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Sherri Mandell is an Israeli-American [1] author, mother and activist. She is best known as the mother of Koby Mandell, a thirteen-year-old American boy who was murdered near their home in Tekoa in May 2001. [2] [3] Sherri Mandell and her husband, Rabbi Seth Mandell, founded the Koby Mandell Foundation, and she wrote a book about the murder, The Blessing of a Broken Heart.
Mandell was born in New York and graduated from Cornell University in 1977. She received an M.A. in creative writing from Colorado State University and taught writing at the University of Maryland and at Penn State University. She is the author of Writers of the Holocaust, and has written for numerous magazines and journals, including The Washington Post , The Denver Post and The Jerusalem Post , and Hadassah Magazine . She and her husband currently write a blog at JPost.com.Heart Earned Wisdom
Sherri and Seth Mandell briefly lived in Israel, where she gave birth to their first child, Yaakov (Koby). In 1996, with her husband and their four children, she returned to Israel where she still lives today. Sherri and Seth, a rabbi and Israel activist, spent several years in Chinuch, Jewish education, prior to moving to Israel. Seth was the executive director of the University of Maryland Hillel in College Park, Maryland, from 1990 to 1996, and prior to that was the director of the Penn State University Hillel. The time they spent as a Hillel family, particularly when they were living in Silver Spring, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC, interested them in activism.
On May 8, 2001, Koby and a friend, Yosef Ishran, took off from school to hike in a canyon close to their home in Tekoa. Koby and Yosef were found bludgeoned to death with stones, an act attributed to Palestinian terrorists, although the murderers were never found. Sherri Mandell founded the Koby Mandell Foundation in their son's memory. She is featured as an expert speaker on the documentary Relentless: The Struggle for Peace in Israel .
The Koby Mandell Foundation, established in 2002, runs healing programs for families that have been directly affected by terror in Israel, having lost an immediate family member to a terrorist attack or an act of war. The Foundation sponsors Camp Koby, its flagship program, for children that have lost a parent or a sibling in an act of terror; Mothers' Healing Retreats for women bereaved by terrorist violence, and similar retreats for widows who have lost a husband to terror or war. Sherri currently directs the Mothers' Healing Retreats.
The Blessing of a Broken Heart (Toby Press, 2003) won the 2004 National Jewish Book Award in the Contemporary Jewish Life category. [4] The book describes Sherri’s loss, her struggle with the first stages of mourning, her journey to find peace, and her growing faith as she endeavors to understand her pain in the context of 3,000 years of Jewish history and tradition. The book was translated into three languages and has also been made into a stage play.
Her next book, The Road to Resilience (Toby Press, 2015) redefines resilience as a process of becoming greater as a result of challenges.
She is also the author of two picture books, “The Upside Down Boy and the Israeli Prime Minister” and 'The Elephant in the Sukkah.” Her latest memoir is about pastoral counseling and is called “Reaching for Comfort.”
Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz was an Israeli Chabad Chasidic rabbi, teacher, philosopher, social critic, author, translator and publisher.
Jewish religious terrorism is religious terrorism committed by extremists within Judaism.
Hillel Halkin is an American-born Israeli translator, biographer, literary critic, and novelist, who has lived in Israel since 1970.
Tekoa is an Israeli settlement organized as a community settlement in the West Bank, located 20 km northeast of Hebron, 16 km south of Jerusalem and in the immediate vicinity of the Palestinian village of Tuqu'. It falls under the jurisdiction of Gush Etzion Regional Council. In 2021 it had a population of 4,315.
The murder of Shalhevet Pass was a shooting attack carried out in Hebron, West Bank, on 26 March 2001, in which a Palestinian sniper killed 10-month-old Israeli infant Shalhevet Pass. The event shocked the Israeli public, partly because an investigation ruled that the sniper had deliberately aimed for the baby. According to Deborah Sontag of the New York Times, the murder became a "potent Israeli symbol as an innocent victim of the raging violence."
