Passover Memories of a Murder
As a senior myself, I read the story on seniors’ memories of their childhood seders with nostalgia (“Seniors Recall the Passover Seders of Their Childhoods,” April 6). My childhood seders were also filled with extended family and laughter. Every year, my mother would pull out the “ruby dishes,” made of glass so they would be pareve, and we would prepare the fruit compote I loved.
But my childhood memories are shadowed by the shock of what happened on the first day of Pesach in 1966. Three armed men entered my father’s liquor store in the District. My father was shot and killed. The men left with $300. The last time I saw my father was at our family seder the night before. It took me five years to be able to sit through one again.
Every year since that awful April day, my family bentches the Ma’ariv service together before our first seder so that my sister and I can say kaddish to honor our father’s memory. In spite of the happy seders we now have with our children and grandchildren (and my sister’s great-grandson), this holiday is a painful one for us.
My sister and I are among the growing number of people affected by gun violence. Today, innocent children are riddled with bullets from weapons of war that are totally unnecessary for civilians. On Pesach, and every day, I pray that no other family should be shattered as ours was. I pray that our legislators will come to their senses and pass reasonable national gun safety legislation.
Fifty-seven years after that terrible Passover, I refuse to be silent in the face of this plague of death that has devastated our country.
Joyce Brodsky Lipman, Rockville
Netanyahu Can Control a National Guard
Regarding “A Gift to Ben-Gvir” (Editorial, April 13):
Your distaste for Israeli National Secuirity Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and your emphasis on personal politics should not be a primary factor in a discussion of the merits of establishing an Israeli national guard.
As you point out, Israel now has “a strong multi-faceted military establishment … ,” and so you ask, “does Israel also need a national guard to help keep internal order?”
Need I remind WJW that the U.S. also has a “strong multi-faceted military establishment,” including “a full-service domestic police system,” yet the United States has found it absolutely necessary to have a national guard, as an adjunct to other law enforcement authorities, in order to have an adequate workforce on hand to deal with national emergencies and natural disasters, and to restore law and order when necessary. Decisions to call up the national guard are judiciously made by high ranking officials in political office, such as by the president of the U.S. or state governors.
I trust that the present political leaders of Israel, such as Israel’s longest serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, have the necessary competence and good sense to put similar limits on the power and authority of an Israeli National Guard.
Marc Caroff, Virginia Beach
