Rachelle Fraenkel

In memory of Naftali Fraenkel

Rachelle Fraenkel is a beautiful lady inside and out, compassionate and warm hearted yet her story is beyond harrowing. Her 16-year-old son, Naftali, had been kidnapped along with two teenage friends whilst hitchhiking home from school on June 12th 2014. The boys had unwittingly been tricked into getting a lift from Hamas terrorists, and were missing for 18 days before their bodies were discovered on June 30th 2014.

My heart went out to Rachelle, and as I read the accounts she had given in the wake of her son’s murder I found I was deeply moved by her response.

She suggested we meet for coffee, and so, one morning in October 2018 I made the winding journey from the mountains of Binyamin where I was staying, to a pre-arranged café in Modiin, accompanied by my Israeli friend and guide/translator. Having greatly anticipated our meeting, on arrival I immediately felt a connection. It was not important that our backgrounds and culture were diverse, or that I spoke no Hebrew; the heart needs no words.

After warm introductions, our conversation began with stories relating to our shared heritage; in common with many in Israel, Rachelle’s roots are in Eastern European Jewry. 

Her father (last name Sprecher) had been born in Vienna in 1929. After the Anschluss her paternal grandparents fled through Switzerland, eventually making it to Britain although the family was separated for a time. Her father arrived in London on the Kindertransport in 1939 and was evacuated to the country during the Blitz. In 1944 the family crossed the Atlantic, heaving with German submarines, to begin a new life in America. Great importance was placed on learning, and her dad not only received a PHD at the age of 24, but also became a Rabbi. The State of Israel had been formed by this time, and a desire to move to the Jewish homeland influenced her father’s choice of subject- he learned Israel needed scientists and so studied chemistry.

Rachelle’s mother was born in Czechoslovakia, moving with her family to New York at the age of 5. The Sprecher’s married in 1954 and moved to Ramat Gan, Israel the following year, where later an infant Rachelle was to make her way into the world. She was raised an Israeli, in an Orthodox home. The ancestry of Avi Fraenkel, Rachelle’s husband is also in Europe; his father’s family were studious German Jews, arriving in Israel in 1933 having left their home with the rise of the Nazi party. His mother was born in Israel in 1934, her family originating from Amsterdam and Galicia (Poland).

These important details gave a backdrop, the Fraenkel family’s Jewish history extended back to Abraham, and, due to the need to flee persecution and an earnest desire to help rebuild the ancient Jewish homeland they were established in Israel, a place of refuge and of promise.

“Tell me about Naftali” I ventured cautiously, “how can I help tell his story?”

Rachelle began describing her handsome, curly haired son. “He was 16 and a half, just finishing 11th grade”. He had attended the same boarding school as his older brother and came home every Friday morning. In elementary school he had been in a gifted children’s programme; he was very bright, very athletic, very musical. He played the guitar and different kinds of flutes -much of what he learned musically was self-taught. He was interested in linguistics and just that year had decided to take maths very seriously. Naturally talented, he always engaged with his studies, but Naftali had begun working very hard. His parents received some of his marks after he was murdered, which Rachelle informed me were brilliant. He loved school. He was in possession of a cynical sense of humour and yet he had a gift of prayer- which seemed to his mother, a contradiction. His faith was a choice Rachelle explained” He told me he chose to believe. It’s not like he didn’t have other options”.

The day Naftali was kidnapped he was returning home from a two day trip and told his parents he would be home in the evening, texting to say he was on the way. They had no reason to worry due to his age and maturity and his parents went to sleep early only to be woken at 3:30am in the morning by policemen knocking at their door. Naftali had been with his friend Gilad Shaer, also 16. Gilad’s parents had been in touch with their son earlier in the evening but realised he hadn’t come home, and his mobile phone had been switched off. Rachelle and Avi checked Naftali’s room and found he was also missing. Eventually the location of the boy’s mobile phones was traced to the Hebron area– a well-known flash point. It was then they realised how serious the situation was “because a child who sets off for home in the area of Modiin and ends up in the Hebron Area doesn’t leave many possibilities to the imagination”

The Fraenkel’s were to learn a little later the 16-year-old friends had been kidnapped with a third teenager; Eyal Yifrah. Gilad had managed to make a whispered call to the emergency services from the kidnapper’s car. The taped call also recorded shouting in Arabic and several volleys of automatic gunfire. A huge search was mounted to find the boys - on the twelth day, Rachelle, as the only English-speaking mother addressed the United Nations appealing for help in bringing the boys home. Finally, 18 days after they were abducted, their bodies were discovered in shallow graves near Hebron. It was established they had been murdered shortly after entering the kidnapper’s car.

I asked Rachelle how she had managed to get through that awful waiting time, not knowing if her son was dead or alive, how he was being treated, of if she would ever see him again. She responded, emphasizing the support of the community  

“There was something very ambivalent about those days. There was great anxiety, and you know you don’t sleep, you don’t eat, I lost 20 pounds in a month, but there was almost a sense of glory in the fact that millions of Jews around the world- It was the family, it was my neighbours, it was the community, it was the State of Israel, it was Jews all-over the Diaspora, it was decent non-Jews all over the world (they all came around us)” 

“You know on Tuesday I met [] Evangelicals- some were Catholics, and so many people came over and said, ‘We remember your story, we’ve been praying for you since then’. There was something truly unbelievable about it, like communities around the world organised first prayers and rallies, then memorials.”

