Twelve weeks after the assassination of her husband, Leah Rabin proved in public appearances here over the weekend that time has not diminished her grief.
Nor has time lessened her bitterness toward the political and religious opponents she holds responsible for the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Speaking in a trembling voice at a dinner Saturday night hosted by the Friends of Sheba Medical Center in Israel, Rabin said the personal vacuum left by her husband’s murder “is constantly growing.”
She recalled that as she departed the Nov. 4 peace rally in Tel Aviv, minutes before her husband’s assassination, a bystander called out, “Leah, take good care of him.”
Rabin added sadly, “I guess I didn’t take good care of him.”
With obvious anger, Rabin recalled the weekly street demonstrations outside her home, with people shouting at the “traitor” Rabin and promising to give him “a trial, a Nuremberg trial.”
She described confessed assassin Yigal Amir as “a Jew who defines himself as a God-lover.”
Wherever she has gone in the last two months, Rabin said, “I have found a immense need to commemorate Yitzhak.”
Rabin, who serves as international president of Friends of Sheba Medical Center, received the organization’s first Yitzhak Rabin Award.
Two projects at the hospital, the largest in the Middle East, were announced at the dinner, both honoring the late prime minister’s memory.
One is the construction of an International Wall of Peace. The other is the establishment of a rehabilitation center, with pediatric, geriatric and psychiatric facilities.
After Rabin visited the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance on Sunday, Rabbi Marvin Hier, the center’s dean, said the center’s film division hoped to produce a documentary on the life of Yitzhak Rabin.
Another possible project would be the establishment of a Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem, focusing on the 21st century and the question of whether Jews can live peacefully with each other in the absence of an external enemy.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
