Rabbi Leo Dee

We met Rabbi Leo Dee at the Scots House Hotel in Jerusalem on April 2nd, 2024, just hours after flying into Israel from Scotland and almost a year to the day after Rabbi Dee’s wife Lucy, and two daughters Maia and Rina had been executed in cold blood after being driven off the road as they were driving to Tiberius for their Pesach (Passover) holiday. The family were British Israelis. Exactly six months to the day after this tragedy, the October 7th massacre happened…

I cannot put into words the brave resilience of this gentle man, and his kindness in agreeing to talk to me despite his immense and unimaginable loss. Rabbi Leo Dee, our hearts are with you, and your family.

April 2nd, 2024, Scots House Hotel, Jerusalem.

Jennie Milne

Please could you tell me a little bit about what happened to your family?

Rabbi Leo Dee

“We were travelling on our Pesach holiday, the second day of Passover on Friday, April 7th, 2023. We left in the morning in two cars. My wifeleft in one car with Maia and Rina; Maya was 20, and Rina was 15. I was with my son Yudah and daughter Tallie, and we have a fifth daughter who was in Jerusalem for the weekend. We drove following Waze up Route 90, through the Jordan Valley. Waze directed us both along the longer route around the top of Route 90. I changed the route to continue straight because I had Lucy’s voice ringing in my ears, she'd always tell me to continue straight - it was easiest even if it took a bit longer, and I assumed she would do the same. She didn’t do the same instead she took a left. About half an hour later I got a telephone call from my sister who was in a car about an hour behind us, and she said, “We've heard that there's been a terror attack on the road, are you ok?” I said I'm okay.

I immediately called Lucy - no answer. I called Maia – no answer, I called Rina – no answer, then I checked Google family link, and I saw that they were at the Humra junction, which we heard was where the terrorist attack had been, and we turned around immediately. As I was on the route, my son through Telegram saw a site where they post pictures of the terror attacks, and there was a photograph of the car, which was our car - our beach bags splattered in blood on the back of the seat, and we knew the worst had happened so we drove down there. I desperately wanted to see, to identify that it was them, but the police wouldn't let me be anywhere near it.

We sat for about an hour in the ambulance. At the end of an hour, I said we’ve got to have some proof because I knew that the mother had been airlifted to Ein Kerem hospital for operations, and I thought we might have to be there, and eventually they brought me the ID card from Maia. So, we knew the worst and immediately set off down to Jerusalem and spent the night - we spent the next three or four days in the hospital in Ein Kerem. Lucie had an operation to remove two bullets, one from her brain stem, and one from her spine. Unfortunately, the operations didn't succeed, and we buried my two daughters on the Sunday and my wife on the Tuesday”.

Q We had just been to Israel when this happened, I read your story straight away and our hearts went out to you…. A horrific thing to happen and we're so sorry... Obviously, your life has changed completely since this point and your children, your other children…?

“So how have we coped, what's helped us?  many things have helped us. Number one, from the moment this happened, we felt a very warm hug from the whole Jewish people, not just in Israel but all over the world and we got literally thousands, literally tens of thousands of messages from people – Jews and non-Jews actually - it really was incredible. Strangely enough, I met somebody else you should speak to, his name is Avida Bachar, a survivor from Be'eri who lost his wife and 15-year-old son when they were hiding in the safe room in their house, under attack for 12 hours by terrorists. He also lost a leg as well.

I met him in his hotel at the Dead Sea, about a month after the tragedy, and I couldn't understand how he was coping with it so well until that evening when I went with him to the hall of the hotel.  They had a meeting for a thousand, the thousand members of the Kibbutz Be'eri in that hall, and I saw them all together, and I realized that they maybe hadn't lost two members of a family of six, but actually two members of a family of a thousand, and then I realized that I hadn't lost three members of family of seven, but three members of a family of fourteen million and the fact that everybody had sort of come around and had been involved really was one of the most amazing things.

The second thing, at the end of the thirty days of mourning I turned to my kids, and I said, ‘We are starting a new world’ . I said we were in world number one with two parents and five kids. We're now entering world number two with one parent and three kids. I said we’ve had thirty days of pain and crying and suffering in between, but we have to start afresh and it’s going to be a good world, it’s going to be a happy world; a world with memories of world number one but it’s going to be completely different, and everything starts from now.

We're now entering world number two with one parent and three kids. I said we’ve had thirty days of pain and crying and suffering in between, but we have to start afresh and it’s going to be a good world, it’s going to be a happy world; a world with memories of world number one but it’s going to be completely different, and you know everything starts from now.

