JERUSALEM — Dan Illouz, 23, was at a kolel in Montreal, giving a shiur on Rav Kook, when he heard that a terrorist had opened fire on a classroom at Yeshivat Merkaz HaRav in Jerusalem and killed eight students.
“I will never forget where I was when I found out what had happened,” said Illouz, of that horror-filled March 6, 2008. “We were in the midst of discussing some of the philosophies of Rav Avraham Itzhak Hakohen Kook, the yeshiva’s founder.”
That night Illouz was inspired by something Rav Kook said. It is: “The purely righteous do not complain about evil, rather they add justice. They do not complain about heresy, rather they add faith. They do not complain about ignorance, rather they add wisdom.” And so Illouz took action when he returned home from kolel.
As soon as he got home, Illouz, who made aliyah two months ago, logged onto Facebook.com and opened a public group called In Memory of Those Killed in the Attack on the Merkaz HaRav Yeshiva.
“I felt I had to do something, that something constructive had to come out of this horrible attack, to bring some light into the world in response to the darkness that was created on that night,” said Illouz, then a law student at McGill University.
What started off as a personal outlet for him and his friends and family’s mourning, in days gathered a membership of more than 30,000 people from around the world, from all walks of life, non-Jews and Jews of all different denominations, alike.
“There was an amazing, passionate response from all kinds of people,” Illouz said. “I think that’s because these kids were so young and because they were in the middle of learning Torah and working on becoming better people when they were attacked. That is a tragedy everyone can relate to. When you see something bad, you want to turn it into something at least a little bit good, and that is cross-national, cross-religious, and cross-cultural. It’s a human response.”
Illouz took the success of his Facebook group as a testament to the strength of unity between people and between Jews, in particular. “As Jews, we tend to focus on our differences – whether we are religious or secular, Ashkenazi or Sephardic, of this political opinion or that one. But the differences between us are small in relation to what we have in common.”
Illouz, who in 2005 started a Jewish unity advocacy student group at McGill University called Michberet Montreal, aimed at “energizing and uniting the Jewish student body toward common Jewish values,” decided that something more needed to come from the outpouring of energy on Facebook.
“When I saw how many people had joined, I knew we had to do something bigger to mark the memorial,” Illoz said. “We wanted to do something that would be a lasting tribute – something that we would be able to hold in our hands for many years to come.”
After polling group members for suggestions, the consensus was to publish a memorial book. “The book as an entity isn’t necessarily what’s important. The fact that tens of thousands of people came together in unity to create it is what is so amazing,” Illoz said.
United: Dispelling Darkness with Light is the 190-page fruit of Illouz’s labours, along with several other group members who volunteered to do the layout, design and typesetting. It contains tributes on each of the victims, as well as 16 essays on the subject of unity, each by a different prominent rabbi. Among them are chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, Sir Rabbi Jonathan Sacks; national religious leader and rosh yeshiva of the Ateret Cohanim Yeshiva in Jerusalem’s Muslim quarter, Rabbi Shlomo Aviner; and Rabbi Mordechai Elon of Keren Yishai, a non-profit organization that grew out of the need for a forum for dialog between Jews from all walks of life, all ethnic origins, religious beliefs and political views.
The memorial book is being distributed free at university campuses and synagogues in Montreal, Toronto, New York, Pennsylvania, Los Angeles and Jerusalem (by Illouz) and can be downloaded free from the website www.mercazmemorial.com/site/, which initially served the purpose of fundraising for the printing of the project (and raised a total of $5,000 US to that end). More than 3,000 visitors have visited the site.
“I feel that we have succeeded to create a lasting memorial to these boys,” said Illouz, who is now in basic training with the Israel Defence Forces. “They say that when righteous people die they are still considered alive, by their influence on the living. Now that we have a lasting memorial in their names, it somehow keeps them alive and that is very important to us.”
