Tali and Keren Dee lost their sisters and mother in a terrorist attack

2023-05-13

EXCLUSIVE The sisters who found solace after their mother’s death in a terror attack… by listening to her heart beating in another woman’s chest

READ MORE: Father who confronted 16-year-old son’s alleged killer speaks

Everyone who knew them marvelled at the strong bond between the four Dee sisters. If one of them needed guidance or support, another of the sisters was always ready to help. Often all four – Maia, 20, Keren, 19, Tali, 17, and 15-year-old Rina – convened in a bedroom at the family home, usually Maia’s.

‘We loved spending time together as a group, chatting about everything and anything,’ recalls Tali. ‘We always used to say we had each other’s backs.’

They went shopping, hiking in the hills near their home, visited cafes and restaurants, and left affectionate notes for each other. Whenever one bought a new outfit, she posted a picture on their WhatsApp group, The Sisters, and waited for the verdicts to drop.

‘It’s so hard because when I look at it now, the group is half empty,’ says Tali.

She is referring to the murders of Maia and Rina, killed instantly when Palestinian terrorists raked their Nissan Micra with Kalashnikov bullets as they drove to Tiberias on the shores of the Sea of Galilee for a family holiday.

SURVIVORS: Tali and Keren Dee, who lost sisters Maia and Rina and their mother Lucy in a terrorist attack

TRAGEDY: Leo and Lucy Dee with their children Keren, 19, left, Maia, 20 and Rina, 15, who were both killed in the attack, son Yehuda, 14, and Tali, 17

After the car crashed, the gunmen opened fire again, this time from close range.

Tali should have been in the car, which was driven by their mother Lucy, 48, but was feeling tired that morning, April 7, so chose the ‘quieter option’ of travelling with her father, Leo, 51, and 14-year-old brother Yehuda. They were 30 minutes ahead of Lucy’s car when the attack happened.

Keren, meanwhile, who today is sitting beside Tali, was planning to join the family the following day. They are speaking at the family home in Efrat, a Jewish settlement in the West Bank nine miles south of Jerusalem, where the Dee family – all born in Britain – set up home after moving from Hertfordshire to Israel to build a new life in 2014.

Wondering aloud why their mother chose to take the circuitous route through the Jordan Valley, where the gunmen were waiting to ambush the first Israeli-registered car that passed, Tali says it was because Lucy, a nature lover, would have wanted to see the newly bloomed roadside flowers. Keren disagrees, saying she always took the quicker route unless instructed otherwise by sat-nav.

Either way, they will never know because Lucy, the mainstay around whom the close-knit Dee family orbited, never regained consciousness, dying from her wounds three days later.

Five people later received organs donated by Lucy, including her heart.

At her sisters’ funeral, Keren had implored them to wake up, not to let the family be cleaved apart. But in her heart she knew then that all hope was lost and, once seven, they became a family of four.

The murders, at a time of heightened tensions in Jerusalem and the West Bank, captured world attention and the attackers were later tracked and killed by Israeli security forces.

‘Our mother was such a strong, exceptional woman,’ says Keren. ‘She meant everything to us and so did our sisters.’ As she talks, relatives from England prepare lunch in a spacious kitchen filled with family pictures. ‘Our mother wanted a big kitchen so we could all cook together, usually with the music on,’ says Keren.

EMOTIONAL: Keren listens to her mother’s heart beat in recipient Lital Valenci

Tali adds: ‘We always came home to the smell of home-cooking and fresh bread. Every Friday all four of us would watch Great British Bake Off with her, and afterwards she would bake something having been inspired by the show.’

Tali recalls saying goodbye to her mother in hospital. ‘I held her hand and gently rested my head on her chest and listened to her heart beat before they switched the machine off. Then, a week later, after her heart was donated, I heard it beating inside someone else. Incredible.’

Keren nods in agreement. If it is possible that something positive can emerge from what happened, it is this. ‘She was such a giving person. This final act was so typical of her, so appropriate,’ she says.

To armour themselves against the pain, they keep busy during the day. And the organ donations give them a sense of hope and pride, though it is hard to see beyond their desolation.

The recipient of Lucy’s heart was Lital Valenci, 51, who had suffered from severe heart failure for five years.

‘There is no greater deed than giving life to someone and Lucy Dee has done that for me,’ she says. ‘I was so moved when I learned who I was receiving a heart from, as I had read about… what an incredible woman she was, with an exemplary family.

‘I will forever be thankful to Lucy and her family that during the most tragic time of their lives, they thought to help others.

‘That person is me and each day, I will live in thanks.’

During an emotional meeting with her donor’s surviving daughters in hospital, Ms Valenci pressed a stethoscope to her chest and, as doctors and nurses looked on in tears, asked Keren: ‘Can you hear her heart beat?’

Keren says of that moment: ‘It was really like being with my mother again, being with part of her. And then you open your eyes and you realise that she’s not there. But I was so happy and proud that she was able to save another person’s life, someone who can hopefully go on living for a long time.