The murder of Eliyahu Asheri was a terror attack which carried out on June 25, 2006, in which Palestinian Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) militants kidnapped, and later murdered the 18-year-old Israeli high school student Eliyahu Asheri.
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Rabbi Hillel Poisic was a communal worker and Torah scholar. He was an expert in releasing agunot from their husbands, who abandoned them without divorce.
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NavaApplebaum was a 20-year-old Israeli-American woman who was murdered together with her father on the evening before her wedding by a Palestinian suicide bomber.
Nechama Tec is a Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of Connecticut. She received her Ph.D. in sociology at Columbia University, where she studied and worked with the sociologist Daniel Bell, and is a Holocaust scholar. Her book When Light Pierced the Darkness (1986) and her memoir Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood (1984) both received the Merit of Distinction Award from the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. She is also author of the book Defiance: The Bielski Partisans on which the film Defiance (2008) is based, as well as a study of women in the Holocaust. She was awarded the 1994 International Anne Frank Special Recognition prize for it.
The first openly lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender clergy in Judaism were ordained as rabbis and/or cantors in the second half of the 20th century.
Comedy for Koby is a bi-annual tour of Israel featuring some of America's top stand-up comedians. The tour, which was first launched in 2008, benefits The Koby Mandell Foundation, an Israeli non-profit organization that works with victims of terror attacks. Comedy for Koby is a project of Stand Up for Israel, which provides emotional support services to thousands of bereaved Israels. It is exclusively produced by DJW Productions. Stand up comic Avi Liberman founded Stand Up for Israel and is responsible for recruiting the fellow comedians on the tour.
Mandell "Bill" Berman (1917–2016) was the businessman and philanthropist behind the Mandell L. and Madeleine H. Berman Foundation, which supports Jewish education, and research and study of the contemporary American Jewish community. His philanthropic focus was on the storage, dissemination, and preservation of Jewish data, as well as Jewish education and special education.
The murders of Koby Mandell and Yosef Ishran occurred on 8 May 2001, when two Jewish teenagers, Yaakov "Koby" Mandell and Yosef Ishran, were killed on the outskirts of the Israeli settlement of Tekoa in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where they lived with their families. The identity of the killers has never been determined, though Israel and a number of sources state that unidentified Palestinian terrorists were responsible.
Kristine Luken was an American Christian who was murdered in a Palestinian terrorist attack on December 18, 2010, while hiking with her friend Kay Wilson in the hills of Jerusalem. Despite multiple stab wounds, Wilson survived the attack; Luken's body was later found by Israeli police, bound and stabbed to death. The Palestinian terror cell that perpetrated the attack were later arrested. During the investigation, the cell members also confessed to the murder of Neta Sorek, whose stabbed body had been found earlier that year near the Beit Jimal Monastery in the Judean Hills. The Palestinian terrorists were convicted of a series of violent crimes.
Laura Naomi Janner-Klausner is a British rabbi and an inclusion and development coach who served as the inaugural Senior Rabbi to Reform Judaism from 2011 until 2020. Janner-Klausner grew up in London before studying theology at the University of Cambridge and moving to Israel in 1985, living in Jerusalem for 15 years. She returned to Britain in 1999 and was ordained at Leo Baeck College, serving as rabbi at Alyth Synagogue until 2011. She has been serving as Rabbi at Bromley Reform Synagogue in south-east London since April 2022.
The 2014 Alon Shvut stabbing attack occurred on 10 November 2014, when Palestinian Maher al-Hashlamun first attempted to run his vehicle into a crowd waiting at the bus/hitch-hiking station at the entrance to the Israeli settlement of Alon Shvut, in the Gush Etzion section of the occupied West Bank, then, when the car was stopped by a bollard, got out and attacked with a knife, killing a young woman and wounding two others. The attack occurred four hours after the killing of Sergeant Almog Shiloni in Tel Aviv and took place at the same bus/hitch-hiking stop where three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and murdered in June 2014.
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The murder of Ori Ansbacher was a terror attack during which a Palestinian man raped and then murdered Ori Ansbacher, a 19-year-old young Israeli woman from Tekoa.
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