by Ronit Segev
The first English-language interview with Yoram Skolnik since his release from prison nearly 22 years ago.
His pure faith overcame a darkness that drives many to despair.
JUDEAN HILLS - It was Hanukkah. Which year, he can't remember - it was the late nineties in Israel - but the place he remembers all too well, and day after day he would pray that G-d would take him out of there and that some Hanukkah, some year, he would be able to rejoin his wife and little girl and light candles together, sing Hallel, play dreidel games, and enjoy latkes. But for now, thick walls separated them from him, and the people surrounding him were inmates and guards. He had been sentenced to Life.
Yoram Skolnik had requested a hanukkiyah in order to fulfill the mitzvah of the holiday, but prison officials had refused. In Hebrew, there is a word for the reason: staam. A reason that is no reason. Caprice. Officially, they said they feared he might make a bomb out of the candles. A bomb? Come on. The assertion was ridiculous and everyone knew it, but time after time the authorities wielded their power against religious inmates, particularly this one. They told him to build a hannukiyah by hollowing out potatoes, filling them with vegetable oil, and using scraps of linen as wicks. Yoram was incredulous and angry. This was Israel, the land of the Jews! And he'd have to make a hanukkiyah as Jews were forced to in the camps in Poland?
The strange and almost quixotic thing about Yoram is that he did not give up. Perhaps logically, he should have, for really, there was little hope, but he greeted their refusal with disbelief and a sense of justice that things ought to be different. And he prevailed: he got his hanukkiyah, even though it took the intervention of a Knesset member, Rehavam Ze’evi.
The story of the hanukkiyah is a parable that helps me understand the source of Yoram's strength, a strength that enabled him to thrive even with a life sentence. Paradoxically, even in a situation that can drive others to suicide, Yoram found his faith in G-d strengthened. I want to find out why. In the end, I discover a modern-day story that mirrors the story of Hanukkah itself. As the Maccabees found themselves in an internecine cultural struggle, so did Yoram. His is a story of ultimate dedication, simple faith, and the deepest kind of love. Even if you vehemently oppose the action that landed him in prison, look at what he did once he was there. His story shows how a person's spirit can flourish even amidst intense suffering.
When A Jew is Murdered… and Another, and Another
The day I meet Yoram he's painting a house, and his clothes are ragged and smeared with white stains. He comes across as humble, with soft, quiet eyes, and a self-effacing and deferential manner. If you were in a hurry, Yoram is the type of guy who'd offer that you cut in line ahead of him. He eschews publicity. This is his first interview for an English-language news magazine since he was released from prison nearly twenty-two years ago.
Yoram’s story begins in 1993. He was 24, and he and his wife Sigalit had a fifteen-month-old baby girl. They lived near Hebron. Yoram worked as a school bus driver while studying to be a teacher; Sigalit was already teaching kindergarten. Every day, as they would drive to work, Arabs on the hills above would shoot at cars with Israeli license plates and hurl down cinder blocks and homemade grenades. And in the cities, it was a festival of bus-bombing and Jew-stabbing. The PLO justified it all by branding it a spontaneous “intifada” – in Arabic, “uprising”, against the Jewish occupation of Judea and of all of Israel. For Yassir Arafat, the war made strategic sense. Quietly, PLO and Israeli negotiators were working out what they would reveal on September 13, 1993 as the Oslo Accords. Israel would cede control over much of its Biblical heartland in exchange for Arafat's promise of peace. Israeli lawmakers debated: was it moral to give up the holy land that G-d had given Jews for the sake of saving lives? The argument turned out to be a canard. Even as the deal was percolating, the result was more dead Jews, not fewer, and the reason was predictable: from the PLO's perspective, violence was working; Israel was surrendering land. It was rational, then, to attack more. From Israel's perspective, the idea of Oslo was that Arafat would police the Arabs so that Israel didn't have to, and Prime Minister Rabin had to give him a chance. That's why the months before Oslo were open season on Jews, as were the years following it.
