“My husband Philippe Braham was taken from me and from our children in the terror attack on the Hyper Cacher in France. He was taken only for one reason. Because he was Jewish,” Valerie Brahm said at a Memorial Day Ceremony at the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem.
Above the audience clouds filled the sky and a dozen different flags, bearing the blue Star of David on a white background, fluttered and snapped in the breeze. The banners flew at half-mast to symbolize the grief that Israelis share on Memorial Day. “The great hatred towards the Jewish people is a hatred that does exist… that hatred came into my home and ruined my family,” she said.
Phillipe Braham was one of four Jewish men killed in a terrorist attack in January this year at a kosher supermarket in Paris. The attack was widely covered, coming just two days after terrorists killed 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo magazine.
Valerie, Philippe Braham’s widow, spoke in Hebrew with a French accent, reading hesitantly from a sheet of paper: “So we try to be strong, I try to be strong for my children. There is no other choice. Every day when my children ask me where their father is I try to find the strength and I remind them what a wonderful father they had. How much he loved them and how proud he was of them.”
The event was part of a host of ceremonies held across the country to commemorate Memorial Day – a day that remembers the deaths of 23,320 fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism in Israel.
“We need to continue living life as usual, but nothing will ever be like it used to be. I can’t forget and I know that all the other families can’t forget. This day it gives everyone a chance to think about those families that will never forget them.”
After Valerie, Sergeot Mordekhai Uzan, father of Dan Uzan, who was killed while guarding a synagogue in Copenhagen in February, also spoke.
If Braham focused on the emotion and loss that she felt from her husband’s death, Uzan highlighted the message that he wished to be the legacy of his son’s murder.
“You have to choose to say no to racism, to hatred, to violence. And (to say) yes to the unity of the democratic constitution, to protect the freedom of man, to act to strengthen the good in man and to strengthen the commonality between people and to use the good which exists in the differences between people and to isolate those who hold racist, old fashioned opinions,” Uzan said.
He spoke to the crowd of the importance of “the democratic constitution” as a means of protecting people from “racism and terror.” The father in mourning stood proudly as he addressed the crowd, wearing a suit and a tie held in place with a gold pin. His voice was steady as he spoke but his face betrayed the emotion that he was burdened with.
It was only as he named his son that his voice began to break, “My son, Dan Uzan, was murdered whilst guarding the Jewish community in the synagogue in Copenhagen. He lived by those rules, free of racist opinions. His message was to dare to be good. Evil will never disappear through strength, you can overcome it only through turning to the good in peoples’ hearts. That is the only hope for mankind and for the world in which we live.”