It’s been a while since I decided I can’t sit around and do nothing to help Israel, and while I have been setting up a few things like preparing a blog of my own and submitting a post here, I have finally encountered the straw that broke the camel’s back.
I am filled with rage right now.
I was reading through this post and a couple of the screenshots really got to me (specifically the third and the even more so the fifth). Now I look at this poor excuse for a human being’s Facebook page and while I have a lot I could say about him, I’m not going to. Aussie Dave already discussed him and besides, it would do nothing to help. Instead I am going to talk about my friend Ezra Schwartz, who this poor excuse for a human being calls some rather horrendous things and expresses joy over the death of without knowing the first thing about him.
Ezra Schwartz was a kind and warm hearted person. One of the nicest, most easy going people I have ever met. Since childhood he made friends with nearly everyone he met, with his goofy attitude and knowing smirk he could charm anyone. He and his best friend, that is, his sister, were inseparable. They went everywhere and did everything together. In high school, Ezra was on the baseball team and when he heard about the three boys being kidnapped, it hit him hard. He was very on top of all the latest news surrounding them and when the unfortunate end came around, he was determined to do something in their memory.
This is where I got to know Ezra. He joined the same yeshiva as me, one that allowed us to go and do charity or community service in the afternoons. The school showed us one opportunity that we could take. It was a park called Oz V’Gaon. It was just past Alon Shivut and the Tzomet HaGush, and it was a nature reserve and park being dedicated in memory of the three boys. We helped them clear an area for a Sukka and Ezra loved it. He could not get enough of bringing light to the memories of these three ordinary boys who ended up making the ultimate sacrifice for living in their ancestral homeland. Ezra would continue working at Oz V’Gaon with a group of friends once a week till November 19th when he was murdered. He was murdered because he was a Jew. When we were discussing his life we had as a school decided not to glorify him and attribute undue praise – the issue with that was we couldn’t think of one thing that he had ever done to upset anybody. Ezra would never have hurt a fly, he was fun-loving, caring, and an all around pleasure to be with. He even opened up his room to me to sleep in for two weeks while the AC in my room was being fixed, and anyone who knows yeshiva dorms knows that is not any easy thing. Whether it was his jokes, his voices or his recitation of full paragraphs of Harry Potter by heart, there was always something that would get the crowd going, and now he is taken from us.
To the guy who thinks that Ezra was other than an amazing human being – I would beg you to reconsider, but since you make assumptions about people based on how they died, and take pleasure in the fact that they are dead without knowing anything else other than they were murdered, and call anyone who practices a religion a “religious nut”, I guess you are too busy being racist to think with any sort of logic.
I know I shouldn’t get this worked up over just one person, but this isn’t the first instance of anything close to this happening and it sure won’t be the last – not about Ezra or anyone else.
