As our young family grew, nursing from this holy land its history and the practical blessings it now gave, we also experienced many trials. It was the coming of the age when the voice of the turtledove could be heard again in G-ds land. But the world order marched against us. Against the odds and legislations that other countries tried to implement by clamping down on the natural growth, little Itamar which started as a row of prefab houses and a generator developed into the largest expanse of thriving land in Yehudah and Shomron. Hothouses, organic farms, olive groves, vineyards, and educational centers popped up as if a genie came out of a bottle and honored the obligation of its masters call. The redemption was being materialized. Hashem, who brought us out of the desert brought us to a land unsown and we followed Him, the remnant of the dry bones to the land of Gerizzim, Yosef, Itamar and Elazar, to Gideon. The land turned from brown to green. There were peaceful days. There were dark days too, days so dark when sinister beasts would come to kill us just for living. At times it seemed as if only the mountains surrounding us would hug us in consolation. Where were our brothers?

Itamar is a place that you can almost see all of Israel from. On a clear day, you can even see the three seas- the Galilee, the Dead Sea and the Mediteranean. It is in the heart of Israel but the people that live here live on the final frontier. This is not some far away place. Although it may seem remote in the luxury of its expanse, it is just an hour from Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and the Ben Gurion airport. Israel is a small country. We like to think here on Itamar that we are protecting Israel.

I am sitting outside in the warm sun staring at our apple tree, a tree planted years ago when we first moved in. It looks almost like a cherry blossom, like the ones in the Botanical gardens. The tree stands tall but it is bare. It looks bare and lifeless but I know that soon it will bud and flower and all that pass by it will marvel at its beauty and aroma. It is a tree planted in G-ds land. It has been a long winter this year and this week it seemed that Spring would never come.

It is Purim on Sunday and we have to gather the strength to rejoice as we remember how we foiled our enemies, enemies that planned to kill every man woman child and infant. On Rosh Chodesh Nissan, just two weeks away, we will bless the trees and rejoice again in the promise of our redemption. See the tree as it stands rooted into this land. See the people of Itamar, beautiful and strong. The family of Itamar would like to express its sincere appreciation to all the people that have sent letters of support, their care and love to us during this most horrific ordeal. Chazak Chazak Venitchazek-we will overcome

– Shabbat Shalom
Leah Goldsmith

The Fogel family represents the tip of the spearhead of our redemption in these days, a family of ideals who was evicted from their home in Gush Katif. Instead of being embittered and filled with resentment for their Jewish brothers, they decided to continue doing the most they could possibly do for the fulfillment of G-d's prophecy for the Jewish people as it returns to its beloved land. The family bought a new house in a neighborhood that was built in response to the massacre in the Shabo house. Both parents were teachers of torah ideals. From my few encounters with Rabbi Fogol, I saw a quiet and humble man who was often dressed in his army uniform. He was an officer in the reserves. My main exposure to this family was when my daughter broke her knee badly and needed assistance getting to and from her classroom. Tamar Fogol, the little girl who discovered her parents butchered in their home, was the one to always take care of my girl. She always did everything with a smile. At the funeral Rabbi Lau said, "Tamar, you have to be the mother of your remaining brothers".

We know that G-d never gives a person a harder test that he is capable of handling. This poor girl saw her family brutally murdered. We know all of G-ds ways are hidden from understanding. Yes we know that Tamar will be a good Ima to her little brothers. The Jewish people are waking up from their 2000 years sleep in exile. We are learning from the Fogol family and the others who paid the ultimate price for the Land of Israel and the redemption of the world from the forces of darkness. May Hashem give Tamar the strength and fortitude to raise her family to be future beacons of light for us here on Itamar and all of Israel and all of the world.

Alon Zimmerman

We were nearing the end of our Shabbat meal this past Friday night. Filled with the warmth of the pleasant family atmosphere, our younger children are preparing for bed. Binah, who recently became bat mitzvah, asks for permission to go to her friend’s house for a Shabbat gathering.

“Yes, sweetheart, you can go,” I say. “Just make sure you’re back by 10:15.” My murdered neighbors.

Unusually for me, I am too tired to wait for Binah and her older brother, who went to a friend’s house for the entire Shabbat meal, to return home. After clearing the table, I retire to my room and sink into a deep sleep.

At 2 AM, my husband jumps out of bed. My oldest daughter is calling him. Soldiers are at the door. “Is everything O.K.?” I call out sleepily. At 2 AM, my husband jumps out of bed. My oldest daughter is calling him. Soldiers are at the door.

“Is everything O.K.?” I call out sleepily.

