Two Articles about Malki Roth - 15 year old killed in the Sbarro
Pizzeria Jerusalem Bomb Blast


The Suicide Bomber Took Malki's Life, But Not Our Convictions 
       
By Lee Hockstader
Sunday, August 19, 2001; Page B01 

JERUSALEM

There is little in this city to suggest hope these days. The emotional
aftershock of the terror attack Aug. 9, in which a Palestinian suicide
bomber killed himself and 15 others in a Sbarro pizzeria, has left
Jerusalem bitter and on edge. Fear of what might explode next has thinned
out traffic and emptied stores and malls. Cafes and restaurants are
posting security guards at the doors to deter the next bomber.

Almost no one expects peace or even believes it possible in the
foreseeable future. A newspaper headline a few days ago said the army
expects the violence to continue until 2006 and is planning accordingly.
Whether it is well grounded or not, a rare consensus has formed among
Israelis of almost every political stripe that the Palestinians have
slipped the bonds of reason, spurned negotiations and embraced the way of
blood.

When I interviewed Arnold Roth the other day, his modest apartment in
northern Jerusalem was teeming withgrieving visitors: Roth's teenage
daughter Malki was among the victims of the pizzeria bombing. Roth is a
49-year-old lawyer who manages a pharmaceutical technology company, a
thoughtful man whose dignity was as evident as his despair.

During the course of a 90-minute conversation, excerpts from which appear
below, Roth discussed the tragedy not only in personal terms, but in the
context of Jewish life and history.His wife, Frimet, who was in tears when
I arrived, did not join us.

Do you see any historical precedent for what's happening in Israel
today?

It's the endless nature of baseless hatred. I think there are very few
Jews who don't feel what I'm about to say. That is, that the profound
hatred that we encounter doesn't really have any basis to it. It's
something that's really, from our perspective, an imponderable. Baseless
hatred was at the root of the Holocaust, and baseless hatred is what you
have to be possessed of in order to walk into a restaurant full of
teenagers [and blow it up].

When you say baseless hatred, it's not necessarily baseless from the
Palestinians' point of view.

I don't want to relate to that at all. What happened in that restaurant, I
cannot see it as a political act. It has no connection to politics. It's
an act of barbarism. There are some things that are so far outside the
pale, they can't be discussed without giving them a degree of legitimacy.
I'm not willing to do that.

How about yourselves? One has to continue living, but life can become
quite circumscribed in a place so dangerous that restaurants can blow
up.

That's the answer -- you can't live like that. And in a certain way that's
conceding the field to the barbarians.

But how can you lead a non-circumscribed life when you think of some of
the neighbors as "barbarians"?

There's a duality of thinking here and I think most Jews in Israel feel
this way. On one side we certainly see a plague of barbarians around us.
But at another level of our consciousness we know there are people here
with real interests, with lives, with needs that are very similar to the
needs that we have. What we see is a colossal, catastrophic failure of
leadership on the part of our neighbors, and something which must change
because it's inconceivable that it would continue for another minute. Of
course, it is continuing, but it must change. No leadership can lead its
people to such a historical catastrophe for long without the system rising
up and reacting.

Now it's out of our control entirely. There's nothing we can do, I don't
think. I'm not focused on the barbarians and I'm not focused on their
leaders and I'm not focused on their needs. I really don't care how they
resolve their problems. Of course I know that, ultimately, their problem
is our problem and we'll need to come to terms with them. I'm quite
convinced that there's no lack of will on our side to do that. [But]
there's no dialogue with barbarians.

Roth's daughter Malki was 15 years old, tall and willowy, a gifted
classical flutist and youth group leader blessed with a sunny disposition
and dozens of friends. Her best friend and neighbor, Michal Raziel, went
downtown with her for lunch at Sbarro that day. Now they are buried
together, side by side.

When Malki's parents recovered her cell phone from the police, they were
struck by two things: A nail from the bomb had shredded the leatherette
case and, in small handwriting, Malki had written a reminder to herself by
the mouthpiece -- "Speak no ill of others."

During the week-long shiva, or period of mourning, Roth was reluctant to
discuss politics. He preferred to focus on Malki, her music and her deep
involvement with disabled children that sprang from caring for her
handicapped little sister, Haya, who is blind and severely brain-damaged.
But Malki's life, and death, led him to broader topics, and I nudged him,
too.

Tell me about Malki.

Malki had the sunniest disposition you'd ever meet in a child. She was
amazingly optimistic and positive; it was very striking. Malki was a very
outgoing, people-oriented person. She had a huge circle of friends.

She was an okay student; she was too busy to be a brilliant student --
busy with everything else outside of school. First of all, her music made
tremendous demands on her. She was a very talented flutist and then taught
herself piano and guitar and was extremely good at both of those. But it
was her flute -- she could reduce me to tears any time just by playing the
flute, and she did, she was wonderful.

There were two [other] major demands on her time. One was helping Frimet
with the baby. The other was youth group activities. Malki had a group of
girls that she led. If you go to her bedroom you'll see a mountain of
little notes and tchotchkes that she prepared for her kids. What she was
really doing was constantly giving expression to feelings of love. This
girl radiated love, it's the most striking thing about her, you can see in
pictures of her this girl had a face that shone with love. That was the
essence of Malki.

You have a second son going into the army. In the context of this
conflict, are you concerned that the experience of the army these days can
be brutalizing, just as any war is brutalizing?

