people to remember Malki’s beautiful life.

Arnold Roth
Honorary Chair