More than a week has passed since his daughter was killed by Hamas militants at her home on the Gaza border. No, not killed — her father, Ilan Troen corrects himself — murdered. How else would you describe the explosion that leveled the door to her family’s so-called safe room and the indiscriminate torrent of gunfire that followed?
Now Troen, a retired professor of Israeli studies at Brandeis University, has entered a new stage of mourning. He buried his daughter, Deborah “Shachar” Mathias, and son-in-law, Shlomi Mathias, on Monday in the town of Omer, where he and his wife, Carol, a linguist, live, in southern Israel. The couple died protecting their 16-year-old son, Rotem, who survived the assault at Holit Kibbutz with shrapnel near his eye and ankle, and a bullet lodged in his abdomen.
They were laid to rest in a traditional Jewish ritual, wrapped in linen shrouds. “Dust to dust,” Troen said.
Troen is fortunate, he thinks. He has the certitude of knowing — a small blessing, really. Others in his position aren’t so lucky. Imagine the suffering of families whose loved ones are unaccounted for because they’ve been taken hostage or no one has identified their remains. There is no worse pain for a parent, Troen believes, than burying your own child. But treading a vast gulf of uncertainty would be unbearable.
At least 4,200 people have been killed on both sides of the Israel-Hamas conflict, according to the United Nations, since the Oct. 7 terrorist attack near the Gaza Strip on Israeli citizens. Deborah Mathias, who was born in Missouri, is one of 31 Americans who have been killed.
Troen grieves by talking — to anyone who will listen — about Deborah, 50, and Shlomi, 47. They were music teachers who helped found a bilingual school in Beersheba, where classes were taught in both Hebrew and Arabic. Their politics leaned left. They were, according to Troen, precisely the kind of people who believed in peace.
The possibility that they might die in their country, for their country, was always present. All six of Troen’s children served in the Israeli military, including Deborah, who was a medic.
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“Everybody knows that there are risks. But if you want a country, you take those risks,” Troen said. “And you don’t give it to somebody else.”
The last time he spoke to her was on the morning of Oct. 7, shortly before she died. Troen woke up around 6:30 a.m. to the Israel alarm system app on his cellphone — ping, ping, ping — warning of an impending attack. Deborah called. She said she could hear glass breaking and gunshots and Arabic being spoken. That was the last time Troen heard from her.
Then Rotem called. “They are dead and I am under them,” he told his grandparents, “and I’m covered with their blood.”
Rotem spent the next 12 hours in hiding, texting Troen and their extended family with updates on his condition and whereabouts. (Rotem’s two older sisters lived separately in another part of the community and survived.) When rescuers discovered Rotem, he was covered in a black film of soot. His parents’ killers had set their house on fire in an attempt, Troen believes, to “smoke out” the living.
Troen struggled to believe any of it at first. Was this a prank, he briefly wondered? But he could see the carnage on the news and hear the planes overhead.
“We knew that this was war and we knew that they were on the front line,” he said, “and that they were objects of attack.”
He slept near his grandson at the hospital in Beersheba that night.
Before he moved to Israel in 1975, Troen lived and studied in Boston. Both of his parents survived pogroms in Ukraine before they settled in Brighton in 1924. The experience scarred his mother, who witnessed the murder of his grandmother. She never spoke of it; instead, Troen said, she “bottled it up her whole life.”
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Troen can’t keep quiet about this. He talks even as he’s interrupted by the ping, ping, ping from his cellphone, as jets headed for Gaza roar across the sky.
“You can’t be silent in the face of evil,” he said. “And what we are experiencing is evil.”
Deanna Pan can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @DDpan.