You're absolutely right. Pinhas, our oldest boy, was chastised by one of
his commanders for smiling repeatedly -- serial smiling -- at Arabs who
were passing through a roadblock he was manning three years ago. There's a
certain degree of humanity that we all have, and some people manage to
camouflage it better than others. No doubt that the army and the entire
experience of dealing with a hostile presence in the neighborhood is a
brutalizing one. But it doesn't necessarily lead to brutalization, I don't
think, inside our family nor among most of our friends.

The issue here is, where are your priorities? Our goal is definitely to be
focused on the constructive. No one was more constructive than this
beautiful girl [Malki]. Her life was an act of beauty -- all but the last
few seconds of it.

Israel is a country of immigrants. Roth, who is Australian by birth, and
his American-born wife, Frimet, 47, came to Israel from Melbourne in 1988,
when Malki was 2. They were driven by the Zionist conviction that Jews
should settle the biblical land of Israel. Now, in their grief, they are
grappling with the implications of that decision, with the nature of the
lethal conflict between Arabs and Jews and the resulting perils of daily
life -- shopping, going to lunch, buying the groceries.

When you think back on your decision to come to Israel -- and you came
during the first intifada -- did it give you pause to come to a place so
conflicted?

It wasn't a career move and it wasn't a personal safety move. It was an
imperative, wanting to be where Jewish life and Jewish destiny have always
been determined, the natural place for Jews. Now I'm conscious that makes
me sound like some kind of dinosaur, but that really is what compels both
Frimet and me -- a strong sense of the rightness of being here, the
naturalness of being here.

You've been here 13 years. Do you ever think about leaving?

Anyone who tells you they've never thought of cutting and running isn't
being honest. At some level you think about running and hiding under the
pillow in your bedroom. But it's [like] the feeling when you walk into a
department store -- "I'd love to grab everything that I see and run out of
the store without having to pay for it." But we have a lot at stake here.
We have deep roots, we're raising children who absolutely love the land
and love being here and never see themselves in any other framework.

Has Malki's death dented that conviction?

Please remember we are just grieving over a very, very open and fresh
injury which is almost beyond bearing. Let me put my comments into a
context that might surprise you.

My father was the youngest of 17 [children]. He was born in Poland before
the war and ultimately was the only one of the family who stayed in Europe
and survived -- went through Auschwitz, then came to Australia. He had one
older brother, 20 years older, who had the insight to come to Palestine in
the early 1930s, before the war. And his brother -- my uncle here in
Palestine -- also survived and as a result I have a cousin who is a woman
in her sixties. She went back to Poland a couple of years ago and went to
Krakow.

While there, she managed to find in a museum a series of pages which gave
me the first-ever look at my father as he looked before the war. This was
a photograph on a German census form in the Krakow ghetto just prior to
its liquidation by the Germans.

There were two other pages there that were tremendously significant:
pictures of two of his sisters who were also living in the ghetto. And one
of them, Feiga, is the twin of Malki. Malki and I both went out of our
minds when we saw that picture because there was a sense of the continuity
of Jewish history, of Jewish existence. Malki saw herself and I saw her as
being the continuation of this Feiga who died in the war, as the
continuation of that generation which was cut off.

So when we talk about Jewish life and personal life after a tragedy like
this, at one level it has to be understood as something more than a
personal tragedy. It's part of Jewish life. Jewish life's had lots of
tragedies and lots of achievements. Personally, I can't relate to what's
happened without trying to put it into some kind of context of the family
and of the people.

Lee Hockstader is The Post's Jerusalem bureau chief
2001 The Washington Post Company
----------
To: The Editors - Time Magazine

My 15 year-old daughter Malki was murdered in the Jerusalem pizza shop
bombing last Thursday. When my family and I got up yesterday from the
shiva, the seven-day mourning period, I thought nothing could distract
me from my grief. Then someone read me the headline of TIME's August
20th article about the bombing: "A suicide bomber's desperate final act
sparks another round of retaliation".  

Your glorification of the act that took my precious 15 year old daughter
is unforgivable. What happened was barbarism. To think of it in any
other way is to give it meaning. 

Malki was a loving, generous angel of a girl, the one you write "had
just zipped a cell-phone text message to a friend". Yesterday her older
brothers collected that cell phone and some other personal belongings
from the police. Inside the phone's protective pouch I saw two things.
One was an ugly inch-long nail which formed part of that "desperate
final act" and which completely shredded the pouch. The other was that 
written on the phone mouthpiece in Malki's tiny writing was a Halachic 
note to herself: "Never speak badly of anyone". 
(In Hebrew: Asur ledaber lashon hara.)

Malki's life was filled with acts of helping others, including her own
profoundly handicapped 6 year old sister, and other children with
special needs. In addition, she adored the challenge and responsibility 
of being a youth leader, a role she took up only eight months ago. 
To her many close friends who sobbed uncontrollably at her funeral and 
to me, her mother to whom she was much more than a daughter, Malki's 
loss is not measurable, not bearable. She was my friend, the sister 
that I never had, my confidant, the main source of support for me in 
caring for our youngest child.  

I wish you would first consider the pain caused by such reporting 
before granting suicidal Arab fanatics their moment of glory.

Sincerely,
Frimet Roth
----- 
Frimet Roth, Jerusalem
Email arnold@roth.tf