Not forgotten

Congratulations to the Boim family, who today won a landmark $156m. from charities supporting Hamas, in an American courtroom. Hopefully this will constitute a blow to the terror organization's cash cows, and thus to Hamas itself.
The Boims' son David (/Dovid), an American-born 17-year old, was killed outside Bet El as he was waiting for a bus in 1996. I used to know David, as I was very good friends with his sister; he was also in my brother's year at school. What I mainly remember is his loud laugh. He was, as they say in Hebrew, a chevreman, socially-inclined.

On the witness stand Tuesday, Joyce Boim tried to give the jury a sense of her son, describing him as the family peacemaker — a sweet, happy, funny boy who volunteered on an ambulance. She remembered how he would bound up the stairs after school, slamming the door as he came into the apartment, and lift the lids of pots simmering on the stove to see what she was making for dinner.
“He was the one who cemented everyone together,” she said.
Joyce Boim’s own life changed unalterably the moment David died.
She told the jury about driving to the hospital after learning that David had been hurt and about the ambulance ride across town at breakneck speed to the trauma center at Hadassah Hospital at Ein Kerem, a towel wrapped around David’s neck.
Soon after David was wheeled into the emergency room, a doctor came out to tell her that he had died, Joyce Boim said, weeping.
“I knew the second David died that I’d never be the same,” she said.
To this day, she said, she feels terrible numbness, shock and emptiness.

When people are killed in terror attacks in Israel, they and their families naturally get a lot of press for a few days -- then they disappear from the public eye, either because another incident and more deaths take over, or simply because life goes on. I hope David's family know that there are people out there they probably haven't even thought about in 10 years or more, who still think occasionally of David and remember him fondly.