And that really is how it was, everything changed.  In many ways, the situation helped us as well, because my son started a new school very soon after, and my daughter started or went to seminary and my oldest daughter was in the second year of her work - it was a very different experience for her starting again. I quit my job as a teacher and people got me involved in many different things and projects, and I continue to do those until it runs out…

So, my life is … the fact that everything is changing dramatically means that we can't, we don't see our life before, our life now as comparable really – it’s too different, but we have you know, wonderful memories, and we are now in the week leading up to the memorial services taking place this weekend basically, we have Sunday, Friday, Monday…”

Q That all must be quite hard…

“Yes, it’s very… it’s a tough time because everybody's pouring into your family you know, but everything has been a challenge, every time it comes to a new Jewish holiday, it's been a challenge. The first day of Shabbat….one of the things we've heard from other families was sitting around the Shabbat table without members of your family is very difficult. At the end of the Shiva, the seven days of mourning, we have a table that's got an extra piece in the middle as there were seven of us sitting around it. So, I thought, I'll take the piece out and make it into a small table for the four of us, but I was so miserable every time I saw it, I couldn't deal with it, so I had to put it back in again. We heard from other families it took them maybe about a year before they could sit around the table, just by themselves without inviting people or going out to people. One friend of my daughter's told her it took eight years for her family. After three months, I said, we have to have to do this, we have to bite the bullet and Friday night we sat around the table, the four of us, and actually, it was a very good experience. and since then, you know Friday nights, if we are all at home we sit together and we have a very nice Friday night. I asked the kids afterward how it was. I have one daughter that still says, ‘It's very nice but it's not a family’. ….so, yeah, how long it will take before they feel it's a family…

Q It's interesting because when I spoke to Rachele Fraenkel - her response to what happened to Naftali was incredible…. she spoke through that, but when I asked her how her children had responded, that was the one question that she said was extremely difficult for her. And then your tragedy…. to be followed by October 7th…

“…and my kids lost their mother…

So, October 7th was obviously a huge tragedy – people ask me how we felt after that, and I tell them, we started our new world on April 7, or maybe just after that, and our world changed so we were in world number two, when October 7th happened the whole world's going to world number three…. so, we were like two worlds away from when we started, so strangely for our personal tragedy, we felt further away from it and were very much attached to the National tragedy. But we feel that what we went through, the whole Jewish people went through exactly six months to the day later….on a huge scale.  

Q But each one is their own world, that’s what you are saying, isn't it? So, the fact that it's hundreds of people that have now experienced what you experienced, each individual pain is as great, even though everybody is together.  Other people I’ve spoken to have said much about this hug from the Jewish people, and even though I’ve no similar experience, that's how I feel coming into the Jewish community with my own history. One thing that I really admire in the Jewish people is their resilience - that spirit that says, OK, we're going to move into world two with the help of God, that He'll strengthen us.

“We have a purpose, I mean I speak for myself and my family, we feel we are very much driven, we are in Israel because we believe this is the home of the Jewish people, we live a Jewish life because we believe that this is the way to bring up our children, it’s the way to live and it develops  good and Shalom in the world, and I talk about Shalom rather than peace because the two are different. Peace - this comes from my rabbi/teacher Jonathan Sachs of blessed memory, - used to say that peace comes from the Latin ‘Pax’, which means the absence of fighting,  Shalom comes from the Hebrew ‘Shlemut’ which means complete. So, in other words, what does it mean? - Basically, you have two kids fighting in a classroom and one teacher pulls one away and one teacher pulls the other another way, then you’ve got peace. But until the third person comes along and says, ‘What are you fighting about, let’s see if we can sort this out’, you won't have Shalom. I think the Jewish culture is about creating Shalom… and this is something, I think if you look at the world particularly at the moment, it is clear that there aren't that many cultures out there that have that agenda. So, we better be doing it because there are very few of us left and the world need us”.

Q Before I finish, is there something you would like to say to the people in Great Britain from the community you came from originally, and when did you first come to live in Israel?

“I quit my job as a financial investor in 2004 and we came for four years and I studied to become a rabbi in Israel, and then in 2008, we went back to England for six years and I was a rabbi, really my wife - she was the brains. I was sort of the sidekick for six years in two communities. And then we came back again in 2014. But I guess one of my messages was I think it’s important for  Christians, Jews…  a number of people have asked me ‘Do you regret coming to live in Israel? What if you hadn’t come to live in Israel? What if you left 10 minutes later in the morning of the attack?  You know there’s so many ‘What ifs?’. I’ve been thinking about it…. from the beginning I felt it’s not a question I want to ask, but what I asked, um and I've come to the conclusion is that it's forbidden to ask in life ‘What if’  except for one ‘What if’, which is ‘What if God knows better than I do?’, which I think is permissible, you know, what if God actually knows what He's doing and this is his plan?. I think that is the one what if that one should ask.

I think we have a lot of plans in our lives, and I would have loved to have seen my daughters married and have my grandchildren in my lap. But sometimes God’s got a different plan and maybe, you know, He had that plan from the outset, and maybe my expectations were not right, were not accurate from the beginning”.

Q It's natural to want to do that, isn't it? life interrupts us with things that we absolutely don't expect that they are like you say, almost God interruptions. I would liketo ask you, though, about Lucy and Maya and Rina. I mean, they look from their photographs like just wonderful people.

