Tel Aviv Gay Center, Scene of Deadly Shooting, Reopens
A community center for gay and lesbian youths reopened on Monday, two days after it was the scene of a deadly shooting that left two dead and 15 wounded.
Mike Hamel, the head of the Aguda, Israel’s Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) organization, said “for so many years this place was home for so many people. This was the only place where you could feel at home, but now it feels that this place has been defiled.”
Hamel said it is very important for him to return the center to its condition before the shooting, but added “I don’t know if I want kids to come back to a place that has bullets in the wall.”
On Sunday evening, hundreds of people attended the separate funerals of Nir Katz, 26, and Liz Trobishi, 16, who died Saturday when a masked man walked into the gay center and began firing in all directions.
Katz, 26, was buried in Modi’in. His sister, Chen, who had lived with him for the last seven months, arrived with a gay pride flag, which she placed on his grave at the end of the funeral.
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