A decade on, parents of LGBT center shooting victims still waiting for answers
Bar Noar shooter remains at large despite biggest police investigation in Israel’s history; ‘How will anger help me?’ asks Ayala, mother of slain Nir Katz
Ten years after the worst attack on Israel’s LGBT community in the country’s history, parents of the two young people killed that day still struggle with the knowledge that the perpetrator remains free.
“I have no control over the fact that the murderer was never caught. That’s just another fact of life. What can I do about it?” said Ayala Katz, 58, the mother of Nir Katz, who died at age 26 at the Bar Noar center for LGBT youth in Tel Aviv on August 1, 2009, after he was shot by a masked, black-clad gunman who charged into the site, opened fire, and fled.
The second person killed that day was Liz Trobishi, age 16. Ten years on, Trobishi’s father, Eli, still blames the police.
“When I’m asked what I think about the fact that the murderer remains free, I always tell the story of the bicycle that belonged to Asaf Hefetz, the former police commissioner,” Trobishi told the Maariv news site, which tracked down the parents and interviewed them for the ten-year anniversary.
“When Hefetz was commissioner, he rode his bicycle somewhere in the south, and it was stolen, but within the hour they found it. There’s your answer. If they had done more, I believe they would have caught the murderer,” he said.
Eleven others were wounded in the shooting, including two who were left permanently disabled.
In its wake, the Tel Aviv Police launched the most expansive and expensive investigation in Israel Police history, questioning over 1,000 people. Despite those efforts, however, the identity of the killer and the motive for the killings remain unknown.
“The Israel Police is doing the best it can. To get angry would be a waste of energy,” said Katz. “I once had a wise teacher who said that anger isn’t an emotion, but a cover for other emotions that are harder to deal with. Anger has no value. How will anger help me? Will it change reality somehow?”
Nir’s death came 19 years after his father Rami was killed in an IDF training accident when his unit was accidentally shelled by an artillery battery during an exercise at the Tze’elim base in the south. Now, Ayala Katz said, all she has left are her memories.
“The feeling of missing him never goes away. Nir was a student, had finished his first year studying computer science at the Interdisciplinary Center [Herzliya]. He served 6.5 years in the army as a programmer. He was a sweet person, and had just started to set up a startup with a friend that had a tremendous chance of succeeding. He was very family-oriented, had a great head on his shoulders, was always active and volunteering to help others.”
Trobishi, 67, also recalled his daughter on the anniversary of her death.
“Liz was a unique child. Someone told me she was like a judge. Kids would come to her in school to resolve conflicts,” he told Maariv.
Both parents have tried to create memorials for their children. Trobishi planted gardens with exotic plants in Meir Park in Tel Aviv and in his hometown of Arad. Katz has become an activist for tolerance and acceptance of the LGBT community, serving for a time as chair of Tehila, a support group for parents of children who come out as gay.
The Aguda, the country’s main LGBT rights and support organization, named its support hotline for LGBT youth after Nir.
The Bar Noar shooting shocked the nation, and has returned repeatedly to the headlines over the years.
Four years after the attack, police believed they had found their man. In July 2013, based on testimony from a state’s witness, Tarlan Hankishayev, police indicted Hagai Felician for the murders. He was held in detention for the next eight months as the indictment and investigation against him progressed.
But the case unraveled when police concluded the testimony of the state’s witness was false.
The charges against Felician were dropped and he was eventually awarded NIS 2.2 million (roughly $580,000 at the time) in wrongful detention damages after suing the state.
He cannot be tried a second time, even if new evidence surfaces tying him to the case.
Prosecutors then filed an indictment against the state’s witness on charges of obstruction of justice and giving false testimony.
Media coverage of the incident also marked a turning point for Israeli public discussion about the LGBT community. Television outlets revealed the identities of the wounded during their coverage, thereby forcibly outing many young people on national television.
Israel’s most-watched news channel at the time, Channel 2, later publicly apologized for its coverage.
In the years since the Bar Noar attack, violence against LGBT Israelis has not waned, according to activists, even as the community has gained acceptance among growing numbers of Israelis. One report in February by Aguda found a 54 percent jump in the number of homophobic incidents nationwide between 2017 and 2018, amid increasing anti-gay activism on the far-right and among religious conservatives.
In 2015, an ultra-Orhtodox extremist stabbed to death Shira Banki, 16, during the Jerusalem pride parade. The attacker, Yishai Schlissel, had been released just three weeks earlier from prison, where he had served eight years for a stabbing attack at the parade in the capital in 2005.
On Friday, a 16-year-old boy from the Arab city of Tamra was stabbed outside Tel Aviv’s Beit Dror house, which houses LGBT youth who cannot return home. The teen had moved to Beit Dror to escape family pressures to adopt a religious lifestyle. On Tuesday, Tel Aviv police said two of his brothers were arrested as suspects in the stabbing, and on Thursday officers arrested a third suspect.
A number of prominent figures on the right have criticized in recent weeks the growing acceptance of LGBT lifestyles in the Jewish state.
Last Tuesday, Jerusalem Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar sparked controversy when he said that homosexuality is a “wild lust” that can be overcome with simple fear of God. “There are people who call themselves religious who also fell into that trap,” Amar told an audience in reference to gay people. “They aren’t religious. It would be better if they cast off their kippah and Shabbat [observance] and show their true faces.”
Amar, a former chief rabbi of Israel, has also previously stated that homosexuality is an “abomination.”
Earlier in July, Education Minister Rafi Peretz, a prominent former chief rabbi of the Israeli army, caused an uproar by indicating his support for gay conversion therapy, a controversial process that purports to help gay people “convert” to heterosexuality. The process has been panned by psychologists as dangerous and has been linked to increases in suicide rates among those who undergo it.
Following the public backlash to Peretz’s remarks, fellow right-wing lawmaker Betzalel Smotrich – who once organized an anti-LGBT “pride” march featuring farm animals – defended Peretz’s comments against what he termed a “media lynching” of Peretz.
Peretz later retracted his remarks and called conversion therapy “dangerous.”
