It feels like we’ve become used to everything — so much so that nothing truly shakes us to the core anymore. We’ve seen too much. Grown too accustomed to tragedy. But this story is different. This one touches the soul.
A young woman named Tze’ela Gez, from the settlement of Bruchin in Samaria, was in her ninth month of pregnancy. She and her husband were on their way to the hospital to deliver their fourth child when an Arab terrorist opened fire on their car. Tze’ela was fatally wounded, and her husband Hanael was seriously injured. In an emergency operation, doctors managed to save the baby through a caesarean section.
Before her death, Tze’ela had already chosen a name for the child — she wanted to call him Ravid. But she never lived to see that moment. Her family named him as she had wished, and because the baby was in critical condition, they added a second name: Chaim, meaning „life“.
A few days after the attack, the family of the IDF officer who had eliminated Tze’ela’s killer came to visit the Gez family. Hanael asked the officer’s name — and to everyone’s amazement, it was Ravid-Chaim. The same name, the same letters: one had just been born, already motherless; the other had avenged his mother’s murder.
And the story didn’t end there. It reached another man — Eyal Ravid, CEO of the Victory supermarket chain. Deeply moved, he was struck not only by the events, but also by the fact that his late father, the founder of the Victory chain, had been named Chaim Ravid — the exact same name, just in reverse. He made a decision on the spot: the Gez family would never again pay for groceries in his stores. He would provide for them, free of charge, for life.
In Israel, love and hate, life and death, cruelty and nobility often walk side by side. And so we go on.