“Did we really have to pay such a terrible price just to be called Israelis?”
"They are very difficult to work with," said a native Israeli psychologist. "They remain silent. And our methods are based on getting people to talk, to scream out their pain. Then we 'enter' that process and begin to guide it..."
Yes, they remain silent. Against the background of loud political statements and intrusive journalists pushing microphones into their grief, mothers and fathers say nothing. Parents who have lost children they brought here, to the Promised Land, for a better life — for life itself — remain silent. So do those who have spent several days sitting in intensive care units, staring with dry, inflamed eyes at the faces of their daughters, mutilated by the explosion, trying to catch even the slightest sign of improvement.
They remain silent, or answer journalists in short phrases. They answer in Hebrew, although in such moments it is difficult even to speak Russian. They speak in the language of their country — their native language.
In one day, we all became Israelis.
On Sunday, the newspaper Maariv came out with a huge headline on its front page — in Hebrew and in Russian: "We mourn our children." Not the children of "Russians" — our children. Perhaps for the first time in ten years, we were looked at with respect. And people were shocked by what they saw: the exhausted faces of our women, who accepted the terrible blow of fate with extraordinary dignity; our modest, neatly kept apartments; our intelligent, talented, well-mannered children. Children for whom we work from morning to night, so they can study in good schools, dress nicely, go to discos.
In an instant, sabras and so-called old-timers forgot the labels they had placed on us. The unfair reproaches directed at us at every step. The condescending lectures we were subjected to on any occasion. No one called us a "sausage aliyah" or, worse, the "Russian mafia." In newspapers, on radio, and on television, we were respectfully called citizens of Israel. Did we really have to pay such a terrible price for this right — the right to be called Israelis?
They say that grief unites people. And it is true. For the first time, despite attempts by some politicians to gain advantage from spilled blood, non-Jews according to Halakha were buried quickly and without the usual disputes. And perhaps most surprisingly — the spiritual leader of the Shas party, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef (often described in the media as a "sworn enemy of Russian immigrants"), instructed party chairman Eli Yishai to personally visit and offer condolences to every single family that lost a child in the attack on the Tel Aviv promenade.
Eli Yishai himself, who at the time oversaw the Ministry of Interior, said in an interview with Kol Israel radio: "Regardless of religious affiliation, we are all human beings, all under God."
At the funeral of sisters Yulia and Lena Nalimov, their younger brother Alex, choking back tears, recited the Kaddish: "I want them to know: we will still live here. We came here forever. We have no other country."
Yes, we will not leave. Our children are buried here. Under the blue-and-white Israeli flag with the Star of David, they were gently laid into this soil — the land where they lived so briefly, and yet managed to love so deeply.