Shafrir synagogue shooting

On the evening of 11 April 1956, a squad of three Palestinian militants crossed into Israel from Egypt and entered the farming community of Kfar Chabad, also known as Shafrir, a village at the time mainly inhabited by refugees from the Soviet Union. One attacker waited by an escape vehicle, a second cut the electricity supply to the village synagogue, plunging its interior into darkness, and the third entered the building's study hall, where 46 children aged 9 to 16 were present, and fired into the crowd.

Five boys and their 24-year-old instructor, Simcha Zilberstrom, were killed in the attack. Five other children were injured, three of them seriously. A teacher named Yeshayahu Gopin was reported to have thrown children out of a window during the shooting, an action credited with saving several lives. Village men retrieved firearms kept in a small defense locker and rushed to the synagogue, arriving roughly five minutes after the attack began, but by then the shooting had stopped and the attackers had escaped. Using the village's only telephone, residents called the police, and the community's only two vehicles were used to transport the wounded to the nearby Tzrifin Medical Center.

In the aftermath, traumatized villagers reportedly considered abandoning the settlement altogether. They consulted the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who responded that they should remain in Kfar Chabad and continue building the community.

The attack drew significant national attention in Israel. Newspapers covered the event and the country's somber mood for days afterward; journalist Herzl Rosenblum wrote in Yediot Ahronoth that entering the synagogue's study hall felt like "visiting Kishinev after the pogrom of 50 years ago." The following day, Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett sent an urgent message to United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld describing recent fedayeen raids and specifically highlighting the Kfar Chabad attack. Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Abba Eban, addressed the UN Security Council and condemned the "murder of Israeli children and their instructor in the sacred moment of prayer."

At the conclusion of the traditional thirty-day mourning period for the victims, thousands of people from across Israel attended a cornerstone-laying ceremony for a new vocational school in the village, an event attended by numerous political figures as well as Israel's two chief rabbis.