On July 28, 2002, I was a fourteen-year-old girl. It was during the days of the Second Intifada, and like everyone my age, I was accustomed to eulogies by that point and an old hand at funerals. But when I stood with my mother by Yeshivat Merkaz HaRav in Jerusalem to listen to the eulogies for the Dikstein family – Yosef and Hanna Dikstein and their nine-year-old son Shuva’el, it was something else entirely. Two parents and a child, murdered in a shooting attack two days earlier, on Friday, just before Shabbat. Nine orphans. The eldest son’s promise to his murdered parents to take care of his siblings. It was too much—far too much.

“Rav Oded Volansky was with them the entire Shabbat,” someone told my mother. He stayed with them. Helped them pull themselves back from the abyss. Told them: tomorrow we will mourn, but today is Shabbat, and we will continue walking in your parents’ path by celebrating it.

It was not surprising.

I do not know Rav Oded Volansky well on a personal level, but my mother worked with him throughout the long years of the struggle to free my father, Natan Sharansky, from the Soviet Gulag. Rav Oded was one of the pillars of what my mother called “the headquarters” – the organization behind the “Shomer Achi Anochi” (“I am my brother’s keeper) campaign for Soviet Jewry. He constantly uplifted my mother’s spirits and strengthened her, encouraging her to see herself as an emissary of the state rather than a victim. I have always known him as a man deeply connected to a larger vision, to a greater spirit. I could easily imagine him sitting with the newly orphaned children, bolstering their spirits in the shadow of such loss and upheaval. I was glad, if “glad” is even an appropriate word in this context, that he was with them, that they did not have to grope for a path forward on their own.

On August 5, 2002, a week and a day after the funeral, we were in Eilat, at my uncle’s home. It was to be a brief reprieve from death, from tension, from explosions, we thought. A break from listening anxiously for ambulances, trying to determine whether there was more than one (and then something had happened), or not (and then you could breathe again). A small respite from the calculated glance with every step onto a bus: how close am I to the exit? Who is around me? Does anyone seem suspicious?

Or at least, that’s what we thought.

My mother woke me very early, her hand on my shoulder.

“Your father and I need to go to Jerusalem urgently,” she said. “You and your sister will stay here.”

Avi and Avital Volansky, Rav Oded and Chavi Volansky’s son and daughter in law, were murdered that night in a shooting attack.

Just like the Dikstein family a little over a week before them.

My mother had known Avi Volansky since he was a curious and artistic child. She gave him her paints. She watched him grow.

On May 16, 2024, I stood on Mount Herzl at the funeral of Roy Beit Yaakov, who fell in Jabaliya. I was, once again, well-practiced in funerals and eulogies, though military ones this time around. I stood there, weeping for a young man I had never known, but whose grandparents, uncle, and aunt are dear to my heart.

Avidan Beit Yaakov, Roy’s father, eulogized him.

He spoke about his beloved son, about the child he had lost.

And he also spoke about the greater spirit. About the larger story. About the people of Israel returning to their land, the courage demanded of them, the mission passed from generation to generation. He quoted Rav Oded aVolansky, who had written about the Hebrew word even (“stone”), a word that binds within it av (father) and ben (son), and spoke about the role our generation plays in the chain of Jewish generations.

I looked at the father eulogizing his son and thought of Rav Oded, who had eulogized his son Avi, and of the eldest son of the Dikstein family, who had eulogized his father.

At the end of the eulogy, Avidan mentioned the social worker who had spoken with his children before the funeral. He showed them the flag on the coffin, Avidan said, and told them: the coffin, the body, goes down into the earth. But the flag – and here Avidan pointed to the Israeli flags around him – the flag remains and continues to wave.

Those we love are buried, and there is no comfort for that, I thought then. But yes: the story continues. It is not comfort. But it is a path forward. Like the path that Rav Oded offered the children of the Dikstein family, back then.

On March 26, 2026, an early evening news update: cleared for publication. Aviaad Volansky, son of Yair Volansky, grandson of Rav Oded and Chavi Volansky, fell in battle in Lebanon. Aviaad was named after his uncle, Avi Volansky.

Avi, who had been a curious child who wanted to paint with colors.

The flag will undoubtedly continue to wave. The larger story will continue to pass from father to son, from mother to daughter.

But grief – this grief, and the larger story that passes from father to son, and the greater spirit, and the mission – they are a very heavy stone to carry, at times. We will go on carrying it. I still believe in it.

But at this moment, sitting with this news, the stone is very, very heavy.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)