Klinghoffer’s Rites Draw U.S., Foreign Aides
Leon Klinghoffer was the victim of “a Holocaust of one” and his murder aboard a Mediterranean cruise liner hijacked by four Palestinians defies understanding, a rabbi said today at memorial services for the 69-year-old New Yorker.
“There was no justification for Leon’s murder. I cannot conceive of his brutal slaying being God’s will,” Rabbi Harvey Tattelbaum told more than 600 mourners at Temple Shaaray Tefila on Manhattan’s East Side.
“Many things are finite. But not human stupidity and human cruelty,” the rabbi said during the 50-minute service.
Klinghoffer’s widow, Marilyn, arrived at her husband’s funeral escorted by her daughters, Ilsa and Lisa. She blew a kiss to the coffin before being seated.
Ilsa, speaking during the funeral, said of her father, “The world knows you now as a hero, but you were always a hero to us.”
Klinghoffer, 69, was shot by Palestinian commandos aboard the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro Oct. 8 off the coast of Egypt, one day after the terrorists commandeered the ship and demanded the release of comrades imprisoned in Israel.
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