Jerusalem – Israeli Terror Victim’s Mother: ‘You Were Taken Too Swiftly, Too Painfully’

Jerusalem – Yael Kolman began writing the eulogy for her son, Adiel, after hearing that he had been stabbed in a terror attack in Jerusalem’s Old City, but before she knew he was dead.

On Monday, she stood on the stairwell in front of the synagogue in the Kochav HaShachar settlement in the West Bank and read those words out loud.

“My dear Adiel. It’s 2 a.m. What am I doing here in Kochav HaShachar, with a righteous family that is hosting us in our pain.

“Adiel, on the way [to the hospital], in the taxi, I thought of the eulogy even though they had not yet told me you had died. I felt that your energy was gone,” Yael said.

The body of her son, 32-years-old and a father of four small children, lay in front of her, stretched out on a table and wrapped in a white and black prayer shawl.

“What can I say of such a righteous person who dealt with such difficult things and overcame them?” Yael said.

“Lately, you had taken to calling me a lot and saying, ‘Mamush, what’s going on. Walla, things are not bad with me,” recalled Yael.

Her son’s nickname when he was born was “Tachshit,” a jewel, said Yael. “You were our jewel. We were close to your heart for years, but now they have taken your heart. We would have wanted to be with you for longer, we always want those things that are good, it is never enough,” Yael said.

“God gave to us and God took from us. This was your exact time to leave this world. You had finished your mission in this world and therefore God took you too quickly and too painfully,” Yael said.

Finally, she said to Adiel, “You will have the time to study in peace.”

Her son, she said, was the light of their lives and his light will continue to shine with them forever.

Yael spoke of the family who would miss him; his wife and his children. “Oy, the children,” she screamed.

Yael told the mourners that their family plans to move from sorrow to joy in the next month by holding her daughter’s wedding, in Gush Etzion, on the date that Arab armies conquered the Jewish communities there in the 1948 War of Independence.

The family chose this date deliberately, she said, to close the circle of 70 years from destruction to celebration.

It was with this same idea in mind that the family decided: “We’re choosing life,” even at her son’s deathbed, Yael said.

A married sister said she preferred to remember him happy, as he was when they danced at her wedding. “Even when we were with you in the last moments of your life, what I remember was you, Adji, the most beloved, not the person in the headlines,” she said.

Kolman was killed on Sunday evening as he left his job at the City of David Museum in the Old City and headed in the direction of Jerusalem’s light rail.

It was a route he took every day to return home.

A terrorist stabbed him in the upper part of his body as he neared the area of the Lion’s Gate entrance to the Old City of Jerusalem. He was rushed to the Shaare Zedek Medical Center in serious condition and died just before midnight.

Kolman grew up in Moshav Keshet in the Golan Heights.

The City of David said he had been with them for years and had worked on their excavations.

“Adiel was a dedicated and loyal worker, a beloved staff member and a model family man,” the museum said.
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