Mother journeys to LI in memory of Hallel

When you live in Kiryat Arba, near Hebron, you live with the unrelenting threat of terror. As Rina Ariel explained on Monday night at the Young Israel of Woodmere, living there’s not for everyone.

Sometimes, tragedy strikes home.

When 13-and-a-half-year-old Hallel Yaffa Ariel Hy”d was murdered in her Kiryat Arba bed last June 30, her mother, Rina Ariel, comforted her other children, both girls younger than Hallel, and then resolved that Hallel’s memory will live on. She would remain on her Jewish land and the terrorists would not win.

“For the children I say go do chesed,” but as adults we have to fight, Ariel  told a gathering of a 200 Five Towners. “I don’t want another [terrorist] to destroy another Jewish life.”

Ariel, accompanied by her assistant Elana Abelow Kronenberg, visited shuls and schools on Long Island and in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Teaneck this week to talk about Hallel and their efforts to keep Hallel’s spirit alive in two projects in Kiryat Arba for which they are raising funds — a playground (there’s so much terror, Ariel said, let the children play!) and an educational center called Kerem Hallel (Hallel’s Vinyard).

YIW Rabbi Shalom Axelrod opened the evening by referencing the surprisingly large crowd which he needed to relocat from a smaller room to the main sanctuary because of its size.

That “this is a family we don’t know personally” is irrelevant, Rabbi Axelrod said, because all of Israel is connected.

To contact Ariel or Kronenberg, write to elanam77@yahoo.com or yekev.arielbyehuda@gmail.com