By Rabbi Dovid Abenson. I received a truly unbelievable email I want to share with Klal Yisroel today. The story goes that soldiers went into a Mosque in Gaza searching for tunnels and weapons,etc. A door opened, and a female bomber walked into the room ready to explode herself near the soldiers. One of the soldiers realized that their end was near and screamed “shema yisroel”. Those two words made the female bomber tremble and was not able to carry out her plan. The army was able to stop her and dismantle the bomb and they took her in for questioning upon which they discovered that she was Jewish. She had married an Arab and had been taken to Gaza and beaten into submission. She had two children and they were suffering terribly. She told the army where her children were and confided to them where more terror tunnels were, who sent her to bomb soldiers, and other information. The army took her and her children to a safe place in Israel and will soon be receiving help from “Yad L’achim”.

We can see from this story the power of Shema Yisroel.

We should be inspired by the above story.

The question remains though, could this story have been prevented. Many “kidnappings” are taking place daily of Arabs who lure Jewsih girls into marrying them, and then forcing them to live like slaves and even worse, as in the above case, to become suicide bombers.

According to Lehava, an estimated 50,000 Jewish women are living in Arab villages and towns in Israel. Since the founding of the State of Israel, more than 3,000 Jewish girls have converted to Islam and married Arab men via the Muslim courts, Additionally, some 2-3,000 women are married to their Arab counterparts by common-law marriage, while another 10-20,000 girls are dating Arabs at any given time.

Just like we have united in tefilla the past few months over the situation in Eretz Yisroel, which started with the kidnapping and deaths of the 3 kidnapped bochurim, we should continue to make mass gatherings, daven and cry for those “kidnapped children” and call out to Hashem to ” bring back all our boys and girls”. These boys and girls may not have been killed in the physical sense, but they are trapped into living a life of torment!

As my readers will know by now, I receive many true stories from disenchanted and broken parents regarding their children’s lack of interest in Yiddishkeit. I have had to deal with
frustrated parents, liase with schools to accept students, and give support to children who have been kicked out or expelled from schools, yeshivas and seminaries. These pure children have been ” kidnapped” in a spiritual sense, into leaving the derech and becoming irreligious.

In a recent reply from my article ” the boxed child “, a mother shared her suffering ……….

My son Dovid was a student of Rabbi X in the summer of 2008.
His education very sadly ended two years later as the local yeshiva refused to take him on as a full time student. He was only permitted to attend the Limudei Kodesh, and we were asked to find the secular studies courses outside of the yeshiva. It proved to be a disaster. Dovid dropped out in grade 10. The whole situation broke his heart. Today, at the age of 20, Dovid is lost and off the derech. It is in fact a very tragic situation. Resentment, anger, and animosity towards the community are all that are left. His pain is so deep that even a year in Eretz Israel couldn’t help him. It became so deeply ingrained in the fabric of his being that he probably doesn’t even want to remember, let alone deal with solving this. He remains fractured by that experience, and has lost all respect for religious aspects of life……

As my Rebbe, Ha Rav Mattisyahu Salomon Shlita, Mashgiach Beis Medrash Govoha, Lakewood
says that “many of the children whom we call drop outs have not become like that because they have a bigger yetzer hora than other people, but because they feel less care for than other people. .
Those children who fall through the cracks of our educational system have very often lost out on those fundamental skills that they should have acquired earlier in life. If we could only give them a little more care, a little extra understanding, or a little more help,an invaluable chizuk can be achieved, giving these people a feeling of value and self esteem. Instead of chas v’sholom, dropping out altogether, they will want to achieve and stay within the fold, carrying on to reach high madreigos which otherwise they would never have dreamed of before “.
We lost 2 million children to the Holocaust.

We cannot afford to lose anymore!

Rabbi Abenson is the founder and director, author and lecturer at Shaar Hatalmud, a unique yeshiva based online program, featuring evaluations and upgrading of skills in Hebrew reading, Gemara studies, consulting school principals world wide to improve their ability to discover students who possess under-developed skills. He can be reached at [email protected] or 1-877-HATALMUD (428 2568).