jerusalem | For the past four years, Irena Sklyanik has kept the bedroom of her daughter Yulia, dead at 15, just as Yulia left it, the bed covered with stuffed toys, the walls covered with posters.
Simona Rudin’s father cherishes the memory of his daughter, who died at 17, by dancing the salsa, as they once danced it together. Simona’s mother has made her daughter’s room a virtual shrine of photographs, flowers and candles.
In the once-laughter-filled Nalimov home, where Yulia and Yelena, 16 and 18 years old at the time of their murder once lived, the memorial is a cavernous silence.
All the parents of the 21 youngsters whose lives were cut short by a suicide bomber on June 1, 2001 as they waited outside a popular beachfront discotheque opposite Tel Aviv’s Dolphinarium, nurture the memory of their children in their own way. After this June, they will have a special place in which to do so.
“The memorial we chose to build is a park with a children’s playground,” says Sklyanik. “Those who died at the Dolphinarium were youngsters who never got a chance to become parents. Even though their children and our grandchildren will never be born, life goes on and there are still children to whom we can bring joy.”
The one-acre Memorial Park in southeast Tel Aviv is the result of four years of grief-filled rebuilding among the families. Most of the victims, along with 164 more who were injured in the bombing, were high school students who had immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s. Roman Janashvili of Bat Yam had come to Israel from Georgia in 1994 with his brother and his mother, Zena.
“I moved my family to Israel for the sake of my children,” she says. “I’d been a teacher of Russian in Georgia, but in Israel I worked as a cleaner, and I did it gladly for my sons. Now Roman is dead. He lived only 21 years.”
The idea of the park grew slowly. The bereaved families first planted olive trees, and created an exhibition shown in Israel and abroad — all designed to reach beyond static photographs and show how their children had lived. It was in this spirit that they told the Tel Aviv municipality that they wanted a living memorial to their children, not simply an engraved stone at the place they had died.