In the region of Hebron, murders of Jews were attempted every day, and funerals of Jews were held almost as frequently. Yes, terrorists were caught, but they were released only a few years later, in exchange for a kidnapped Israeli soldier, or for the body of a kidnapped Israeli soldier, or simply as a “gesture of goodwill” to Arafat. Once released, these terrorists continued doing what they’d been so good at: murder. The phenomenon of terrorist-commits-murder-is-jailed-is-released-commits-murder-again was so common it became a running gag for comedians. In one skit, two Arabs want to earn a degree, so what do they do? Why, kidnap a soldier. They're sent to jail, where they get PLO stipends and free education, until - to their chagrin – they are freed in a prisoner exchange! Before completing their degree! So what to do? Kidnap another soldier, of course. When I watched this show, I laughed. The reaction of someone who does not live in this environment is horror.
During these months, Yoram called emergency dispatchers to report close to one hundred attempted murders on the road. His greatest fear was for his wife. Sigalit's car had been smashed by rocks again and again, and Arabs threw a stun grenade at her. But he and Sigalit did not even discuss moving away. That would not have been just a personal defeat; it would have been a national one. So it was for the entire nation that the Skolniks and thousands like them clung to these hills of Judea, despite all the dangers. And then one March day in Jerusalem, at the ORT Canada school, an Arab went on a stabbing spree. The principal heard the students screaming and, unarmed, raced out of his office and tackled the terrorist. Prime Minister Rabin called on citizens to “take personal responsibility for maintaining security.”
His words resonated in Yoram's ears the very next day.
To Kill a Would-Be Killer
Yoram's emergency walkie-talkie crackled with an alert of a terrorist attack in the town of Susya, near Hebron. He arrived before police and found the terrorist lying on the ground, his hands tied with twine. The Arab had been lurking near a school and stabbed one person, but Jews overpowered him, searched him, and found a hand grenade. They assumed he'd planned to lob it into the schoolyard while kids were playing.
Yoram recalls his moment of decision, looking down at the terrorist, lying near his bloody knife. The grenade, now out of his reach. Yoram thought: this guy's already used his knife; if he hadn't been stopped, he’d have used the grenade, too. Children’s mutilated bodies would have been strewn across the courtyard. On the other hand, the terrorist's hands were tied; Yoram could afford to wait for the police, and he could avoid going to jail; but then, this terrorist would be sentenced to a few years, and he'd return to this school or to another, and there would be more dead. Yoram saw these scenes as already scripted; such was the political climate.
Yoram describes the turmoil that pulsated through him. The indecision. The uncertainty. And then, the piercing realization that he could act no other way. With that knowledge came great relief – and action. Yoram raised his gun and fired. “I felt, at that moment, that I had done the right thing,” Yoram tells me quietly. He felt he had no other choice in order to save other Jews.
He never imagined that his action would ignite a national debate about a citizen's role in security. Near Hebron, at the gate of the Jewish city of Kiryat Arba, a banner proclaimed, "We are all Skolnik." But in Susya, some residents denounced Yoram to police, to reporters – to anyone, really, who would listen. In his eyes, their betrayal stung even more since he had sped to the scene to help them; the terrorist had threatened their children. Not only were they not defending him, they were selling him out – arguably, his supporters say, seeking approbation at his expense. If you're a marginalized "obstacle to peace" in Judea, and you want to be accepted by your enlightened, cosmopolitan brethren in Tel Aviv or Geneva, you vilify Yoram Skolnik. You're not like him. You wouldn't do anything like that. But another explanation is that they genuinely thought he did wrong. After all, if everyone does "what is right in his own eyes" –the refrain of the Book of Judges – the result will be anarchy. Jews are supposed to be moral exemplars, and that, according to Israel's doctrine of "purity of arms," means not to harm those who pose no immediate threat; and here, the terrorist's hands were tied. What many could not see – but what many Jews on the ground felt – was that the army's hands were tied, too. Deferring to the army works when the army is doing its job. But what about when the army isn't?
