Nearly two years after Palestinian terrorists murdered his wife Lucy and daughters Maia and Rina in a shooting attack in the Jordan Valley, Rabbi Leo Dee has announced his engagement last week.
The Dee family, residents of Efrat, had been on their way to a family trip during the Passover holiday when the attack occurred. Now, just over two years later, Rabbi Dee is preparing for a new chapter in his life: last week, in the midst of Israel’s Rising Lion campaign against Iran, he became engaged to Aliza Teplitsky.
“We are very happy, thank God,” Rabbi Dee told Ynet in an interview. “I always look to the future—that’s just my nature. A year ago, I decided it wasn’t good to be alone, and I began the journey to find a wife.”
Asked about that journey, Dee shared that it was unfamiliar territory. “It was strange for me, because I met Lucy at university, so I’d never gone through the matchmaking process. Starting that at 52 is very unusual. But thank God, the people of Israel helped me—every matchmaker in the country called me. I was offered many options and met more than 30 women. Thank God, I found the one for me.”
When asked whether the current situation influenced his decision to move forward, Dee responded: “Yes, I think the more sorrow there is in the world and in life, the more we have to invest in goodness and in joy. Yes, that was a motivation.”
How does one recover from such immense loss? How do you wake up in the morning and search for a positive goal to pursue, when pain threatens to consume you? So many have lost loved ones—on October 7, in the subsequent fighting, and now during the conflict with Iran. How does one rise from that?
“A few months ago, I went on a matchmaker-arranged date,” Rabbi Leo Dee recalled. “The woman told me she was still in pain over her divorce, which had happened ten years earlier, and that she was still in therapy. I told her I had finished my own therapy after ten weeks, and I asked what kind of therapy she was doing. She said it was a Mizrahi approach, and explained that it teaches you to live only in the present—there is no past, no future.
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“I told her I’d heard a lecture by Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Jacobson, quoting the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who said the opposite—that there is no present, only past and future. It makes sense. If I speak of the present, by the time I finish the sentence, it’s already the past. It’s almost impossible to grasp the present. I said to her: If you believe only in the present, then the pain exists now, and there’s no way to move it—no way to let it go. But if you believe there is no present, only past and future, then you can place the pain in the past, as a memory, and put your entire life in the future.
“On the eve of Independence Day, I said that this is exactly what the people of Israel do every year: we take our pain, we put it in a box called Memorial Day, we place it on the shelf—and then we celebrate Independence Day.”
After the attack, Dee was left alone with his three surviving children. As he prepares for a second marriage, he reflects: “I don’t think it’s really a new chapter. All the experiences I’ve had come together to help me build a new home. My life—with everything I learned with Lucy: how to love, how to invest in someone, how to build a family. From Maia, my eldest daughter: how my role was to bring out the best in her, to take her on trips and spend time with her. And from Rina, my youngest: she taught me to pay attention to every person and understand the importance of family.
“All the lessons in my life, all the meaningful people—they are still part of my life now. And I can take all those gifts, and with God’s help, use them to build something even better in this world. So I don’t see a contradiction.”