Gov. Kathy Hochul traveled to Israel last week to console a grieving populace, only to find that stranger after stranger wanted to console her.
She learned as her plane landed Wednesday morning that her 87-year-old father, Jack Courtney, had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. Hochul pressed on with her trip nevertheless, telling her staff: “I need to stay here.”
And after her father died that night, she still stayed – and found not only unbearable suffering, but also unbelievable grace from those who had suffered.
Gov. Kathy Hochul’s father, John “Jack” Courtney, died of a brain hemorrhage Wednesday night in Florida. He was 87 years old.
“I was meeting so many people who dealt with the unthinkable,” Hochul said in an impromptu 40-minute interview with The Buffalo News on Saturday. “But they were all trying to comfort me. On the streets of Jerusalem, people were coming up to me, saying they’d heard about what happened and they wanted to hug me.”
Even so, Hochul said the suffering she saw in Israel turned her focus away from her own grief toward the grief of a nation coping with the worst attack in its tortured 75-year history. Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that controls the Gaza Strip, attacked Israel by land, sea and air on Oct….
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