Tali Dee gets married wearing her mother’s wedding dress

Tali Dee, the British-born Israeli teen who lost her mother and two sisters in a deadly Palestinian terror attack in the Jordan Valley three years ago, got married on Sunday.

The 20-year-old-bride wore her mother’s wedding dress at the marriage.

“They are a role model to all of how we can rebuild after tragedy,” the bride’s father, Rabbi Leo Dee, told JNS on Tuesday.

The Dees became the face of national tragedy when Leo’s wife Lucy Dee, 48, and daughters Maia, 20, and Rina, 15, were murdered by a Palestinian terrorist in the Jordan Valley on April 7, 2023 while driving towards the Israeli city of Tiberias on the shores of the Sea of Galilee for a vacation during the Passover holiday.

Maia’s friends sewed the chuppah or marriage canopy, and dedicated it to her memory. The music at the wedding, held at Kibbutz Hulda in central Israel, was selected in memory of Rina, their father said.

‘A match made in Auschwitz’

After her family’s personal tragedy, Tali Dee went on a trip to Poland with his religious high school seminary to tour the Nazi death camps, where she met her future mother- and sister-in-law, Dee recounted.

“Have we got a boy for you,” they told her, Dee said.

He called it “the shidduch or match made in Auschwitz.”

On her return to Israel, Tali Dee met her future husband, Ariel Rosenfeld, and the two dated for the next two years while they both served in the Israeli Air Force, where Rosenfeld is an officer.

Rosenfeld is an eight-generation Jerusalemite, although his father, like the Dees, was born in the United Kingdom.

“He passed the test,” Dee said.

Rabbi Dee, who was left to care for his three surviving children after his family’s tragedy, remarried last year.

Looking back, he said his daughter’s wedding was her mother’s wish, who had loved Israel passionately.

“This was her mother’s dream: that we should come to Israel and the kids establish themselves for life,” he said.