She explained how diverse denominations in the Jewish world rallied together to offer their support, visiting them in their home, continuing “Bedouins, Druze, every minority. During the Shiva Palestinians came over as a delegation, it was truly unbelievable. I remember, at some point I asked my brother in law ‘Is something really going on or is this a mother trying to rationalise her suffering?’ He said he was sure something outstanding was going on. So, on the personal level it was about focus, it was about not letting your thoughts go into all the dark places and drain all your energy”.

Rachelle spoke about the terrible fear that the search for the boys would be called off. They knew Israel would never stop looking but due to the pressure on the population of Hebron and the approach of Ramadan their greatest fear was that foreign governments would try and pressure the Israeli government to cease. As a means of keeping a focus Rachelle understood her part was to tell the story and gain legitimacy for the search. For this reason, she agreed to go to the U.N and to speak to foreign media.

“For me it wasn’t difficult because it was a mission, it was something to do. I didn’t know what to do, so as soon as that was brought up, so that’s what I did…. you get 120 seconds to say your thing. There were a couple more statements that were supportive, but the rest of the statements were very very hostile. It was a platform to speak to the journalists to tell our story to make sure that they understand why the government is doing what it is doing.”

6 days after addressing the U.N, Naftali’s body was found. After all the activity and effort to remain positive, I asked her if this time was the hardest.

“There are different kinds of hardships, you know, we had our hopes” she answered. “Personally, I wasn’t naïve, I knew that there were different options.” Rachelle described the hopes of the other parents also, waking up every morning sure that the boys would be found, that their son would be home, and then the crushing reality; he was still missing... “ but I was preparing. If we go into (hostage) negotiations, and Israel has a lot of experience in this, this might take a while. So, I was preparing myself to breathe deep. People were saying the uncertainty is the worst, but I always say, OK I’m willing for it to be years, the uncertainty, as long as he walks in here healthy and alive… and we’ve had such stories. Getting the message was a physical pain, you know, it was quite unbearable. The hardest thing ever was to tell my children, to take each one individually and tell them”.

Naftali was the Fraenkel’s second child of seven. His younger sister considered him her best friend. He and his older brother never fought, and Rachelle deeply mourns the lost relationship between the brothers. The time to truly know one another had been cruelly stolen, and Rachelle finds this very hard to bear. “There’s hardly anything that makes me cry in this context except thinking about the relationship between the brothers. I feel like they’re missing out.... It’s really the only thing that makes me very emotional”. Naftali was very close to his youngest brother Shlomo, 4 at the time of the murder, and she treasures the “dozens and dozens of photos of the brothers together at every stage of Shlomo’s life”.

We spoke also of all that Naftali had lost, his mother reflected on all he had missed, all the things he never had the opportunity to do “He didn’t have a romantic relationship, he didn’t have a family, he didn’t parent, those things. The things he did do, that’s a better feeling. In 12th grade they work with a younger student, they’re paired off. For some reason he did that in 11th grade, so I say Wow! he got to do that”. Her desire to focus on the positive is obvious.

Rachelle Fraenkel is loved throughout Israel. In 2015 The Jerusalem Post named her in their annual list of the 50 most influential Jews as Israel’s voice of Unity, stating’ She became a symbol of ‘a period of unprecedented social unity, prayer and faith’ during the time her son was missing, which continued after he was found’. In 2019 she was chosen to be one of the 12 torch bearers for Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day. Talking with her it is easy to understand the place she holds in people’s hearts. Rachelle is gentle, earnest in her desire to focus on unity rather than division, she is empathetic, intelligent, faith filled, caring and easily relatable. Above all, she is a mother who loves her family deeply, her response as a parent forced into an unimaginable nightmare from which her son did not return is perhaps the most affecting aspect of her character.

Speaking of her journey through grief, and her profile in the public eye, a role Rachelle did not choose, she explained “I think different people experience things differently”. She spoke softly of a mother who had lost her child a year previously under different circumstances “she remains functional, but her inner world is crushed. I don’t experience it like that. I experience it as one of the challenges of my life.”  She describes the time immediately following a loss when the pain is all consuming, comparing it to the kind of pain experienced during labour;

“it’s just like, when each wave of pain comes you just have to get oxygen into your brain, so in the very beginning stages I feel it’s that, it’s all about breathing. You say, OK, it’s going to subside….  Later on, people are built differently, different personalities. For me it’s about widening your lens and getting a wide picture of my life. I have a few mantras I repeat to myself. I say ‘I can feel pain; I don’t have to become my pain. I can feel sorrow; I don’t have to become my sorrow’.

In my inner landscape there’s so many, you know, dreams and failures and disappointments and successes and so much blessing, and there’s a choice you could make. We can take a bucket of black paint and spill it all over your life or you can try to keep the spectrum. For me it would seem stupid and an ingratitude for all the blessing we have in our life, so my core experience is of being very very blessed. And yes, there’s pain, there’s difficult stuff but I don’t feel I’m walking around with 100 tons. I feel sad for things that we missed, but I can see how different people different personalities have- we have different tool boxes. For many people they continue everything but there’s no more joy and I don’t feel that happened to us. I think there’s a lot of joy in our life - Overall I can say life is good”

My time with Rachelle drew to a close, but the impact of our meeting has remained with me. The cruelty of Naftali’s death, the unimaginable pain his mother has experienced as a result, and the courage and faith with which she has faced it are inspirational. Instead of hatred, Rachelle reaches out in grace, and continues in life. She is a lesson to us all.