“A 14-Year-Old Is Not Supposed to Die in the Street”: The Day After the Yerushalayim Tragedy

Fourteen-year-old Chaim Yosef Eisenthal z”l was killed last night during a protest in Yerushalayim, an event that has left the city—and far beyond it—reeling in shock and grief.

[Pictured above is the invitation to Yosef’s bar mitzvah, held a year and a half ago.]

The morning after the tragedy did not begin with routine headlines or updates, but with a heavy sense of anguish. The loss of a child, many said, eclipses politics, sectors, and arguments, forcing a painful national reckoning.

At the opening of the Kikar FM broadcast in Israel, host Eli Gothelf said that the very fact that a 14-year-old boy lost his life in the street should shake the entire country. “Not a sector, not a camp, not a political debate,” he said. “In a democracy, protest is a right. But in a democracy, a 14-year-old child is not supposed to die in the street. He is not supposed to be killed.”

Gothelf stressed that when a child is killed, questions of affiliation or ideology become irrelevant. “When a child goes out to a protest and does not come home, this is no longer an internal dispute. This is a flashing red warning light,” he said.

Also interviewed on the program was Motti Bukchin, spokesman for ZAKA, who spoke with visible pain as he described what the organization’s volunteers encountered at the scene.

“This is a horrifying event,” Bukchin said. “I don’t know whether to call it an accident, a killing, or an attack. In the end, there is a child in his early teens who was killed for nothing. Entire families are destroyed.”

According to Bukchin, ZAKA volunteers arrived shortly after the incident, while rescue forces were still working to extricate the victim. “The bus dragged him,” he said. “People ran after the driver and shouted for him to stop—and he kept going.”

He described long, agonizing minutes as teams waited for firefighters to arrive with hydraulic equipment. “Only after they lifted the bus were they able to extricate the victim. Sadly, he was already without signs of life, with multi-system injuries, no pulse and no breathing.”

Bukchin emphasized that, from his perspective, the central issue is not only the sequence of events but their tragic result. “It doesn’t matter what came before what,” he said. “The outcome is a 14-year-old child who lost his life in a tragic way.”

He noted that the scene was especially difficult, requiring extended and painstaking work by volunteers to collect findings and care for the deceased with dignity. “This work is done in front of the public, in front of a family that understands that their child has been killed. It is true kindness,” he said.

Despite decades of experience with ZAKA, Bukchin said the pain never dulls. “Every time it is new. No two events are the same. Every family, every person who dies, is an entire world.”

{Matzav.com}