After Sbarro’s, A New Resolve

By Curt Schleier
Special To The Jewish Week

Arnold Roth came to Washington, D.C., last month to participate in an international conference on terrorism. It is a subject he knows well. In fact, six years ago, he became an expert. Aug. 9, 2001, when a Sbarro Pizza was the scene of a deadly suicide bombing, became the worst day of his life.

“It was the middle of school vacation in August. It was about 2 o’clock. I was back at my desk [after lunch], and the TV was on. CNN was reporting that there was an explosion in the center of Jerusalem.”

Within a relatively short time — though it certainly seemed longer — Roth and his wife Frimet made contact with all their children save one, their eldest daughter, Malka Chana, 15.

It wasn’t a good sign.

“She was a good girl, very responsible,” Roth says. “Then we started getting calls from her friends asking where she was.”

In the end, Malka’s body was the last identified, about 12 hours after the explosion. All told, 15 were killed, hundreds wounded and one woman remains in a coma.

But this story doesn’t end where you might expect, with anger and grief alone. As an outgrowth of the tragedy, the Roths founded the Malki Foundation in their daughter’s memory. The foundation helps Israeli families provide home care for their disabled children.

But the story didn’t start here either. It began almost 35 years ago in New York City where Roth, then a young lawyer from Australia, was working and studying for a graduate degree in Jewish studies. Another Australian national introduced him to Frimet, an American who was studying law.

“On our very first date [Frimet] asked me if I saw aliyah as part of my future,” he says. “My answer must have been right, because we’re married 31 years.”

The couple moved to Australia, had four children [three boys and Malka], but remained steadfast in their determination to settle in the Holy Land.

“The arrival of the children didn’t change things. We always had our hearts in our mouths at the idea of raising children in Israel. But the idea of raising children in Israel was very central to the notion of moving. We were moving to Israel because of the children. Joking around, my wife used to say we were going to hide them in the basement.”

Tragedy first struck the family seven years ago. Their youngest daughter, Haya became ill, suffered very serious brain damage and became multiply disabled. Malka spent considerable time with her younger sister during several lengthy stays in the hospital and after she returned home.
“We thought [Haya’s] disability was the great tragedy of our lives,” Roth says. “That turned out not to be true.”

Despite the family’s hardships, their faith has remained unwavering. “There’s no question about our faith,” Roth said. “But we did question God. We have questions to which we wish we had answers, but we have the feeling we’ll probably never get them.”

Anger, they decided, was not the proper answer. While in D.C., he participated in numerous weekend retreats for families who have lost loved ones to terrorism. “I have never once heard anyone talk about hatred or revenge or killing Arabs. I don’t say that they don’t think about it. But they don’t talk about it. What they talk about endlessly, compulsively, is how to find a normal life for themselves and their families. When people understand that, they understand what Israeli society is really about. It’s based on Jewish values.”

About his family’s ordeal and the urge to turn it into something positive, Roth says: “Plenty of people have done more things: a resource room at a school, a library, a bus shelter. They’re not doing it because they want to get medals. For them, it’s terribly important to find some meaning in this tragedy and in a Jewish way, you find meaning by doing the opposite, constructive things.”

More information on the Malki Foundation is available at: www.kerenmalki.org.

The article above first appeared in the Jewish Week, New York, on 16th November 2007. It is online on the Jewish Week website here. An offline PDF version of the printed page is here.