Ashkelon Teen Hit by Shrapnel Begins Recovery

With Hamas rockets still being hurled at Israel for the seventh straight day, Israelis found something to cheer about as Yarin Levy, a 16-year-old boy who was seriously injured yesterday in a rocket attack in Ashkelon regained consciousness this morning.

Speaking with local media, Avinoam Levy called the ongoing recovery of his son at the Barzilai Medical Center “a great miracle.”

“Yarin is an active child, a good child, a nice child and the oldest,” says Rabbi Moshe Vilenkin of Chabad Lubavitch of Ashkelon, who taught Yarin two years ago at the Ohr Menachem school there.

People across the country—and around the Jewish world, thanks to posts on social media—had been praying and performing acts of good deeds on behalf of the teenager.

Those actions were deeply personal for members of the Chabad community in the coastal city of Ashkelon, as Yarin had attended Ohr Menachem, a Chabad school there, since grade one. While he now goes to a school in Rechovot, his younger sisters and younger brother remain students in the Chabad Ashkelon schools.

According to Vilenkin, Chabad mobilized immediately upon hearing the news.

As members of the community began reciting tehillim, particularly Psalm 17, one of the local Chabad emissaries went to the hospital where Yarin was taken to meet with the family and find out if they needed anything.

Vilenkin says the family asked for people to pray and say a misheberach, a blessing for the sick.

According to Rabbi Menachem Lieberman, director of Chabad-Lubavitch of Ashkelon, the city’s Chabad emissaries have been keeping in touch with the community via What’s App. One of the more recent postings came from Itai Nagar, a former student at Ohr Menachem, who was Yarin’s “big brother” when they were in school together, said Lieberman.

“His situation has become much better. He’s regained consciousness and he is speaking a little bit with difficulty,” Nagar wrote in a message to the rabbis. “There’s no question that with wonderful miracles and merit of prayers he gets stronger moment to moment. Don’t stop the prayers!”

Yarin’s recovery, says Lieberman, is just one of many miracles that people have been witnessing.

He noted that a rocket landed very close to the Ohr Chaya, Chabad’s girls’ school, shattering all the windows on one side of the building. More than 300 children from first through 12th grade attend the school.

“Hashem’s presence is felt in this unique time by everyone,” says Lieberman. “Over 800 missiles, and almost nothing has happened. There is such an awakening to do more mitzvot; it is very exciting. We feel we are in the land that Hashem’s eyes are upon us all the time.”