Yedidiya-Aria Gottlieb was born on Tammuz 1.8.29, XNUMX (XNUMX) in the town of Tszybinia in western Poland, where Israel Avi's family also lived. Yedidiya-Aria immigrated to Israel with his family when he was six years old and at nineteen he joined the defense of Haifa as a machine gunner.
On the 22.4.48th of Nisan XNUMX (XNUMX), during the Battle of Haifa in the War of Independence, the battle known as "The Clearing of the Bitterness", Yedidia-Aria was hit by an Arab sniper's bullet and killed. Yedidia-Aria is buried in the military cemetery in Haifa.
Yedidia-Aria's parents were older than my parents and were a kind of substitute for the parents they didn't have, and with them we could talk at length about the town, its people, and the Jewish destiny.
As a child, I would accompany my parents on Shabbat when they went to visit the Gottlieb family in their small, modest apartment on Pevzner Street in Haifa. I had not yet been told about my son's fall, but even as a five-year-old girl, I felt the silent, uncompromising presence of the heavy, constricted sadness that pervaded the house, which was always a little dark.
Only in my adulthood did I come to understand the sense of loss that never ends and the pain of parents that never passes but only changes. When I first visited the military cemetery in Haifa with my parents and saw the white, uniform tombstones, arranged in exemplary order, it seemed to me that an attempt was being made to organize the sadness and pain. There was an endless love of families, endless love and pain.
Later, my father Israel told me that the fall of nineteen-year-old Yedidia-Aria in battle broke his parents. They broke not with a loud voice, not with a noise, but with a thin, silent voice, with a thin, penetrating break that came from the heart. They were quiet people.
Every Passover Eve in our house, since the day of the fall of Yedidia-Aria, my father, before the beginning of the Seder, would ask everyone present to stand up and say: Our lives here are possible only because of the life that our Yedidia-Aria gave us on Passover Eve 5758. We must remember him and his friends because today we celebrate the holiday of Passover, the holiday of freedom, only because of them.
Dad is gone and all that remains are the public ceremonies on Memorial Day. Every now and then the question arises as to how much the bereaved families need Memorial Day, since for them every day is Memorial Day.
From conversations with bereaved families, I learned that for them the ceremonies are of great importance and are meaningful, because they strengthen the sense of partnership, recognition, understanding and social embrace. "The government will not send to our cemetery a minister who did not serve in the IDF," said a bereaved mother on the radio.
The sharp edges of pain can never be blurred. Memory is alive and well, both personal memory and public memory.
Dear Aliza. A meaningful story. Every family should adopt a bereaved family, give them a sense of empathy and love and be grateful for our very existence. Don't leave any family alone during the holidays.
Dear Aliza, your story is very moving. Indeed, the bereaved families live with grief every day and time does not heal but rather increases the longing.