On July 28, 2002, I was a fourteen-year-old girl. It was during the days of the Second Intifada, and like everyone my age, I was accustomed to eulogies by that point and an old hand at funerals. But when I stood with my mother by Yeshivat Merkaz HaRav in Jerusalem to listen to the eulogies for the Dikstein family – Yosef and Hanna Dikstein and their nine-year-old son Shuva’el, it was something else entirely. Two parents and a child, murdered in a shooting attack two days earlier, on Friday, just before Shabbat. Nine orphans. The eldest son’s promise to his murdered parents to take care of his siblings. It was too much—far too much.

“Rav Oded Volansky was with them the entire Shabbat,” someone told my mother. He stayed with them. Helped them pull themselves back from the abyss. Told them: tomorrow we will mourn, but today is Shabbat, and we will continue walking in your parents’ path by celebrating it.

It was not surprising.

I do not know Rav Oded Volansky well on a personal level, but my mother worked with him throughout the long years of the struggle to free my father, Natan Sharansky, from the Soviet Gulag. Rav Oded was one of the pillars of what my mother called “the headquarters” – the organization behind the “Shomer Achi Anochi” (“I am my brother’s keeper) campaign........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)