My husband checks on all the children; they’re all safely at home. He reports back to the soldiers.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“Some kind of security incident,” he replies. “They’re checking up on all the families to make sure that everything is okay. I think we’d better say Psalms.”

I get up and join my husband in prayer, concentrating on the positive verses and mentally blocking out all the verses that seem to insinuate evil tidings. “Think good and it will be good,” I tell myself.

From time to time I look out of my bedroom window. To the side, I can see military vehicles driving up in the direction of the newly built houses at the other side of the village—an unusual sight on Shabbat for the religious community of Itamar. This is obviously a case when profaning the sanctity of Shabbat is permitted: lives are clearly in danger . . .

From time to time I look out of my bedroom window. I can see military vehicles driving up in the direction of the newly built houses at the other side of the village—an unusual sight on Shabbat Military flares are exploding in the dark night sky above, illuminating the hills around us, a sure sign that the army is searching for somebody or something ominous out there. I continue saying Psalms, trying to fathom from the familiar, calming words whether all is good, or not; but I am no prophetess.

I see a group of soldiers walk across the synagogue courtyard just beneath my window, wearing helmets and bullet-proof vests, guns at their sides.

The flow of vehicles continues. Military jeeps and ambulances are now rolling out of the village. I notice civilians walking quickly to the village offices, which are also in view from my window. During times of danger the offices serve as headquarters for the emergency task force which collects and relays information to us citizens.

Seeing the civilians walking freely outside, I realize that the incident has come to its end. Maybe now we can learn what happened. I am still optimistic.

My husband spots a friend and walks down to greet him. Through the window I watch them embrace in a bear hug. I try to discern from their motions whether all is well. An hour has passed since we awoke.

Exhausted, I crawl back into bed, waiting for my husband’s return with news. Itamar, Israel

At long last he comes in but stands there in silence. Something is clearly not right.

“Is anyone injured?”

“Yes,” he replies quietly, and adds no more. I recognize that if he could, he would ensure me that nobody had been killed. I am dumbfounded.

“Terrorists infiltrated the village and broke into one of the houses,” he tells me slowly, and is silent once more. Unfortunately, in the twelve years that we have lived here, Itamar has known too many similar incidents.

“Was anyone saved?” I ask him haltingly, well-versed in the ramifications of such an occurrence, but wishing only to hear good to the same extent that he wishes to refrain from telling me of the evil.

“Three of the six children were saved.” I instantly derive that the parents, too, were not spared.

Not wishing to leave me groping for questions any longer, he adds, “There were five killed altogether, the Fogels . . .”

A chill grips my heart.

It’s Shabbat, I tell myself. Try not to cry on Shabbat.

I try to defeat the tears that threaten to overwhelm me with the power of my mind, by regulating my breathing to the rhythm of a chassidic meditation. I toss and turn in bed. Sleep evades me for the next few hours. Towards dawn I finally fall into a short, fitful sleep, dreaming strange dreams.

I wake up at 7 o’clock to the sound of my children’s voices, hoping ever so briefly that last night was nothing more than a horrific nightmare. Alas.

My husband is already in synagogue, praying in the early service, as he does every day. I must get up to tell the children before they run down, too, and hear the shocking news from other sources.

“The Shabbat gathering I went to last night was at the Fogels!” Binah tells me through her tears, as I sit with her on her bed. “We all left there together and Tamar [Fogel] was with us!”

“That’s why she was saved,” I reply, gently caressing her.

Throughout Shabbat everything centers on the terrorist attack that left Tamar and two of her younger brothers so dreadfully orphaned at such an early age.

“Mrs. Fogel was helping to organize the celebrations for the Talmud Torah [boys’ school]’s twentieth anniversary,” my fourteen-year-old son tells us with tears in his eyes. This year, until baby Hadas was born, Ruth Fogel had been working as the secretary for the school while the regular secretary was on maternity leave.

“Last year she was form tutor for the other ninth-grade class,” my now tenth-grade daughter tells us. “She taught us, too . . .”—and, I remember now, Mrs. Fogel would often give my daughter a lift to school.

After the morning prayers each of the children goes off to a specially arranged meeting with their familiar educational figures from the village and professionals in trauma treatment. There they hear the whole story in a way that is supposedly suited to their age (is there really a way to tell young children that their schoolmates and their parents have been brutally murdered in cold blood?!)

Although I hardly knew the family myself, that doesn’t help ease the shock, horror and pain that I share with my children, with my community, with my people. And, I remind myself, G-d says He shares our pain with us, too: “In all their troubles, He is troubled” (Isaiah 63:9; Talmud, Taanit 16a).