Lucy

“Yeah. They were even better than they looked…... so, Lucy was an English teacher,  I lectured at her school last night and they were making a video – a song video in her honour which they composed, and they sang, professionally produced – hopefully coming out in a week or twos time but it was beautiful. She still has students there that said they adored her. She gave everybody personal attention, she was on WhatsApp until 11 or 12 o’clock at night - to all the students, she would keep on top of their work and ask why they didn't turn up and they still felt personally sort of loved by her.

She was a community builder. When we went to Britain as a rabbinical couple, she was the one that they wanted, and she really had a hand in building communities wherever she went she would bring people together like around our Shabbat table. She would introduce people to each other, and create connections and relationships between people,  and then we could walk away because they didn't need us any anymore . That was really her approach. She was a very kind-hearted person, she was visiting a young mother, helping her and arranging communal learning classes in the community… a strange fact,  a very nice lady received her heart because we actually donated her organs and saved five lives. She saved five lives: heart, two kidneys, lungs and liver. The lady who received her heart was telling me last week that she has started to visit a young mother, that she started to keep the Sabbath, she gets a group of women together to say Psalms together once a week which are all things which Lucy used to do, and whether it's because she knew that's what Lucy did and she feels obligated to do that, or whether it's because she thinks that the heart actually has driven her to do that I don't know, but it's really quite incredible, she says her life has improved that she's just happier and she's just like a different person. And I find yeah, I find that really quite astonishing.

Maia

Maya was really a princess  - I mean she was our oldest- she had a lot of friends, she also brought friends together from disparate groups, and she would always bring them together and they would meet each other.. Strangely after what happened, two of her best friends who really didn't know each other have now become best friends with each other - she was a connector. She loved teaching and learning and yeah, she was really incredible..

Rina

”Rina...” (Leo has to take a moment to compose himself before being able to continue..) Rina took me aside when she was about twelve and we went for a nice walk on Shabbat afternoon for about an hour and a half. She said to me, I'm not happy I don't feel I'm stretched. She was an A-grade student in every subject she did… she said I don't feel that I’m being stretched, and I said ‘Well look you’ve got two choices, either you can start a university degree... which she could have done in maths, or science, or Torah, or in and any subject she wanted….  and then you could do that and have a degree by the time you're eighteen or sixteen or whatever it is. ‘Or you could say, I'm one of these lucky people you know, that takes you 10% of the time to do the work, and you can dedicate the rest of the time to friends and other activities such as volunteering - things which are important as well.

So that was how we left it, and then literally, six months later, I noticed that she had selected her new high school, which was not the most academic, so she's really not opted for the university option. And she was spending 90% of her time with friends, helping people, and volunteering, and she was an amazing, youth worker actually, she had a group of thirty kids that she bought from scratch in the local youth group, and she made that decision. Because of that, there are a lot of people who miss her even to today, and people who are emulating her, so a number of projects have been kicked off at her school, which literally are happening now a year later. They've organized a trip for hundreds of girls around the country to Masada, because the school loves to travel - they take them with friends overnight to different sorts of places. They've built,  they're building a spring in Hamra where the tragedy took place, they built a nice sort of social area in the school gardens with a pergola where people could get together and sit and talk.

One of the things that she was very careful about was praying the afternoon prayers -minchah. and not all girls are that careful about praying that prayer. Her school have now taken it upon themselves to pray it – all the girls, and not only that but other schools have too, a number of schools around the area, they are getting together for around 15 minutes to pray afternoon prayers in memory of Rina – the girls are very passionate about it so she had a massive impact”.  

Q. All three of them have left a huge impact on the lives of those around them, haven’t they?

“Some people have said to me – the Chief Rabbi of Israel actually, Rabbi Lau said to me at the shiva, the seven days of mourning, he said that there's a Book of Life and, you know, some people have 120 pages, and some people have 15 pages, and 20 pages, or 48 pages. but some people have 120 pages of big writing and big gaps between the lines. and some people have 15 pages with very small writing and very small space between lines. I said, ‘wait here’, and rushed off into the other room, grabbed a copy of Sapiens which is subtitled ‘the book of life for man’ or something and I showed it to him. I said ‘A year ago - this is a year before the tragedy -, I said to Rina (because she wasn't being stretched in English), ‘You should read this book and then, you know, we can discuss it’.  So, two or three months before the tragedy, she came back to me with some notes. I said, ‘What are the notes?’ She said, ‘I read through the book’, and Sapiens, which is a book about evolution, argues for a lot of ideas that we have as Jews in terms of creation, so forth and the different ideas about how we behave as people. ‘So, I made notes about all the differences that it has with what we believe, and I’d like to discuss it with you’. I'm so sorry I didn't ever get round doing that. But I showed him these pages that she'd made of notes and her writing was very small, with very small gaps between the lines. I said, ‘You're a prophet’. He said ‘No, no, no I’m not a prophet!’ , but uh it was just one of those bizarre memories, which summed her up ...

Thank you. We really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us…