Baruch Goldstein

You mentioned being in Israel during the year Rabin was assassinated.

A few years before he was assassinated, Dr. Baruch Goldstein walked into a mosque and opened fire on people praying.

And about that horrible terrorist event, like Jewish terrorist event in the settlements, Rabin said something like, You, meaning Baruch Goldstein, like you are not one of us.

You are an errant weed.

You are, you know, like your interpretation of Judaism, whatever it was that motivated you to commit violence against innocent people going into their mosque.

Like you are persona non grata.

You don't get to be buried in a Jewish cemetery.

So anybody who's visited the grave of Baruch Goldstein, we did an Israel trip a few years ago.

And so much like the other, uh, uh, factions in Palestine, they joined that uprising and, a- a- and carried out their first armed attack on an Israeli, uh, military target in 1989.

And carried out a few more attacks in nine- 1990, and they're, they're, they're still small and not well known at that time, and they don't really become a, a, a force in Palestine until after 1994 when, uh, Baruch Goldstein, an American from Brooklyn, enters the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, um, on Ramadan and slaughters 28 Palestinians in a gruesome act of violence before he's beaten to death.

And, and, and, and when you interview, and, and you have many, um, uh, uh, terrorist attacks, uh, in which Hamas kills Is- innocent Israeli civilians after that.

But it's all after '94.

I was in the army.

And after the Baruch Goldstein affair back in 1994, I was banned from ha- having a gun, thrown out of the army, and I tried to get it back a couple of times.

And with Itamar in there, I got it.

And a lot of people got guns 'cause he realized you gotta arm the Jewish people.

She said, "It's not because of us that we have to go in, you know, go into Hebron.

Baruch Goldstein was a religious person.

He, he wasn't a secular person.

It's because of you, and you, you create a larger burden for people like us, for the secular people, because you don't join the army." And at the time I was considering joining the army, for what it's worth.

Shelley and I get into it all, why she and her husband of 45 years chose at age 20 to make their home in Hebron, why they have stayed, the experience, as she puts it, of living in the shadow of 1929 every day.

We discuss the 1994 attack on Muslim worshipers in Hebron when Baruch Goldstein, an American Israeli physician, took matters into his own hands.

I expect you will find Shelley's comments on that mass murder interesting, to say the least, as did I.

At dawn prayers on February 25th, 1994, Dr. Goldstein murdered 29 Muslim worshipers and injured 125.

He was beaten to death at the scene by survivors.

Shelley and I also get into October 7th and the dread on that morning as the gravity of the situation became clearer.

There were shootings on the road.

My husband at the time was the head of security here in Hebron, okay? It was a rather small community, but he was in touch with the army, you know, the, the top army officials here and everything, and he was called to a meeting with, um, with the head of security in Kiryat Arba and with Dr.

They started targeting people on the street, beating them up.

And as I talk about in the book, It inspired Mary Kahana that then moved to Israel, Baruch Goldstein that followed him from the JBL, and then massacred dozens of innocent Palestinians, right? So there is a difference between protecting yourself and then engaging in violence because you believe that somehow if you push if you put punch them first but they you'll be safer no if you punch them safe first you're just creating the same thing that you're railing against

i agree with you and yet you know i'm having this uh you know angel angel and devil here where You know, again, and I'm very much not a physically confrontational person.

I'm much more comfortable in the intellectual confrontational realm.

On the other were the rebels, so disgusted with their leadership that some prepared to take matters into their own hands.

It was in this atmosphere that a young physician named Baruch Goldstein walked into the Tomb of the Patriarchs on the morning of the Jewish holiday of Purim in 1994 and murdered 29 Palestinians while they were praying.

The massacre horrified Israeli society, including most religious Zionists.

It breaks my heart to tell you that a small minority of Jewish Israelis actually praised the murders, with some rabbis justifying the massacre as Jewish self-defense.

Rabbi Dov Lior, a leading figure on the religious right, even heralded Goldstein as a kadosh, a holy martyr.

This fringe was just that, a fringe.

Most rabbis, religious Zionists or otherwise, were appalled by the massacre and by their colleagues' approval of Goldstein's act of terrorism.

Rabbi Aaron Lichtenstein, one of the great religious Zionist heads of yeshiva, rosh yeshiva, responded to Rabbi Dov Lior with righteous fury.