Channel 10 Features Terror Victims’ Bar/Bas Mitzvah

In a report on last week’s mass Bar Mitzvah ceremony at the Western Wall organized by the Chabad Terror Victims Project, Israel’s Channel 10 News featured the tragic story of 13-year-old Eliad Shefi, who lost his older sister when Palestinian terrorists dressed as Israeli soldiers broke into their home in 2002.

Shefi joined 85 other children at the Western Wall in what has become an annual tradition for CTVP, a Chabad-Lubavitch run program that provides spiritual, emotional and financial support for terror victims and their families.

Though only four years old at the time of the attack that claimed the lives of three others in the village of Adora, Shefi remembers that Sabbath morning vividly. His father was praying in the synagogue and his mother was home with him, his brother and his five-year-old sister Danielle. As Shefi recalls, when his mother saw the terrorists coming up the stairs, she tried to hide the children under the bed.

“I got one bullet to my head and miraculously it hit my shoulder instead,” Shefit told the Channel 10 crew. “My mother thought she lost two children that day.”

After lighting a Chanukah candle at President Shimon Peres’ residence, he returned home to light a candle for his sister.

“Life would be so different if she hadn’t been murdered, if she was with us,” said Shefi. “She was my big sister. She did so, so much for me.”