Toulouse Widow Interviewed by Israeli Television

by Joshua Runyan

Eva Sandler weeps during the Jerusalem funeral of her husband and two young sons on Wednesday.

In a new video on Jewish.TV, the multimedia portal of Judaism website Chabad.org, Eva Sandler, who lost her husband and their two sons in last week’s horrific attack outside the Ozar Hatorah high school in Toulouse, France, looks back at the tragedy and advises parents to make the most of their time with their children.

Raw with emotion, she tells an interviewer from Israel’s Channel 2 that like many Jewish mothers, she would sing the Shema prayer with her children every night. But for several days before the attack, she didn’t get to because she was in Paris. Two nights before the attack, she resolved to get back into the routine.

“What I want to say to people, wives as well as husbands, is that we need to pay more attention to our spouses and our children,” she says in the video. “Sometimes we are tired, hungry, irritable or busy … and we end up not paying so much attention to our families. We don’t comprehend how important it is.”

The remarks echo a theme in a message she released last week through Chabad.org in which she tells parents to kiss their children.

Asked what she wants people to take away from the massacre, Sandler says matter-of-factly that she wants people to “grow stronger religiously from this story, not just … be terrified and forget about it.”