‘The unspeakable anguish of Ezra’s family and friends must strengthen our resolve’

JERUSALEM — It was eerily quiet in the old Ben Gurion Airport building in Tel Aviv on Saturday night. Of the 500 people gathered, many were students spending the year after high school in Israel’s yeshivas, seminaries and assorted other programs. Others were former neighbors of the Schwartz family who made aliyah from the Boston suburb of Sharon, Mass., over the years — including this reporter.

The only sound heard was the slow singing of Ezra Schwartz’s friends, arms wrapped around each other. That was until Rabbi Seth Farber stepped up to the microphone. 

“We were brought up on the Zionist dream,” he said. “There is no young man or woman who is unscarred by what happened in the last 52 hours, but we cannot give up on the dream. The unspeakable anguish of Ezra’s family and friends must strengthen our resolve here.”

Days ago, Ezra Schwartz, age 18, was just another one of the tens of thousands who spend their “gap year” after high school here in Israel. Until he was shot and killed by a Palestinian terrorist. On Nov. 19, a carful of yeshiva students including Schwartz was stuck in traffic. The day’s agenda: dropping food to IDF soldiers and visiting Oz Vegaon, the park set up in Gush Etzion in memory of the three Jewish teens kidnapped an killed by Hamas last summer. 

“When I had the awful mission of calling Ezra’s father, he told me that, as a student, he worked for the release of Soviet Jews,” Natan Sharansky, who chairs the Jewish Agency for Israel, told the crowd. “At this terrible time he wanted to remind us that we Jews are all connected to each other, that we share all our joys and sorrows.”

Ezra, like so many of his peers, “was sharing our joys and sorrows that day to be with our soldiers. I want to remind all his friends that this is the time to come here, to share with us our struggles,” Sharansky added.

For Ezra’s uncle Yoav Schwartz, the most powerful memory he will carry with him is of his nephew’s “big brown compassionate eyes.”