Eulogy for Rabbi Malka

On December 2nd I posted about the shock of hearing of the terrible untimely death of Rabbi Uriel Malka, whom I knew.  Here is an article which describes what sort of man he was.  I was wrong about his age.  He wasn't 34.  He was 32.

Rabbi who survived Hizbullah fire among dead on bus

By RHONDA SPIVAK 
12/06/2010 02:58

Uriel Malka, former Winnipeg school principal and Denver emissary, 32, was working as a chaplain in the Prisons Service.

  Rabbi Uriel Malka, 32, who fought in the IDF against Hizbullah in hand-to-hand combat in the Second Lebanon War, was among those killed on the Prisons Service bus that was engulfed by flames in the Carmel forest fire on Thursday.

Malka, from Karnei Shomron, who was training to be a chaplain in the prison system, was with Prisons Service cadets en route to Damun Prison to evacuate prisoners from the paths of the flames.

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He was laid to rest Sunday night at the military cemetery in Yavne.

A former principal at the Ohr Hatorah Day School in Winnipeg, Canada, Malka recalled in an extensive interview in October 2008 that he narrowly escaped death fighting Hizbullah two years earlier.

“It is a miracle that I am alive, as there were times in the war when I was shot at directly by Hizbullah terrorist fighters,” he said. “I met them face to face. I could see their eyes.”

Twelve of Malka’s colleagues from his paratroop unit were killed in a Katyusha rocket attack on Kfar Giladi, as they were standing outside, in a parking lot, en route to deployment in the Lebanon War on August 6, 2006.

“I was not in Kfar Giladi with them because I was already in Lebanon,” he recalled in the interview.

“We did not find out that those in our unit had died right away. Our commander had us take out the batteries to our equipment so we could not hear the names of those who died so we wouldn’t realize they were from our unit. Four days later our commander called us together in the [deserted] home of a Hizbullah terrorist and told us what had happened. He told us we had to be strong.

It was very difficult.”

(read all of it here.)