‘It is incredible that, in a way, she could carry on living inside someone else.’

She adds: ‘The doctor who did the transplant came up to me afterwards with tears in his eyes and said that all through the surgery he thought about what I said at the funeral about my mother.’

In her eulogy, Keren told mourners: ‘I can’t digest that it’s over. It’s impossible to put in words.’

She says now: ‘The doctor told me that my words really pushed him to make the transplant work, to do his absolute best.’ For her part, Tali says listening to the heart beat through the stethoscope ‘made me think of saying goodbye to my mother.

The three surviving children of Lucy Dee, mourn by her body during her funeral at the Kfar Etzion settlement cemetery in the occupied West Bank, on April 11, 2023

‘But then I thought about this woman and her partner and their four children.

‘I couldn’t bear to think of someone else’s family being broken up like ours, so I was just so happy this donation could bring them all together, that they could go on living as a family.’

One of Lucy’s kidneys saved the life of a 38-year-old Arab man from Nazareth, something the girls say would have made their mother proud. He gave the family a plaque inscribed with a prayer.

Leo Dee had studied chemical engineering at Cambridge University and worked in the City in private equity before training to be a rabbi. Lucy, an English teacher, studied Japanese at Oxford where the couple met.

Keren and Tali describe Rina, who helped run a youth club, as clever and mature beyond her years.

As the eldest, Maia’s position in the family conferred instant responsibility and the sisters recall her as a role model dispensing wisdom from her bedroom.

Socially conscious like Rina, she tutored underprivileged children and helped at a summer camp that aimed to foster greater understanding between Jewish and Arab children. ‘One of the things I liked doing with Maia was to get a coffee and go up to the mountains to a new spot I’d found and just talk about life,’ says Keren.

Describing the day of the attack, Tali talks of how excited they were to be setting off on holiday before the journey’s abrupt ending.

Sketchy early reports which suggested the car was a Kia and that the older woman involved was in her 30s had given them false hope.

But, within a few hours, that was replaced first by panicked disbelief, then dawning acceptance.

The plan had been for the two cars to meet at a beauty spot before setting off on the journey’s final leg. There was a text exchange between Maia and Tali minutes before the attack. ‘She asked where we were,’ says Tali.

Later, a relative alerted Tali and her father to the news. Scouring the internet for reports, they spotted what they thought might be the family’s green swimming bag in a picture from the scene but they couldn’t be sure.

They thought the car looked similar, but, again, couldn’t be certain. They doubled back and were met by a roadblock.

‘There were ambulances and soldiers everywhere,’ says Tali. ‘We could see the car in the distance but we just didn’t know for sure and they wouldn’t let us through.’

There were tears and screaming and frantic phone calls. Keren was told to head to a hospital in Jerusalem where the injured woman was being airlifted.

Mourners attended the funeral of two British-Israeli sisters, Maia and Rina Dee, at a cemetery in the West Bank Jewish settlement of Kfar Etzion, Sunday, April 9, 2023

Lucy Dee, 45, a British-Israeli woman who died of her injuries three days after a suspected Palestinian gun attack, in which two of her daughters were also killed

At that stage, nobody knew her identity.

But as Keren sat and waited in the emergency room a close family friend, a paramedic, called to say that a helicopter carrying her mother would be landing at the hospital in the next two minutes.

‘We are praying your mother is going to be OK,’ she said.

Meanwhile, Tali, her father and brother were racing to the same hospital from the attack scene having had their worst fears confirmed. On the way, Tali rang her grandparents – her mother’s parents – in England.

Numbed by shock, she was bluntly matter-of-fact and robotically beseeched them to come to Israel, saying: ‘Maia and Rina are dead and mum is critical.’

At the hospital, Keren pleaded with medics to let her see her mother but ‘they warned me that she was not in a good state and that it would not be good for me’.

Her sisters’ funeral, the day after the murders, drew thousands of people. On the way, with Tali sitting in the car on her sister’s knee, they saw thousands more lining streets outside their homes in Efrat. ‘It was an incredible response,’ says Tali.

Of Efrat in the Judean mountains, their father said in a recent interview: ‘It’s the Oxbridge of Israel’s religious community. There are so many doctors, teachers, academics, rabbis and nurses here, educated people who want to contribute to the wider world.

‘Something many don’t appear to understand is that we live very closely with Palestinian Arabs. We live in peace with these lovely, decent Muslims.’

He wrote a book, Transforming The World, outlining his vision of how different races and religions can live in harmony while celebrating differences, and sees it as his mission to spread the message ‘not just in Israel, but the whole world’.

His children, he says, were all taught to be independently minded.

He adds: ‘Of course I miss Lucy, Maia and Rina every minute of every day, but the amazing things Keren, Tali and Yehuda are doing give me joy and satisfaction and are of great comfort at this time.’

Source: Read Full Article