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By IAN MUNRO
Saturday 11 August 2001
The Melbourne Age
Malki Roth was 15
years old, an accomplished musician and youth club leader, heading
into year 11 at school and thinking about studying at university.
Born in
Melbourne, like her father and three of her siblings, Malki's life
was rich with promise. Anything was possible. Now she is dead;
killed on Thursday by a suicide bomber in the heart of Jerusalem.
After a frantic
afternoon and evening, her family found her body in the pre-dawn
hours at the coroner's office in Tel Aviv. If anything could deepen
their grief it is this: the world forgot that behind the statistics
of body counts and reprisals was their lovely daughter and sister.
"She was murdered by a fanatic who
didn't know a thing about her," her father, Arnold Roth, said
yesterday. "It horrifies me that people are making comparisons -
there's this the Palestinians did; there's that the Israelis did.
"I am just hoping that people who care
enough to read will see there was a wonderful human being behind
this story.
"She was a fun-loving kid, a wonderful
musician - a prize-winning flautist. We have a handicapped child and
she has developed great sensitivities to the needs of the
handicapped. Malki was very involved in working as a youth leader,
extremely giving, very popular."
Mr Roth said he
and his wife, Frimet, moved their family to Israel in 1988, although
his extended family remains in Melbourne.
"We felt there are Jewish values which
you can only pass on to your children when you are living in a land
that has always been the Jewish homeland," he said.
"That's been true and we are blessed
with wonderful kids. This is a terrible tragedy but you have to draw
a distinction between the tragedy and the reason we are living here,
which is to live a full Jewish life." |
