Volume 67, Issue 3

Reflections on Yoni Jesner, Friend and Martyr  

By Yechiel Robinson

 Around 1:00 PM on Thursday, September 19, in downtown Tel Aviv, an Arab terrorist stepped on a bus and blew himself up, murdering six people.  My friends Yoni Jesner and his cousin Gideon Black, two nineteen-year-old British students, were riding that bus.  Yoni suffered severe brain damage and died the next morning, Erev Sukkos, at about 10:30 AM.

 Yoni was a second-year classmate with Gideon and I at Yeshivat Har Etzion, where we study Talmud, Bible, and other Judaic subjects.  The yeshiva is located in a town between Jerusalem and Hebron.  It includes Israeli men on the five-year "hesder" program, in which they devote fifteen months to army service, and overseas students, mainly from North America, the United Kingdom, and South Africa.

 On September 29, following Simchas Torah, I went with fifty other yeshiva students to meet Yoni's family at the Renaissance Hotel.  For two wonderful hours we told stories and related memories.  Although I cannot do justice to the complexity of Yoni's personality, I hope to provide a taste from my own experiences and from stories I heard at the hotel. Yoni grew up in Glasgow, Scotland, where he developed his unique accent.  He participated in the various concerns of the Jewish community, from the synagogue to the burial society.  Local youth remember Yoni as a leader of Bnei Akiva programs and as the teacher of a short class on the weekly Torah portion once a week.

 Yoni liked to make people happy.  I remember several conversations we had last year in the Beis Midrash (study hall) and the hallways.  He would ask how I was doing, and we would discuss my concerns, or sometimes the Talmudical topic we were studying that day. Yoni pulled hilarious pranks, especially on his close friends.  He convinced his younger sister Yael that a stampede of elephants caused the pavement of a certain street in Glasgow to crack.  Eitan Green reminisced, "Yoni once put a note on the message board: 'Anyone who has lost his right leg, please see Eitan Green.'  And all these Israelis came to me asking, what do I want with their right leg?"

 Yoni planned to enroll in medical school next year.  He wanted to become a doctor and move to Israel.  Yoni's serious devotion to Torah study spilled over into the lunch and dinner breaks.  He was working to complete the Mishnah and the Mishneh Torah (Code of Maimonides). Yoni was defined by kindness throughout his life and even after his death.  His organs were donated to several patients, including a seven-year-old Palestinian girl.

 The yeshiva remembers Yoni alongside nineteen former students who sacrificed their lives while serving in the Israeli army, whose names appear on a memorial plaque at the main entrance to the Beis Midrash.  The Israeli public remembers Yoni as but one of the hundreds of victims of the Arab terror over the last two years.  In a recent speech, Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, one of the two Roshei Yeshiva (deans), quoted the Mishnah, "One who destroys a single Jewish life is considered by the Scripture as if he destroyed an entire world" (Sanhedrin 4:5).  I think of a thousand people like Yoni, and immediately I am overwhelmed by the tremendous suffering, the broken families and crushed hopes, that the Jewish people have endured for too long.

 In memory of Yoni, my friends and I are collectively studying the entire Mishnah by the one-month anniversary of his passing. I hope that the memory of Yoni's life will reverberate in our daily lives.  I hope we will smile and say hello to our friends, and make them happy, much as Yoni did.  I hope we will renew our love for Torah study, service of God, and kindness to humanity.  I hope we will build our long-term goals around supporting the Jewish community and the state of Israel.  I hope we will all become closer and more sensitive to one another's suffering and loss.

 I hope we will be comforted by the following words, which Yoni's mother Marsha wrote from Glasgow in a letter to the entire yeshiva: "It is so hard for us here and you there to see Yoni's makom [seat] empty, but I know he is very close to us wherever we are, and that his soul will continue to be a deep part of all of us who knew and loved him."

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