Anguished Jewish Parents Wait For News After Florida School Massacre
By Dave Goldiner February 15, 2018
Anguished Jewish parents reportedly gathered at a south Florida hotel awaiting word about teens missing after a deadly school shooting killed 17 people.
Rabbi Avraham Friedman of Chabad Coral Springs told the Sun-Sentinel that he was tending to parents who “are in agony” after not hearing word from missing children a day after the massacre at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, a Fort Lauderdale suburb.
“There is really nothing you can say. It’s so horrible and senseless,” the rabbi told the paper.
“This is a tragedy that will change the face of our community, it will definitely change the face of the community,” Friedman. “Something so horrific, so tragic, you got to be made of stone not to be changed by this forever.”
Among the parents enduring a wrenching wait to identify victims was Andrew Pollack whose daughter, Meadow Pollack, had not answered her cell phone since the deadly shooting.
“We’re all sick over this and just praying,” the dad said.
The first confirmed victim was identified as Jamie Guttenberg and her father took to Facebook to mourn her loss.
“I am broken as I write this trying to figure out how my family get’s through this,” he wrote.
Vicky Alhadeff said the family was hoping against hope they would find Alyssa Alhadeff. Those hopes were dashed when she was identified as one of the victims.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
