Perilous
Times
Jewish victims in French shooting buried in Israel
JERUSALEM (AP) – Relatives sobbed inconsolably by the gravesides
of a rabbi and three children gunned down at a Jewish school in
France and brought to Jerusalem for burial on Wednesday.
An Israeli Zaka volunteer stands next to the bodies of the
shooting victims in a morgue before their funeral in Jerusalem on
Wednesday.
The four where killed Monday in the French city of Toulouse when a
man on a motorcycle opened fire with two handguns outside the
school. Hundreds of French police descended on the suspect's
hideout in Toulouse on Wednesday, but by midday still hadn't drawn
him out after hours of gunbattles and negotiations.
At the funeral ceremony in Jerusalem, Eva Sandler, the rabbi's
widow and mother of two of the slain children, and Yaffa
Monsenego, the mother of the third, burst repeatedly into tears as
speaker after speaker eulogized the dead.
The women had flown to Israel to bury their loved ones.
The slain members of the Sandler family were wrapped in white
prayer shawls while the body of Monsenego's daughter was draped in
black velvet. Israeli media reported that Eva Sandler is pregnant
and arrived in Israel with her remaining child, a toddler.
About 400 people gathered at the cemetery, including grieving
relatives who arrived from France, French Foreign Minister Alain
Juppe and leaders of the French Jewish community.
In his eulogy, Israeli parliament speaker Reuven Rivlin said the
Jewish people "once again find themselves facing beasts … driven
out their minds by hatred."
Juppe said "an attack on a Jew in France is not only an issue for
French Jews. … Anti-semitism is against all French values."
The school attack was the bloodiest France has ever known and the
bloodiest assault on Jewish targets there in decades.
Earlier Wednesday, an El Al Israel Airlines flight from Paris
brought the bodies of Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, his sons Arieh, 5,
and Gabriel, 3, and 8-year-old Myriam Monsenego to Israel. The
children held dual Israeli-French citizenship; the rabbi had lived
in Israel for years and the families had asked to bury them in
Israel.
After the plane landed at Israel's Ben-Gurion International
Airport before dawn, memorial prayers were read over the plain
pine coffins bearing Stars of David before they were placed in
four ambulances for transport to the Har Menuchot cemetery.
In Toulouse, hundreds of French police on Wednesday surrounded the
hideout of a man suspected in the school shooting and two other
attacks that killed three French paratroops. A gunbattle erupted
and police were trying to negotiate the man's surrender.
French Interior Minister Claude Gueant described the suspect as a
24-year-old French national who claims connections to al-Qaeda and
"wants to take revenge for Palestinian children" killed in the
Middle East.
Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad denounced the deadly
shooting attack and condemned the link to Palestinian children.
"It's time for criminals to stop using the Palestinian cause to
justify their terrorist actions," Fayyad said in a statement. "The
children of Palestine want nothing but dignified lives for
themselves and for all the children in the world."