Chana Nachenberg, a 31-year-old mother who was wounded in the infamous Palestinian terrorist bombing of the Sbarro pizzeria in central Jerusalem in August 2001, died on Wednesday after spending 22 years in a coma.
The bombing, which took place at the popular eatery at the intersection of Jaffa and King George streets, killed 15 people, including seven children and a pregnant woman and marked the nadir of the second “intifada.”
At the time, Palestinian terrorists were in the midst of a murderous campaign that claimed hundreds of Israeli civilian lives in attacks on buses, restaurants, night clubs, and other public places. The intifada began in September 2000 after then-Palestinian Authority president Yasser Arafat rejected a peace deal offered by President Bill Clinton at Camp David in July 2000 that met nearly every Palestinian territorial demand.
Nachenberg was among the wounded. Her daughter, Sarah, later recounted the difficulty of growing up with her mother in a vegetative state:
I always felt like I was missing something, my heart was longing for something but I didn’t exactly know what it was. I tried to fill this gap in many different ways. I spent time with friends, I went shopping, shallow things, but it only made me feel better for a couple of hours at the most. It never healed my pain. Reality is that my mother was critically hurt and I am her daughter and I have to deal with it, no avoiding it.
She succumbed on Wednesday, as the Jerusalem Post reported:
New York-born Nachenberg, nee Finer, was 31 years old when the bombing took place. Her two-year-old daughter Sarah was one of the few to survive the attack unscathed.
Izz al-Din Shuheil al-Masri bombed the Sbarro pizza place on the bustling corner of King George Street and Jaffa Road in Jerusalem on August 9, 2001, killing 15 people, including seven children and a pregnant woman, and wounding 130.
…
Al-Masri’s accomplice was Ahlam Tamimi, who chose the location for the attack. Tamimi was convicted and given 16 life sentences but was released in the prisoner swap for captive IDF soldier Gilad Schalit.
The Sbarro bombing happened just weeks before Palestinians launched a global propaganda campaign against Israel at the UN World Conference Against Racism in South Africa, and before the 9/11 terror attacks in the U.S.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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