Amid Jaffa terror tragedy, Yaari Vigder holds on to precious life
Until last week, Yaari Vigder’s world had been a picture of happiness. He lived with his fitness instructor wife and baby boy in the historic port city of Jaffa. A terror attack changed everything.
There are times when Yaari Vigder embraces his baby boy Ari and hugs him as if his life might depend on it – and in many ways it does.
Until last week, Mr Vigder’s world had been a picture of happiness.
His wife, Inbar, 33, was a fitness instructor who glowed with joy when clients celebrated their improvements. Mr Vigder, 29, kept busy with his PhD research.
Together, they lived in the historic port city of Jaffa in southern Israel with nine-month-old Ari and their dog, Kapara, a friendly black labrador named after a slang word for “mate”.
All of it was taken away during a terrorist attack last week that unfolded on the same night that Iran launched almost 200 ballistic missiles at Israel.
As millions sheltered from the rocket fire, Mr Vigder pushed through a police cordon and made his way to a light rail stop in Jaffa to begin a search for Inbar and Ari that would continue all night.
He’d seen a news headline about the attack and his thoughts turned grave when Inbar stopped answering calls; minutes earlier, they’d been talking on the phone as she headed home with Kapara from the vet after an operation, baby Ari strapped to her chest in a carrier.
What’s known of Inbar’s final movements is that she’d been travelling on the tram to the Jerusalem Boulevard station when two men from the West Bank city of Hebron – one armed with a rifle, the other with a knife – rushed the vicinity targeting anyone in their path. Hamas would later claim responsibility for the attack, which saw seven people killed and 16 more wounded.
Both assailants were shot dead by security forces at the scene.
At the time, none of this was known to Mr Vigder. He rode his bike in the direction of the light rail station behind a trail of ambulances, calling out Inbar’s name amid the throng of people and the violence he encountered.
“I saw a lot of blood, a lot of dead bodies, but I couldn’t find Inbar – no Inbar, no Ari,” he said.
Perhaps they were at home and he’d missed them?
He circled back to the apartment and couldn’t find them, so he returned to the station. This time saw Kapara covered in blood, being cared for by passersby.
A witness told Mr Vigder that he’d seen a woman with a baby walking away from the area.
“So I just needed to look for them,” Mr Vigder said.
“I looked for them while there were missiles in the sky, as you can imagine.”
At the nearest hospital he found a doctor in the children’s ward nursing Ari in his arms.
Physically, he appeared fine, “untouched, without a scratch on his body”, Mr Vigder said, but he could see Ari was in distress, his eyes “shining from tears that I just can imagine what he went through”.
The woman who had brought Ari to the hospital from the tram stop was in a state herself, barely able to speak as Mr Vigder tried to establish the facts, and whether Inbar had been hurt. “She knew already what happened to Inbar but she didn’t want to be the one to tell me this,” he said.
“One of the forces at the scene briefed her not to say anything.”
Much later he would meet her, give her a hug, call her a hero, and tell her to dispel any second thoughts about what happened, or not having done enough.
“She saved my most precious thing – so I told her how much I appreciate her.”
It took another five hours of travelling between hospitals in the Tel Aviv region before Mr Vigder was finally informed that Inbar had been killed, her body one of those on the tram at the Jaffa station the whole time. She and Kapara had been shot as they were alighting on to the platform with Ari, which is where the good Samaritan had found him.
Mr Vigder recounted these painful details from his mother’s home in Ashkelon, south of Tel Aviv, where dozens of people had been pouring inside for days bearing food trays and condolence messages for the seven-day Jewish ritual of mourning.
In the kitchen was Ari, family members hovering about him in a baby chair. The boy’s survival, Mr Vigder said, had been nothing short of a miracle.
“I found myself several times hugging him as hard as I can,” Mr Vigder said. “His mother is a hero, and I said in the funeral that his mother gave him the present of life twice. And when I look at him, I know that I can’t go down. I just can’t. I need to be happy – for him.”
Days after the Jaffa incident – one of the deadliest in recent history – a shooting in the city of Beersheva killed a 19-year-old border policewoman and wounded at least 10 others. The terrorist in that case was a 29-year-old Israeli citizen from a Bedouin community.
The threat of terrorism is a fact of life in Israel, although Mr Vigder said he and Inbar had discussed taking “a break” from “this madness that surrounds us”.
The events of October 7 hadn’t been the only trigger for those considerations, with Mr Vigder having been twice called up to serve in the military over the past year – once in Gaza while Inbar was pregnant, a second time along the northern border when Ari was five months old.
Now, he isn’t quite sure what he needs to do. “After this incident, this terror attack, I feel the hearts of everyone who wants to help, to give their kind word or just to be there for us, and I know the next few years will be very tough and I can’t do it by myself.”
Family and friends have set up a fundraiser to support baby Ari’s future: https://giveback.co.il/project/80886?lang=en
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout