Sherri Mandell
Encyclopedia
Sherri Mandell is an Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...

i author, a mother and activist. She is best known as the mother of Koby Mandell
Murder of Koby Mandell and Yosef Ishran
The murder of Koby Mandell and Yosef Ishran occurred on May 8, 2001, when two Jewish teenagers, Yaakov "Koby" Mandell and Yosef Ishran, were killed on the outskirts of the Israeli settlement of Tekoa in the West Bank, where they lived with their families...

, a thirteen year old American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 boy who was murdered near their home in the West Bank
West Bank
The West Bank ) of the Jordan River is the landlocked geographical eastern part of the Palestinian territories located in Western Asia. To the west, north, and south, the West Bank shares borders with the state of Israel. To the east, across the Jordan River, lies the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan...

 in May 2001. Mandell and her husband, Rabbi Seth Mandell, founded the Koby Mandell Foundation, and Mandell wrote a book about the murder entitled The Blessing of a Broken Heart.

Education and Professional History

Sherri Mandell was born in New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

 and graduated from Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

 in 1977. She received an M.A. in Creative Writing from Colorado State University
Colorado State University
Colorado State University is a public research university located in Fort Collins, Colorado. The university is the state's land grant university, and the flagship university of the Colorado State University System.The enrollment is approximately 29,932 students, including resident and...

 and taught writing at the University of Maryland
University of Maryland, College Park
The University of Maryland, College Park is a top-ranked public research university located in the city of College Park in Prince George's County, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C...

 and at Penn State University. She is the author of Writers of the Holocaust and has written for numerous magazines and journals, including The Washington Post
The Washington Post
The Washington Post is Washington, D.C.'s largest newspaper and its oldest still-existing paper, founded in 1877. Located in the capital of the United States, The Post has a particular emphasis on national politics. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia editions are printed for daily circulation...

, The Denver Post
The Denver Post
-Ownership:The Post is the flagship newspaper of MediaNews Group Inc., founded in 1983 by William Dean Singleton and Richard Scudder. MediaNews is today one of the nation's largest newspaper chains, publisher of 61 daily newspapers and more than 120 non-daily publications in 13 states. MediaNews...

and The Jerusalem Post
The Jerusalem Post
The Jerusalem Post is an Israeli daily English-language broadsheet newspaper, founded on December 1, 1932 by Gershon Agron as The Palestine Post. The daily readership numbers do not approach those of the major Hebrew newspapers....

, as well as Hadassah Magazine. Sherri and her husband Seth currently write a blog at JPost.com.Heart Earned Wisdom

Family

Sherri and Seth lived in Israel briefly, and Sherri gave birth there to their first child, Yaakov (Koby) Mandell. In 1996, with her husband and their four children, Sherri moved to a settlement
Israeli settlement
An Israeli settlement is a Jewish civilian community built on land that was captured by Israel from Jordan, Egypt, and Syria during the 1967 Six-Day War and is considered occupied territory by the international community. Such settlements currently exist in the West Bank...

 in the West Bank, where she still lives today. Sherri and Seth, a rabbi and Israel activist, spent several years in Chinuch, Jewish education, prior to moving to Israel. Seth Mandell was the executive director of the University of Maryland Hillel in College Park, Maryland, from ?? until 1996. Before that he was the director of the Penn State University Hillel. The time they spent as a Hillel family, particularly when they were living in Silver Spring, Maryland
Silver Spring, Maryland
Silver Spring is an unincorporated area and census-designated place in Montgomery County, Maryland, United States. It had a population of 71,452 at the 2010 census, making it the fourth most populous place in Maryland, after Baltimore, Columbia, and Germantown.The urbanized, oldest, and...

, a suburb of Washington, DC, developed within Sherri and Seth a sense of activism.

Murder of Koby Mandell

On May 8, 2001, Koby and a friend, Yosef Ish-Ran, took off from school to hike in a canyon close to their home in Tekoa, a settlement in the West Bank. Koby and Yosef were found bludgeoned to death with stones, an act attributed to Palestinian terrorists, although the murderers were never found. Sherri Mandell founded the Koby Mandell Foundation in their son's memory. She is featured as an expert speaker on the documentary Relentless: The Struggle for Peace in Israel.

The Koby Mandell Foundation

The Koby Mandell Foundation, established in 2002, runs healing programs for families that have been directly affected by terror in Israel, having lost an immediate family member to a terrorist attack or an act of war. The Foundation sponsors Camp Koby, its flagship program, for children that have lost a parent or a sibling in an act of terror; Mothers' Healing Retreats for women bereaved by terrorist violence, and similar retreats for widows who have lost a husband to terror or war. Sherri currently directs the Mothers' Healing Retreats.

The Blessing of a Broken Heart

Her most recent book is about her experience losing her son. The Blessing of a Broken Heart (Toby Press, 2003) won the 2004 National Jewish Book Award in the Contemporary Jewish Life category. The book describes Sherri’s loss, her struggle with the first stages of mourning, her journey to find peace, and her growing faith as she endeavors to understand her pain in the context of 3,000 years of Jewish history and tradition. The book has also been made into a stage play.
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