Yom Kippur is fast approaching again, the body is tense, the forehead is sweating
And the heart sings at a fast pace.
37 years of Yom Kippur without you, without sharing in Yom Kippur conversations, a meal that ends with an empty chair. Yes bro, your seat is empty, there is no replacement for it.
The day after Yom Kippur 1978, five in the afternoon, we were waiting for you to return from the base in the Golan Heights. You didn't come, in your place a military team arrived with a doctor, they knocked on the door and entered, I was in the shower, a 17-year-old boy after a ball game, the voices of a mother shouting "Tzadok, where are you? I want Zadok". Father's voice in the background "Zadok is gone, there is no Zadok". And mother continues: "Zadok, I want you, come back to mother, where are you?".
These voices come back to me every Yom Kippur, never forgotten.
My late brother Zadok was killed on the evening of Yom Kippur in the Golan Heights after he finished the fast and the closing prayer and returned to the team to help. There he found his death.
Today I am the father of 3 children, they don't have an uncle, I don't have a brother and Yom Kippur is approaching again and the pulse is accelerating. On the street, in the Synagogue, people remember and look with sympathetic sympathetic eyes, some of them point their fingers "his brother was killed on Yom Kippur, poor man" and I think about how Yom Kippur will pass with racing thoughts and a fast pulse.
The next day is a joint memorial for a general memorial to the Yom Kippur War, we arrive at my brother's grave in Haifa, today 37 years ago he was killed and around us are hundreds of families who come to the general ceremony. I look around and want to shout: "My brother was killed today, this is his day, not a general memorial." And once again another Yom Kippur goes away and is forgotten until the next Yom Kippur, with an empty chair, with a gap in the puzzle and a broken heart.
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