Cara Trager, beloved Queens Jewish communal leader and lifelong journalist, dies at 71 |
New York Jewish Week via JTA — Standing before hundreds of mourners last month, Rabbi David Wise held up a T-shirt with the words “Proud American, Proud Zionist.”
It was the shirt he had planned to wear to the Israel Day Parade that morning. Instead, he carried it to honor Cara Trager, a Queens-based journalist and congregant of his whose sudden death days earlier had left the local Jewish community reeling.
Most in attendance had planned to attend the parade, as did Trager, whose fierce support for Israel was a defining conviction of her life.
“There was nobody more pro-Israel, and a bigger Zionist, than her,” Trager’s husband, Michael, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “The joke I would say is that I knew how to tell her ‘I love you.’ I had to tell her I’m pro-Israel.”
Trager died May 29 from injuries sustained when she and her husband were struck by a car four days earlier while returning to their home in Hollis Hills, Queens, from an Israeli restaurant. She was 71.
“I will spend the rest of my life missing her, and wishing she was here,” Trager’s son, Eric Trager, said during her funeral on May 31. “My mother, Cara Trager, loved, and was loved deeply. This is how I will remember her, and this is how I hope she will always be remembered.”
Michael Trager said that he and his son both attended the May 27 arraignment of the driver who started the chain-reaction collision, Dawood Faisal.
Faisal, 22, has been charged with manslaughter in the second degree, leaving the scene of a collision resulting in death, reckless driving and other crimes for speeding. Faisal pleaded not guilty at his arraignment in Queens Criminal Court, and was remanded to custody without bail.
Michael Trager said that he believed that Faisal had been “looking to do damage in a heavily Jewish area.” Faisal’s attorney, Sara Pervez, did not respond to a JTA request for comment.
“As devastated as the family is, and me in particular, I’d like to at least hope that justice is served, that this puts an end, or at........