Nava Applebaum - Bombing

Bombing

A few hours before the bombing, on September 9, Applebaum attended the mikveh (ritual bath), as required by Halakha (Jewish law) for all brides prior to their wedding. She then began helping her family with the wedding arrangements, when her father decided to take her out for a "father-daughter" talk before her wedding. They went to Café Hillel on Emek Refaim Street, in Jerusalem.

On the day of the bombing, September 9, security guards in the vicinity of Café Hillel were told to be on the lookout for a suicide bomber. At around 11:20 pm, a security guard stationed at a nearby pizza parlor noticed a man walking by with a bulky square-shaped box under his shirt. He yelled at the man to stop, but the man refused. The security guard did not want to shoot him in the back, for fear that it would detonate the bomb. A few seconds later, the suicide bomber detonated the bomb close to the entrance of Café Hillel. Nava and her father were entering the cafe at that time. Nava was killed together with her father. She was dead by the time she was reached by paramedics.

Applebaum's fiancé, Chanan Sand, collapsed in the emergency room of Shaare Zedek Medical Center upon hearing that his fiancée had not survived. She was buried the next day adjacent to her father in the Har HaMenuchot cemetery, in the western part of Jerusalem.

Hundreds of friends and relatives traveling to Israel for the wedding arrived to find that they would be attending her funeral instead, on the day she was supposed to get married. Sand attended the funeral, and placed in her grave the wedding ring he had planned on giving her at the wedding.