The debate reflected a cultural divide in Israeli Jewish society that continues to this day. Some believe that this land is ours by divine right and that a Jew's life is more precious than a terrorist's; others believe that "divine right" is xenophobic, that a terrorist must have suffered a trauma or injustice and should be given a second and third chance, that this land is not really ours, that we should look to the West for guidance, and above all, for acceptance. Oft-repeated mottos on the street include, “Make Israel Great Again,” referring to Trump. You also hear, “Israel needs a Putin." Many Israelis want to be accepted (not entirely clear by whom), but whoever it is should be big and powerful. We haven't quite grown up yet; we lack confidence to stand on our own.
Lest you think we'll mature in a decade or two, open the Book of Samuel. Thousands of years ago, the Israelites beg the prophet to “give us a king like all other nations." Sounds cosmopolitan. But one moment. We also revere Samson, David, and the Maccabees – all heroes in our struggle for national and religious independence. So we Jews are caught between countervailing forces. And the tension between them is the essence of the Hanukkah story. You may have grown up thinking that Hanukkah is a story of religious freedom of the Jews against the Greeks. But read the Books of the Maccabees, and you'll see it was also a civil war. The Hellenized establishment Jews against ragtag bands of radical vigilante extremists who lived in caves in the hills of Judea and Samaria and believed in religious coercion. Those bloodthirsty nutcases. Those crackpots. Those zealots. As you light the hanukkiyah this year, as you celebrate their victory, remember: that's what we'd call them today.
No one wants to be considered a "bloodthirsty nutcase." The Susya residents were protesting their innocence: to kill is immoral; since they had not killed, they were not immoral.
Light Behind Bars
Yoram was jailed and charged with murder in the first degree. He was stunned. He was sure that once he explained what had happened, the judges would understand, especially given Rabin's statement about individual Jews taking responsibility for security. Public opinion was divided; many supported him, including the Rishon LeTzion, the Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel, Rav Mordechai Eliyahu. But in Israel, over 90% of defendants are found guilty; Yoram was no exception. After sentencing he was moved to a special prison ward for religious Jews. Since he was a political offender, he could not be jailed in a mixed ward with both Jews and Arabs.
Yoram, painfully, recalls that he offered his wife a divorce. He thought it the right thing to do. “I could not expect her to go on as a living widow,” he said. None of the inmates sentenced to long years remained married. But Sigalit refused his offer. Every week, she came to visit him with their little girl. She would spend long hours waiting for buses and lose an entire workday. She would drag with her bags of canned food and vegetables, since the kashrut of prison food was questionable in Yoram's eyes. Sometimes she would be turned back at the prison gates and sent home without explanation. Other times she was allowed in, but only for an hour in the main room crammed full of inmates and their families, constantly watched by wardens. In his little girl’s preschool, children taunted her that she would never see her father free. His wife struggled to pay the bills.
“You have two choices in that situation. You can go crazy, knowing you can’t help and feeling the pain, or you can believe HaShem will help. I believed HaShem would help her, and me, in our individual struggles,” Yoram said simply. What kept him going was the knowledge that he had done the right thing. He was not tormented by that question, as other inmates were about their own actions. He also believed that really, only HaShem controlled his fate, not a human judge, not a prison bureaucrat, not even Israel's president, who had the power to commute his sentence. So Yoram was in good hands. HaShem does only good. If he was in jail, there was a reason. He didn't need to understand the reason, and he didn't try. If HaShem wanted to free him, He would do so instantly. Yoram kept meditating on those simple thoughts over and over, until he cultivated what he calls a complete and blind faith in HaShem. "You could call it repression or self-protection," he admits. But it worked. With all the uncertainty whether he would ever be released, and with the knowledge of the suffering of his wife and daughter, Yoram was, perhaps eerily, relaxed and at peace. He was a passenger in the car. The Master of the Universe was at the wheel.
So it was that even with a life sentence, he believed that his freedom was imminent. Illogical? Yes. Against all odds? Certainly. Insane? Arguably. Yoram looked at the world of logic and disregarded it. He didn't need it. He had a better, more effective tool for dealing with suffering: belief, blind belief, belief so simple that sophisticates would scoff at it as childish. There’s a word for it in Hebrew: tmimut. It brings to mind something beautiful and rare and fragile and wholesome. One of Yoram's beliefs was that the situation was so ridiculous it could not possibly go on. HaShem would not let it go on. "I think the approach of faith was correct," he says.
