12/17/2014
Light a candle tomorrow for Kristine Luken.
Four years ago, Kay Wilson and her Christian American friend Kristine Luken Z”L were brutally attacked with machetes by Palestinian terrorists. Kristine was murdered because they mistakenly thought she was Jewish.
We ask you to join us in lighting a candle tomorrow in memory of Kristine - may G-d comfort her family and may we continue to be there for Kay on her life-long journey of recovery. Am Israel Chai.
December 18, 2010
It was a beautiful autumn Sabbath afternoon. The sun was not too hot, the skies were deep blue and the pine trees seemed somehow extra fresh and clean. It was an ideal day for hiking. I had been working as an Israeli tour guide for four years and cherished opportunities like this. I loved to take tourists somewhere a little different, somewhere off the beaten track. Kristine Luken was one such candidate for the ‘something different.’
Kristine Luken, a Texan living in Nottingham and a ministry staffer for the Church's Ministry among Jewish people (CMJ), a Christian group based in the United States and the United Kingdom was visiting Kay Wilson for the Christmas holiday. They had met just a few months previously in August on a trip to Poland where they visited concentration camps.
Kay took her friend Kristine on a hike through the Mata Forest, between Tsur Hadassah and Beit Shemesh. They had been enjoying the afternoon when two Arab men asked Kay for water in Hebrew. After they disappeared from view, Kay became uneasy about their intentions, and began walking in return to Mata. As they walked towards the village, the men attacked.
Kristine screamed.
I turned around to see what was wrong but didn’t make it. I was thrown to the ground by the weight of a man who was trying to pin me down.
Kay Wilson was held at knife point for 30 minutes, tied up and gagged only to be stabbed 13 times with a machete while watching her friend, Kristine Luken be murdered a few feet away.
Kay survived by playing dead as the stabbing continued. She sustained 13 perforations in her lungs and diaphragm, over 30 broken bones, 6 open fractures to her ribs, a crushed sternum, a dislocated shoulder and a broken shoulder blade.
The knife plunged through my side with ease and I felt it rip through my organs. My insides were on fire. I knew it was fatal. “Shema Israel…” I prayed under my breath. I waited to die a painful, prolonged and messy death.
During the attack, she stabbed one of the terrorists lightly in the arm with a small penknife. When the murderers left the scene she heroically managed to stand up.
My hands were tied so I could not hold her [Kristine Luken] in her last moments. I was gagged and unable to utter the simplest word of comfort… I knew that if I knelt beside her I would never get up, ever again.
I started to slowly walk away and as I did the sound of her breathing faded away forever into the forest.
Kay struggled to return to the path, walked more than a kilometer while gagged, broken, bleeding, bound, barefoot and dying, until she found help.
As Kay Wilson describes: There is a million miles between being alive and knowing what it is to be alive.
