(JNS) — KADIMA-ZORAN, Israel — Walking cane in hand, the small elderly man hovers over the two fresh graves, gingerly watering the potted plants adorning them. He straightens the pictures of the young men, arranges the stones and mementos, and cleans off the tombstones.
“I know what pain is,” Yaakov Lubinewski, 99, whose entire family was murdered by the Nazis eight decades ago, told a freshly bereaved Israeli father nearly six months ago in the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre. “The pain will not pass, and it will be hard to recover, but remember there is something to live for.”
It was, after all, his own life’s lesson—climbing out of the ashes of despair to build a new life—that he was sharing as he neared his centennial year.