Rabbi Yisroel Gellis had just finished hanging a big sign over the new branch of Chabad-Lubavitch of Dimona when 60 meters away, a Palestinian suicide bomber's explosion rocked the Israeli city's downtown shopping center and the relative calm that had descended of late on the country's interior.
Gellis, who directs the Chabad House and its network of educational institutions throughout the Negev desert town, immediately rushed to the site of Monday's terror attack, which killed one shopper and injured dozens of others. Both Hamas and Fatah's Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade clamored to claim responsibility for the bombing.
After seeing if there was anything he could do to help, Gellis and an assistant set up a table just past the barrier set up by emergency personnel and offered the growing crowd of shaken men to put on tefillin.
"There was so much pressure," said Gellis. "They wanted to overcome it."
It was from their perch that the pair witnessed one of the more miraculous moments in the minutes following the explosion. According to The Jerusalem Post, a nurse was in the process of inserting an IV into the arm of an injured man, only to realize that he was also wearing a belt of explosives. She screamed for help and within seconds, a police superintendent shot and killed the man.
At the time, people thought that there were three casualties, a miracle in of itself given the highly lethal history of past suicide attacks in Israel, said Gellis. But when it was clear that two of the dead were the perpetrators, "even though it was a tragedy at its very core, it was a miracle that only one person died."
The rabbi noted that an official from city hall who was at the scene started asking, "Where's G‑d?" The official stopped himself, and provided the answer: "If there was no G‑d, there wouldn't have been such a miracle."
Later that night, Gellis went to Soroka Medical Center in Be'er Sheva, where the injured had been sent, to bring home his wife, who had days earlier given birth to their 10th child. He then made a round of the victims to see if they needed anything.
While there, he met with one man who was suffering from shock. He had been in a nearby store when the blast wave threw a toddler into his face. The rabbi said that he explained to the distraught man that if it wasn't for him, the little girl would not have emerged from the attack uninjured. The man then joined Gellis and his assistant to talk with the other patients.
Gellis added that the Chabad House, which also maintains a soup kitchen, will continue to reach out to victims of the attack in the coming days.
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