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Hani Lowenstein, daughter of the late former Senator Joe Lieberman, joined Arutz Sheva - Israel National News to speak about her father’s impact on her family, the community, and the world stage. Lieberman OBM will be honored with a special tribute during the upcoming Jerusalem Conference in New York.
She began by remembering her father’s statement the day she immigrated to Israel: “We're very excited and proud of our daughter. Thank God that there is Israel, there's the Jewish state of Israel for young people like our daughter to decide they want to go to. Thank God it's there, for people who don't have the choice, who are running away from somewhere. We're really a blessed generation,” Senator Lieberman declared at the time.
“For my father, the main thing was to live out our dreams, and part of our dreams was to move to Israel,” Hani recalls. “He was always very proud to say that he had a child in Israel and talk about his next trip to Israel with his friends and people in the government.’’
She said that his passing caught the family unprepared. “He had a background medical condition which he didn't talk about. I woke up on Wednesday morning, March 27th, to the news that my father had fallen and I should get on the next flight. I took my youngest child, my one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and we literally jumped on the next plane to get there.”
Senator Lieberman left his impression on many. ‘’Anyone who ever interacted with my father knew that he had a tremendous amount of positivity and optimism. We're going to continue his legacy forward, we're not going to let anything stop us. I’ve said to my husband “Now what's our next big project?”” Hani shared one possible idea for such a project - collecting stories of her father from the many people he had touched over the years and creating a book to help inspire people to lead better lives through his values and example.
After his passing, it became clear quite how far his influence had reached. ‘’So many people were inspired by him. The range of people that came in to mourn him - important people from the government, people from the synagogue, the people that worked in the building. Walking down the street to the local stores, some of the people who worked in the stores started to cry, because my father was so kind to everyone. Even people that ignored him and walked past, he would smile and ask how they were doing.”
Despite his political career, Lieberman was careful to observe Jewish law, or Halacha. ‘’When my grandmother died, he was less religious, but he made the decision to carry on our traditions. It was a commitment that accompanied him for the rest of his life. He would always make sure things were calm and ready for Shabbat. As I said in my eulogy, he may have missed some events, but he never felt that he had missed out.”
Hani recalls one such event. “He was supposed to speak at a convention in Connecticut, but it was on a Saturday. He taped a message for them instead, and even though people wondered how he could possibly have missed it, he felt like he had made the right decision. He had made a commitment and was sticking to it. That was his true nature, sticking to his beliefs.’’
Lieberman’s commitment to Shabbat was exemplified in several ways, including his leadership of The Shabbat Project and his book The Gift Of Rest. “He wrote it for everyone because he felt that the blessing of Shabbat was something that went forward into his entire week. He had an amazing custom to not only give the blessing of the children on Friday night but to give a ‘’satellite blessing’’ to each of his grandchildren by going one by one and discussing each of them.’’
Hani recalls that her father tried to stay above the underhanded behavior of the political world. “It came so naturally to him because of the family that he came from. His mother and his father were extremely hardworking, and his grandmother raised them and him in a certain way. He grew up with these really down-to-earth people and he never forgot where he came from. I also mentioned this in the eulogy, that he would often say that ‘’I'm just a simple boy from Stanford.’’ He never thought of himself as being on a different level. He also saw the image of God in every person, and so he really respected people.”
Lieberman held deep convictions regarding Israel’s relations with the USA. ‘’He viewed Israel as a democracy in the Middle East and as one of the most important allies for America, to the point where he said that there was no way the two countries could not have a strong connection.’’
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“It was very important to him that Israel be a bipartisan issue, and he was disturbed that it was becoming something more and more partisan. The last article that he published the week before he passed away was against Chuck Schumer's speech because Israel should be a bipartisan issue. The last article that he worked on with Alan Dershowitz, which was published after my father passed away, was about how Democrats cannot rely on pro-Israel votes unless they show that they are authentically pro-Israel. He sent it out, but passed away before it was published, making the call for bipartisanship the last thing he ever did.”
Hani has two small requests to commemorate her father. ‘’Everyone remembers my father with a smile. Connect to people in the community, smile, say hello, ask how they're doing. It's unbelievable how he really changed people's days by the way he interacted with them, so maybe we can make our communities much warmer and more welcoming places by being more like that. We should also, God willing, stay true to what we believe in and work hard like he did.”
The upcoming Arutz Sheva Jerusalem Conference in New York City will feature a special tribute to the late Senator Lieberman, with the participation of Mrs. Lieberman and a wide array of officials from both Israel and the USA.