The names of the victims have not yet been released to the general public. After Shabbat is over, I call my seventeen-year-old son in yeshiva high school in Jerusalem—Mercaz Harav. Was it only three years ago that we were at our wits’ end with worry over what was going on there? He was only in ninth grade at the time and, by Divine Providence, was out of the yeshiva when the gunman shot at the boys learning there in the library, injuring one of my son’s roommates and killing one of his classmates along with seven other pupils . . .

I can’t make a call out of my cell phone—the cell network is busy, probably overloaded with callers who have just heard the horrific tidings after Shabbat. I call again from our land line and my son answers immediately.

“Have you heard the news?” I ask him gently.

“Sure. My friends told me something was going on in Itamar and I was just checking it up on the Internet. I was worried about you.” I didn’t ask him why he didn’t call us to find out.

My heart is torn to pieces. Why do my children have to know such suffering at such a tender age?

Unlike my heart, my faith is whole, as is the faith of our community and all those who build their homes in every part of the Land of Israel. We are aware that by living where we live we are protecting Jerusalem from more such vicious attacks; and Tel-Aviv, Haifa, Netanya, Ashdod . . . No matter how much we suffer, our faith grows ever stronger. We channel our pain into positive actions, standing solidly by our resolve never to succumb to the use of violence against the brutality that smacks us in the face again and again. For every Jew murdered, more orchards, more fields, more greenhouses will be planted; another house, another neighborhood, another village will be built, with the compassion and benevolence that we learn from the Torah and will continue to teach to our children.

We share the legacy of faith that the Fogels, Ehud and Ruth and their three innocent children, have left us. They set up their lives together in Netzarim, in Gush Katif, only to be cast out of their home, their lives uprooted, for our enemies to trample upon its ruins in a fantasy of peace that has never been realized. Undaunted, they relocated to the town of Ariel, and then finally to Itamar—just two short years ago. Rabbi Ehud found his place as one of the rabbis in the school here and Ruth continued to build their beautiful family in their new home. Together, they planted an olive orchard and taught their children to love the people of Israel, to love the Torah and to love the Land of Israel. Together they were snatched away from us by the brutal hands of bloodthirsty terrorists.

May the Fogels’ souls be bound in the bundle of life!

It is no longer Shabbat, we are allowed to cry.

One of my earliest childhood memories was sitting around with my cousins in the picturesque Catskill Mountains and telling them that one day I will be living in the land of Israel on a place with dirt roads and beautiful mountain ranges. I will never forget how they looked at me, a seven year old boy at the time, like I was some kind of Martian who just came down from planet Mars. Today I live on Itamar, a beautiful community in the mountains of Shomron with gorgeous mountain ranges and many dirt roads. I was no Martian from Mars but a young child that felt the love and passion of Israel in his heart. No doubt, part of this passion I received from my special parents who at every opportunity would praise the land of Israel and talk about its importance. I have scores of memories of my papa showing me pictures of the land and his eyes were full of tears from excitement and love for the home of our forefathers. I remember how concerned my parents were during the Yom Kippur war; I was only ten years old at the time.

Even more so, I always heard a deep voice within me telling me that I must return to the land of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This call to return home is difficult to describe in words since it was way beyond the physical realm as it came from an inner chamber in my soul. This angelic voice told me very clearly that outside the land of Israel I can never truly be myself.

Our sages teach us that a person is only complete when he finds his other half. I first met my wife to be when I was only 12 years old in elementary school. We were very good friends and parted our separate ways when we graduated elementary school. We didn't see each other throughout our high school years and met again in Brooklyn College 7 years later in my junior year. The very first words we spoke about at our reunion – was about moving to the land of Israel. Leah told me that she was planning her Aliyah in the spring and I mentioned to her that when I graduate college I want to move as well. Well, in the end Leah waited for me. We married in the summer of 1985 and six weeks later we moved to Israel.

It wasn't enough for us to make Aliyah, we wanted to do something more idealistic so we decided to join the settlement movement with the goal of setting up new communities on our precious land that was liberated in the Six Day War. Amongst many different options, we chose Itamar because it is the very place that Abraham first treaded upon when he entered the land of Israel, the holy area of Shechem. Shechem is the burial place of Yosef and lies between the two famous Biblical mountains of Grizim and Avel the very site of receiving the covenant when the Jewish nation entered the land under the leadership of Joshua. The sons of Aaron the priest, Itamar and Elazar, are buried in an area right below our community.

Our love for Itamar grows every day. It is our dream that we merit in seeing Itamar an important city of Israel one day. To this important task we have devoted our lives.

Please come and visit us!

            With all my love and loyalty,
                                                     Your servant,
                                                                         Yosef