More than 3,500 Israelis gathered at Park HaAsor in Efrat on Thursday to celebrate the completion of a Torah scroll in memory of 48-year-old Lucy Dee, and two of her daughters: Maia, 20, and Rina, 15. The girls were murdered by a Hamas terrorist on April 7, 2023, while their mother succumbed to her wounds three days later, on April 10.
Since the beginning of the year, youth at educational institutions in the Judea town attended a workshop in sofrut (Hebrew calligraphy), with more than 5,000 children partaking in writing the scroll’s 304,805 letters.
In addition, Yehuda Elon, an Israel Defense Forces reservist and ritual scribe affiliated with the “Sign of Love” organization, took the scroll into the Gaza Strip, where soldiers helped write letters, Arutz 7 reported.
“The Torah is a Torah of life,” Rabbi Leo Dee, Lucy’s husband and the father of the girls (the Dees have two other daughters and a son), told attendees at Thursday’s event. “Each letter in the Torah corresponds with an individual of the people of Israel, and if one [letter] is missing, the Torah scroll is invalid.”
“This is why we need absolute unity among our people. Am Yisrael chai [the people of Israel live]!” added the bereaved husband and father.
In his speech, Efrat Mayor Dovi Shefler praised the Dee family for being a leading example of “how to grow out of a massive crisis.”
The new Torah scroll was placed in the town’s Orot Etzion Boys School, where Lucy Dee worked as an English teacher.
Lucy Dee, 48, and daughters Maia, 20, and Rina, 15, were ambushed last year as they traveled on Route 57 to Tiberias to celebrate the second half of the Passover holiday with family from overseas. Maia and Rina were killed instantly, while their mother was hospitalized and died days later.
Following the murder, Leo inaugurated “Dees Day,” which people across the globe mark by sharing photos of themselves draped in Israeli flags on social media. In September, then-foreign minister Eli Cohen appointed Dee as Israel’s special envoy for social initiatives.