‘G-d, I have paid my share’

This Remembrance Day, on her yearly visit to Mt. Herzl Military Cemetery, Miriam Peretz will have to choose which of her fallen sons to mourn first.


Tovah Lazaroff
JPost
16 April '10

As if she could lock out death, Miriam Peretz shut the door in the faces of the military officers who came to notify her that her son, Eliraz, 32, had been killed in Gaza. “I knew they were going to tell me he was gone,” she said, as she sat in the living room of her Givat Ze’ev home two weeks later and described for The Jerusalem Post the events of that painful Friday on March 26.

She’d reacted differently when her oldest son, Uriel, was killed in Lebanon, 12 years earlier, on his 22nd birthday, she said. On that late November night, she ran outside, wailing and shouting Uriel’s name loudly enough to wake the slumbering street.

This time she tried to hide from the news, as if by doing so she could keep Eliraz alive. “I didn’t want them to say anything. I just wanted a few more minutes with Eliraz. I felt he was still alive, and once they notified me of his demise that would be it. Those words would stop his life. “I didn’t want them to come into the house. I locked the doors and the windows and closed the shutters,” says Miriam.

Then she went over to the photograph of her late husband, Eliezer, hit her fist against the wall next to it, and shouted at him. “What have you done to Eliraz?”
As she speaks, she bangs her hand on the chair, so that it resounds with every word, like a beating drum. “You were supposed to fight for him there, while I protected him here,” she yelled at her husband.

“I was angry at Eliezer. Why didn’t you protect him? Why did you want him so badly?” she says, through tears.

As she stood there, someone opened the door for the officers. When she saw them, she ordered them not to speak.

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