The years dragged on. He told me that during that time his faith became simpler, perhaps because it had to. He kept repeating: this is absurd, I know it's so absurd, it's so absurd that I know Hashem will bring me out of this place. Even more remarkably, Yoram hadn’t grown up with this faith; it had begun to grow within him when he was about nine years old and had matured and blossomed in prison.
Yoram was a child of secular kibbutznik parents. When he was nine, they moved to the United States. Yoram’s mother was traditional, what Israelis call a masortit. She had a quiet belief in G-d and kept Shabbat in her way. She did not want Yoram to grow up without any Judaism, so she sent him to a Chabad school. Yoram fell in love with Chabad. He describes the teachers as bursting with exuberance of life and radiant with the joy of their connection to Hashem and the Jewish people. It was this warmth, this love, which first planted the seeds of connection in him. Over the years, he learned more about Judaism, and as a teenager, he decided to become religious. His parents supported him. When they returned to Israel, Yoram attended The Jerusalem Yeshiva for Youth, a deeply spiritual high school which follows Rav Kook’s teachings. It was this school which taught him the missing third link to G-d and the Jewish people: the Land. Yoram went on to study in the yeshiva of Hebron, then served in the IDF as a military intelligence officer. When he married, it was the love of the Land which caused him to choose to live in a town on the outskirts of Hebron.
In prison, Yoram could not pursue his teaching degree, since, he says, the university program was offered only to the mixed ward and to Arab terrorists. So he studied Torah. He taught a Talmud class after the evening prayer. He attended classes of rabbis who drove long distances to spend time with the inmates. But even in the religious ward, prison is an ugly place. The inmates there were a mix: political offenders, such as Yoram; religious Jewish criminals; Jewish members of crime families who could not be jailed in the regular wards for fear they'd be offed by other crime families; and regular Jewish criminals who’d convinced prison authorities that they were newly observant (ba’alei teshuva) so they could benefit from the religious ward’s better conditions.
Yoram got along with most of the inmates, even those who had been jailed for heinous crimes such as murdering their own family members. Most of the prisoners believed the worst about each other, but Yoram wondered to himself: is it possible that the judge made a mistake? Is it possible that the inmate is honestly protesting his innocence? Who was he, Yoram, to decide the man was a liar – or worse? And so Yoram treated everyone with dignity and respect.
He also helped fellow inmates with their appeals to the court for better conditions. For example, the prisoners did not have showers, only a hose attached to the wall above a hole in the ground, which served as a toilet. Anyone wanting to shower had to stand on the edges of that hole. It was not just unsanitary, it was disgusting and humiliating. The appeal was accepted. Proper toilet, not just hole in the ground? Accepted, but only for Yoram, since only his name was on the appeal. Toilet not in the inmates’ room, so they could daven in the morning? Denied. Hanukkah candles? Denied, until MK Rehavam Zeevi intervened. Sifrei kodesh to restock the few ratty books in the prison beit midrash? Denied. The inmates resorted to smuggling gemaras.
Yoram carved out meaning for himself because he clung to the belief that G-d does only good. He had to explore the goodness of the situation, pursue light, and, in its absence, create it. He fought to receive food of a better kashrut not only because he believed the other kashrut wasn’t really kosher – but because the struggle itself proved to him that even in prison there was still something worth fighting for, something worth living for. That's the hanukkiyah. It's resistance, it's meaning, it’s connection to G-d. His wife says he would teach their daughter Torah via telephone from prison, even though every minute cost money. His quest for the light brought him light. Faced with adversity, many people conserve their energy. But conservation of energy doesn't fuel your soul; expenditure of energy does. It's the collapsing inward that's deadly.
His faith was so simple, so pure, so childlike, he became impervious to setbacks. They did not depress him. He would press reset and expect that at the next appeal he would succeed. There was seemingly no cumulative, corrosive effect of failure. Every time an appeal was turned down, he was more incredulous than disappointed: how could HaShem allow this injustice to go on?
