Volume 6, Issue 1 / Tevet, 5763 / January 2003

He Gave His Life

By Karen Brunwasser

Haim Smadar was killed during Passover week when he prevented a suicide bomber from entering the supermarket he was guarding. Shown here are his family from  l to r: Natie, Shalom, Racheli, Shoshana (Haim's widow), Hanni. Shoshana is holding Haim's broken watch, framed and presented to the family by the supermarket.

"His name was Haim, and that's exactly what he gave to so many people...life," says 55-year-old Shoshana Smadar, with an expression that conveys a tragic mixture of pride and unspeakable anguish. On Friday, March 29^th, 2002 Shoshana unknowingly spoke her final words to Haim, her husband of nearly thirty years, when she called his cellular phone to remind him to pick up meat for the Sabbath. Just a few hours later, Haim was gone. With his own body, he blocked a female suicide bomber from entering a supermarket packed with pre-Sabbath shoppers, saving countless lives by sacrificing his own.

Born in Tunis in 1947, Haim Smadar made aliyah to Israel with his family when he was just a baby and grew up in Jerusalem's Kiryat Yovel neighborhood. The most important priority in Haim's life was creating a warm and loving home environment for his five children, Alon, Shalom, Rachaeli, Hani and Nati. Two of the children, Shalom and Rachaeli, are deaf. Haim always took special pains to ensure that each of his children received equal love, even if Shalom and Rachaeli often required extra attention.

Haim worked for five years guarding the Yad Hamoreh School in the Ramat Eshkol neighborhood of Jerusalem. But for Haim, being a security guard was much more than a job. He played a particularly important role in the daily lives of the autistic children who studied in a special program offered by the school. "He was a source of warmth and love and patience for those children," says Nati, who would volunteer at the school with his father during summer vacation.

At school, Haim was notorious for his painstaking security inspections, to which not even friends and acquaintances were immune. "Neighbors of ours would say, 'Haim, it's me, for crying out loud' when he would ask them to open their bags for examination," Hani recalls proudly. "But he would always say, 'The neighborhood is the neighborhood. My duty is my duty.'"

The uncommon sense of duty that brought Haim's life to a premature end was nothing new. Only two years ago, he was honored by Jerusalem's Mayor Ehud Olmert for outstanding security service and presented with a watch. After the attack, the watch was recovered from his body. Today the watch face is mounted on a gleaming silver plaque of honor presented by Supersol in gratitude to the Smadar family.

Haim was not scheduled to work on that fateful Friday, but the combination of Passover holiday crowds and high terrorism alerts translated into heightened demand for security guards. As Shoshana has not been able to work since she sustained critical injuries in a car accident five years ago, Haim thought to seize the opportunity for overtime to make some desperately needed extra cash for the family. He was sent to the Supersol supermarket in Kiryat Yovel.

Hani was the first one in the family to hear the radio report about the terrorist attack in the Kiryat Yovel Supersol. "I immediately felt terrified because I knew that my father was there," she remembers. "I rushed to call his cellular phone, but there was no answer. I didn't panic just yet because I knew that when there is an attack in Israel that the cellular phone lines often crash because so many people are trying to get in contact with their loved ones."

Several hours and many hospital list checks later, the Smadar family still had no word on Haim. Soon radio reports came through that a guard had been killed while stopping the terrorist at the entrance of the supermarket. "We still had hope, though, because we found out that there were two guards on duty that day." Then the family received word that the son of the second security guard had managed to locate his father, injured but alive in hospital. "At that point we knew that it had to be Dad," Hani said.

"It's still so surreal," Shoshana comments. "Since the beginning of the violence, I'd gotten used to watching the news about terrorist attacks and crying for other people, orphans, parents who lost children. Now strangers are crying for me."

The Smadar family has received assistance for educational and medical purposes from the Jewish Agency Fund to Aid Victims of Terror.

Credits: Photos by Douglas Guthrie


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