Yesterday I received a link to the leading story in the Times of Israel; an article describing the murder of 15-year-old Malki Roth in the Sbarro restaurant bombing, Jerusalem on August 9th 2001. A thoroughly comprehensive account, it details the unimaginable pain at her loss and her parent’s years-long fight for the extradition of her unrepentant murderer from Jordan, to the USA. I had to stop halfway through, I was so overwhelmed by the sheer horror and heartache her parents bear.
I was sent the report by Arnold Roth, Malki’s father through Whatsapp. I first met Arnold in Jerusalem in October 2018; he was one of nine individuals I photographed, each with a devastating story regarding the murder of a loved one due to terrorism. Although I wrote up each interview when I came home, gathering their images and stories into a book I entitled ‘Do You Know My Name?’, I have never written in this manner, describing our meeting and the continued impact their loss has made on me.
Arnold Roth October 2018
Pompidou Bistro and Bar, Jerusalem
I felt a connection to Arnold before we even shared breakfast at the Pompidou Bistro, a quiet restaurant in a leafy Jerusalem street.- Arnold's choice of venue. I made my way there alone; the only interview I was able to walk to by myself, and as I did so the words of the prophet Isaiah turned over and over in my mind “Comfort, O Comfort my people, speak tenderly to Jerusalem’. ..meeting with the parent of a murdered child I had learned, carried an aching pain of its own.
We had discovered through the shared emails sent between Israel and Scotland in preparation for this appointment, that we could possibly be related. We shared my grandmother’s surname, Rothenberg; Arnold’s survivor parents had shortened his name to Roth, as a small boy in Melbourne to make life a little easier for him. Our Rothenberg’s, Rotenberg’s, Rottenberg’s (the spelling seems to change depending on the document) found their roots in the same part of Poland - Galicia, part of the former Austro Hungarian Empire. This fact alone, as one retrieving precious relatives in ones and two’s from the utter void which had been my mother’s experience of family, endeared me to him.
Arnold, I discovered, is a gentleman in the truest sense of the word, courteous, warm, and very engaging. Between the bites of breakfast which he so kindly ordered, I learned the details of his family search; both his parents had survived the hell of the Holocaust whilst losing many many members of their families. Arnold’s father, born into a family of 17 children was one of only 3 survivors.
His mother, he told me, dreamt of Jerusalem ‘during the many black days of forced labor and unspeakable suffering as a victim of the German oppression that took the lives of her parents and all three of her brothers.’. I learned of the community of survivors he grew up amongst in Melbourne, where no- one had grandparent’s, and the insights into his parent’s past which came during the night whilst overhearing their nightmares.
He shared with me the ebullience of those same survivors, their determination to live life for their children and grandchildren, the lack of hatred expressed towards those under whom they had suffered the incomprehensible, unbearable destruction of all they had known and all those they loved. His words filled every sentence to bursting, reminding me of acclaimed author Daniel Mendelsohn- there was just so much to say, and Arnold has an engaging way of saying it, he is a natural storyteller. I leaned in and listened; glad my phone was recording so that I could return to listen again and again when Jerusalem was far behind me.
Malki Roth
MALKI. So much love, so much joy and so much pain wrapped up in the mention of her name. Here was Arnold the father, proudly describing his beautiful, sensitive, caring, little girl, taken so cruelly on the cusp of her future. I learned of Malki’s great love for her younger sister Haya, severely disabled, and in need of continual care. Malki was the devoted, attentive older sister, the champion of those less able at school, determined to help, she built bridges between disabled children and ‘regular’ kids. Malki, who wondered why there were so few photo’s of her taken compared to her siblings, Malki, whose smile shines out from a photograph Arnold found on an undeveloped reel of film years after she was gone. Every word spoken about his daughter was immersed in longing and love. A father’s heart.
That Malki’s should be murdered in Jerusalem, the place of refuge in her grandmother’s desperate dreams, and because she was Jewish, makes an unbearable tale of loss somehow even more profoundly devastating. I wondered how a world that remembers the holocaust, reminding us to ‘never forget’ could fail to care about the children and grandchildren of survivors, who had so valiantly continued living. Six million Jews perished in the Shoah, each with their own name, their heartaches, their achievements, their joys. The numbers are so overwhelming it is impossible to grasp the magnitude of each loss; and yet, we can learn of one or two, or six or seven of those names and recover their humanity.
“Malki, our Rock of Gibraltar. Attentive, listening, always with a smile on her face, always engaged in fun. Fun that stems from empathy. Empathy from wall to wall. She was the most empathetic person I’ve ever met… I want you to know about her life. ”
Malki Roth is numbered amongst thousands murdered in the ‘new Shoah’ - Jewish people murdered in Israel. For decades after WW2, those who wilfully murdered Jews were pursued for justice, and yet today, amongst us, Malki’s murderer, on the FBI most wanted list, a self-confessed and proud child killer is allowed to walk free. How can this be?
I decided to write this today because my heart hurts for a family, who have not only to bear the pain of a life lived without their daughter, who had to face the horror of learning she had been murdered, who have had to carry the knowledge of those details every waking moment, who battle alone- forgotten, for justice for their child and safety for others .. What can we do- what can I do?, I ask myself. I’m not sure I have the answer to that, but one thing I do know. I will stand with them, pray for justice and speak up for Malki. Life is a gift, each one unique. As the parent of another murdered Jewish child expressed so profoundly “Jewish tradition says that in each person is a world. I have lost a whole world.” - Sherri Mandell
Read Arnold and Frimet’s blog, This Ongoing War @ http://thisongoingwar.blogspot.com/
The Malki Foundation, set up by Arnold and Frimet to help children with disabilities in Malki’s memory: https://kerenmalki.org/
“Jewish tradition says that in each person is a world. I have lost a whole world. ”
