A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy

by Nathan Thrall

In February 1994, a Brooklyn-born religious settler, Baruch Goldstein, murdered twenty-nine Palestinian worshippers in Hebron. Significantly, he chose to do it on Purim, the holiday commemorating the biblical story of the Jews of Persia foiling a plot to destroy them and then killing “all their enemies with the stroke of the sword, and with slaughter, and destruction.” That year, Purim fell on the third Friday of Ramadan. Goldstein, a resident of Kiryat Arba near Hebron and a captain in the IDF reserves, put on his army uniform, took his assault rifle, and entered the Ibrahimi Mosque during the dawn prayer. Wearing noise-reducing headphones, he fired 111 rounds at the rows of Palestinians kneeling in supplication. The slaughter lasted for two minutes before he was subdued and then beaten to death by the crowd. His tombstone, in a Kiryat Arba municipal park, became a shrine and pilgrimage site. Its inscription reads: HE GAVE HIS SOUL FOR THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL, ITS TORAH, AND LAND—CLEAN HANDS AND A PURE HEART.