By Andrew Adler
Community Editor
Photographs of slain hostages Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas; and Oded Lifshitz shown Feb. 24, 2025 during a memorial service at the Nova Grove in front of the Trager Family JCC (Photo by Robyn Kaufmann)
If there is a way to heal a shattered heart, it might be by gathering to hear words of solace, gratitude and ultimately, a measure of hope.
So it was on Monday, Feb. 24, when we came together at the newly planted Nova Tree Grove in front of the Trager Family JCC. It was an opportunity to mourn the deaths of Ariel and Kfir Bibas, alongside their mother Shiri – two small children and a young woman – hostages murdered by Hamas who were returned to Israel the preceding weekend amid the trappings of cynical, grotesque ceremony.
We also remembered the fourth slain hostage, 84-year-old Oded Lifshitz, all those whose lives were extinguished in the blackness of subterranean Gaza, plus the 364 innocents massacred while attending the Nova Music Festival on October 7, 2023. Many photographs of hostages were displayed next to saplings that, one day, would provide leafy shade and quietude.
“As Jews we are obligated to plant trees,” Sara Klein Wagner – president and CEO of the Trager Family JCC and the Jewish Federation of Louisville – remarked to friends, colleagues and guests standing nearby on the Jewish Heritage Fund campus.
“The survivors of the Nova Festival shared their voice and desire: ‘We will dance again,’” Wagner said, “and as we think about trees and future and hope and life in this sacred space, we did not want this moment to pass without marking it together as a community.”
It would have been futile to deny the somberness of that moment.
“My eyes fill with tears,” Rabbi David Ariel-Joel of The Temple acknowledged, quoting from Chapter Two, Verse 11 of the biblical Book of Lamentations, known in Hebrew as “Eicha” – “which means, ‘How could that happen?’ We cry to God; we cry to our fellow human beings: ‘How could these things happen?’”
Call it a question with no adequate answer. But on this occasion, at least there was some consoling perspective.
“I just wanted to share some words that were written by a colleague of mine, Rabbi Karen Weiss,” said Rabbi Ben Freed of Keneseth Israel. “‘May we all be wrapped in the loving arms of the Shekhinah,’” God’s dwelling place, “‘as we hold our collective grief, anger, incredulousness, loneliness and devastation. And as God holds us through this time, may we find the ways to forgive evils in the world and in our own hearts.”
Cantor David Lipp of Adath Jeshurun chanted El Malei Rachamim, the prayer for the souls of the departed, followed by a collective recitation of the Mourner’s Kaddish. The blustery winds subsided just long enough to hear a softly sounded, yet resolute, Amen.