Another forgotten victim of Palestinian terror

New Jersey attorney Stephen M. Flatow is the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in a Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He writes this from a tense Jerusalem.

After every Palestinian terrorist attack, the news media report the names of those killed and the number of those wounded. The names of the injured are almost never mentioned. In many cases, they are maimed for life, but nobody outside their immediate families will ever know their names or remember what happened to them.

The one tragic exception to this Rule of the Forgotten Victims is if someone who is injured in an attack later dies from his wounds. And so the name of Rabbi Haim (Howie) Rothman briefly entered the consciousness of world Jewry this week, when he passed away from the devastating injuries he suffered in the November 2014 Har Nof synagogue massacre.

Rabbi Rothman left the comforts of Toronto in 1985 to make his home in Jerusalem, where he and his wife raised 10 children and became beloved members of the Har Nof community. On Nov. 18, 2014, the Palestinian terrorists Uday Abu Jamal and Ghassan Muhammad Abu Jamal burst into a Har Nof synagogue, swinging axes and firing automatic weapons.

Some of the worshippers may have known the Jamals. The two cousins worked in one of the neighborhood’s grocery stores. Some people probably see the fact that Palestinian Arabs take jobs in Jewish businesses as a sign of peaceful coexistence. Not in this case.

The Jamals murdered four rabbis (three of them American citizens) and an Israeli policemen. They also wounded seven others. Rabbi Rothman was one of those seven anonymous “others.” He lingered in a deep coma for 11 months.