Missing children

September 3, 2008 - 9:57 PM by

It’s been a bad couple of weeks on the child safety front in Israel. Starting with four-year-old Rose Pizem’s disappearance and suspected murder at the hands of her 44-year-old grandfather — who is married to her mother — continuing with the suspected drowning of a four-year-old boy by his mother and then the discovery of another dead four-year-old in a Tel Aviv apartment, Israelis are shaking their heads at this latest turn of events in Israeli society.

There is a desire to link the incidents, given that they all involve four-year-olds, their parents and guardians, all of whom are suspected of suffering from various mental disorders. And it’s certainly true, that given the proximity of the three disappearances/deaths, one has to wonder whether there’s a certain copycat situation taking place.

For the public, there’s the daily poring over the newspapers, listening to the latest reports, and hearing what certain public figures have to say. Child abuse hotlines have noted a spike in the number of calls received. MK Nadia Hilou has submitted a bill that would require every mother and father with a new baby to take a crash course in parenting as a requisite for receiving the childbirth grant from the National Insurance Institute. An Haaretz editorial, meanwhile, stated that legislation increasing supervision of parents is wrong, as it won’t prevent “extreme cases of family dysfunction.”

And Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy, whose paper has been closely covering these events, calls the amount of media space devoted to the subject “voyeurism”:

“Let’s just admit it, we are covering the case from top to bottom only because of the extraordinary familial circumstances of the Ron-Pizems. And that means the issue is cheap gossip, not genuine concern for the little girl’s welfare. Enough of this self-righteousness.

Make no mistake, the story sells and it sells well. It has all the ingredients of a good story: a family arrangement that “deviates” from accepted norms; a great-grandmother in the role of savior; the mystery of a murder with no body; a central-casting suspect with an evil face; a thriller, with fruitless searches in muddy water; the horror of a little girl’s body in a red suitcase, rather than a red dress.

But in Israel, we don’t settle for juicy facts: Under the hypocritical cover of concern for the welfare of this child, and all children, a plague of experts and commentators has descended – never a moment is without Rose. They offer advice on what to tell our children, how to act with the neighbors’ children in the future, what punishment is fitting for the murderer and how to search for a body in a river.”

There isn’t anything to add or learn from these incidents; and it is true, that Israelis are rubber-neckers of the first degree; one only has to see how long the traffic snakes when there’s an accident on the road. But I think that what is drawing Israelis to this grisly tale is less regarding the lurid details about what happened, and more the ‘how’ this could have happened in Israel, where we think of ourselves a close, tight-knit society that takes care of its own.

That’s just it, though; while this is a society that is small, in which it’s more like two or three degrees of separation rather than six, it’s also much larger and spread out than it used to be,

Tags: , , • Category: A New Reality, Crime, General 

Comments

2 Comments on Missing children

  1. David-Joe on Thu, Sep 4th 2008 1:45 AM

    2. I grew up in an Israel where people did not lock their doors……

    The biggest disaster to Israeli society was the arrival of the Russian speakers. Providing they were even still Jews, they brought with them their repulsive vodka drinking and violent habits.

    Israel was changed forever and it was not for the better.

  2. Alan Abbey on Sun, Sep 7th 2008 10:54 AM

    3. The missing chidlren catastrophe must remind us of our collective responsibilities to one another as marked in Jewish law, history and tradition. Look at Rabbi Dr. Donniel Hartman’s moving take on this issue here on the Shalom Hartman Institute website – Blood of the Children: The unheard cries – http://www.hartman.org.il/Opinion_C_View_Eng.asp?Article_Id=183

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