As Yoram pauses to drink some of the tea which cooled long ago, I repeat his question to him: how can you believe in a G-d who allows injustice to go on? The age-old question posed by the Book of Job, which resurfaced in our parents’ generation about the Holocaust.
Yoram thinks for a moment. A person deeply perturbed by the question must, he says, seek answers – but he himself had not been perturbed by it. With simplicity that astounded me, Yoram explained that he knew it could not go on. And if it was going on – if appeal after appeal was rejected – then there was a reason. He, Yoram, didn’t need to know the reason. All he needed to know was that he must do good in the situation he found himself in. He knew HaShem was with him; he knew, too, that he had done the right thing. His belief was so strong he felt serene. I asked Yoram if he was ever angry at G-d. He smiled and said no: “I was the one who pulled the trigger.”
Yoram’s quiet activism in prison may have made him popular among inmates, but it infuriated prison authorities. His constant appeals put them under judicial scrutiny and forced them to make changes. They got back at Yoram in the ways they could: sometimes, during visiting hours, they would place a heavy metal screen between Yoram and his wife; other times they would turn her back at the gate. The revenge was petty and painful, and when I asked Yoram if he hated them for it (or, for that matter, if he hated the Susya residents who testified against him at his trial), Yoram was frankly surprised. He told me that although he was imprisoned in an ugly whitewashed building in the rundown city of Lod, their prison was far worse - the prison of the spirit. In the struggle of morality and Jewish identity, they were lost, clinging to cultural fads, or, worse, to power. He felt genuinely sorry for them. One day, he knew, he'd get out of prison. Would they?
The inmates in the religious ward, except the political inmates, squabbled and fought. Knifings were common. Once, Yoram saw one inmate holding a makeshift knife creep up behind another prisoner. Yoram sprang at the attacker, slapping the knife out of his hand. The furious inmate screamed at Yoram that friends outside would slaughter his child. Yoram experienced a momentary flash of terror before he calmed down: HaShem would protect his child. He, Yoram, had prevented a death. He had done the right thing.
Still, the years behind bars stretched on. When Yoram’s appeal to the Supreme Court was rejected, he had no further legal recourse; his only hope was that President Weizman, a left-wing secularist, would pardon him.
Political Chaos, Personal Freedom
1997 rolled around, and with it, one of the worst embarrassments for the Israeli Mossad. “The Khaled Mashal Affair" was their botched plot to murder Mashal, a Hamas kingpin in Jordan. Not only had they failed, Mossad agents had been exposed and arrested by Jordanian police. It was an international scandal, made worse by the fact that the Mossad agents initially claimed to be Canadian tourists. Israel frantically tried to free its agents and to mend rifts. It agreed to all Jordanian demands, including freeing seventy-one Hamas terrorists.
Israelis on the street, including families of those murdered by Mashal and his henchmen, were furious. President Weizman agreed to meet a supporter of Yoram's, Shmuel Medad, who went on to form the Honenu legal rights organization. "The President showed me his hand and turned it over,” Medad recalls. “He told me, everything you think, I think the opposite. But of one thing you've convinced me. If we free Arabs, we free Jews." Weizman commuted sentences of fourteen Jewish political offenders, including Yoram. Yoram’s life sentence was cut to fifteen years, then to eleven years. Some restrictions were eased: he was now allowed to visit his wife and child at home once a month.
By this time, Yoram had been in prison seven years. As with every prisoner who serves two-thirds of his sentence, Yoram was up for an early parole. It was granted by prison authorities but rejected by the Supreme Court, following an appeal by Zehava Galon, leader of the Left-wing Meretz party. It was another six months before he was allowed to appeal. The appeal was turned down. Yoram served another year before prison authorities once again granted him early parole and, once again, an appeal was filed against his release. This time, it was rejected by the Supreme Court and he was released.
At the Knesset, left-wing and Arab parties convened a hearing to protest Yoram's upcoming release. Arab MKs claimed that there were double standards, since a Jew who murdered an Arab is released early, while Arabs who murder Jews are not (they conveniently forgot those seventy terrorists released in the Khaled Mashal affair, and others that were released in the years that followed). They then demanded that if Skolnik were released, Arab terrorists should be released as well. Despite the fact that both the Leftwing MK's and the Arab MK's opposed Yoram's release, the Leftwing MK Yosef Paritzky inadvertently threw a wrench into the opposition. He responded that the Arabs' demand for the release of Arab terrorists indicated the Arab MKs supported Skolnik, since they don’t believe terrorists should serve time at all. Confusion followed his statement. The meeting ended without a conclusion.
Yoram was released in 2001 on condition that he undergo therapy, post bond, and not live in Judea or Samaria. Israeli media heralded him as anything from a hero to a murderer of a murderer. Typically, international media neglected to mention that he’d killed a terrorist, choosing to frame the story as a settler/Jew killing an “Arab man” or “Palestinian."
Yoram's challenges did not end with his release. Adjusting to life as a free man, he recalls, meant assuming responsibility. Prison teaches you to be passive, to do as you’re told; being innovative and economically responsible for a family is a huge change. The family lived from month to month. Yoram worked at any job he could find: real-estate broker, sofer stam, and then house painter, his profession until today.
The Legacy of the Hanukkah Candles
Israel's soul-searching continues today in the debate about a death penalty for terrorists. Essentially, Yoram was making the case for such a law in 1993. If you put a terrorist to death, you don't give the PLO an incentive to kidnap an Israeli soldier to bargain for his release. Thus, a death penalty for terrorists would save Jewish lives. Had there been such a law, Yoram would not have fired those shots. He would have felt that the state was fulfilling its responsibility of protecting its Jewish citizens. He's not sorry for what he did; for him, it was an act of deep love towards his fellow Jews.
Today Yoram and his wife have eight children. His back is slightly stooped from labor and from time, but his eyes are a clear and straightforward blue. When we sit down for the interview, he asks me: “Do you want the real story, or what they published at the time?”
I want the real story, of course. But more than that, I want the backstory: what he felt when it happened, why he remained religious despite tribulations, and how his family succeeded in sticking together. I want to understand his internal quietude, the radiance and the humility. I want to understand the secret of the faith that sustained him while in prison and helped him transition afterwards. Tears, trouble, and fear are the chaotic backdrop to the persistent human question: did I do right?
And how much louder and more persistent is this question for those whom society has condemned as wrong. It takes a great faith in G-d, as well as a deep knowledge of the internal compass within, to cling beyond a doubt to the conviction that you did right. To live with the palpable feeling of G-d’s presence around you, knowing that He does only good. To be proactive and to do what good you can, and to believe there is a reason and purpose. To pray and to believe your prayers are being heard. To remain steadfast in a relationship with G-d, even when that, too, is condemned as “fanatic” and “extremist." Because the internal fight in Israel, as it has been since Jews returned to the Land from Egypt, is not only a nationalist one: it is a theological-moral-cultural one. We commemorate this struggle and indicate which side we support; once a year, we light candles for eight days running.
Whether you feel a visceral connection with G-d or no connection at all, Yoram's story shows that faith in G-d is something you can cultivate. He did it through extreme focus even under extreme stress. Much as soldiers describe their extreme focus in combat: bullets go whizzing past, smoke, you can barely see, you just focus on your job. You load one shell after another. An explosion. Did you hit them? Did they hit you? You see blood. You drag your friend away. Oh. He's not the one bleeding, it's you. You didn't even notice. You were just focused on your job. Yoram stayed focused on his beliefs: Hashem does only good. There is good here. I must find it. I did the right thing. Ergo, this is absurd. Soon He will set me free. Over and over and over. That was his compass. Forget about logic, alternatives, or details. Amidst confusion, simplicity. The focus quiets the mind, rejuvenates the soul. No matter the turbulence of the outside world. It's just you and me, G-d. Just us.
A person like that has those candles burning inside all year round. They never go out.
Comments: ronit.segev@contactoffice.net
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First North American Serial Rights
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