TOP STORY: AFTERMATH OF TERROR: `It was important for me to come back here—and soon’

c. 1996 Religion News Service JERUSALEM (RNS)-Last week, U.S. rabbinical student David Hoffman accompanied the bodies of two friends and bus bombings victims, Matt Eisenfeld and Sara Duker, home to burial in the United States. Within 24 hours he was on a plane headed back to Israel.”It was important for me to come back here-and […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

JERUSALEM (RNS)-Last week, U.S. rabbinical student David Hoffman accompanied the bodies of two friends and bus bombings victims, Matt Eisenfeld and Sara Duker, home to burial in the United States. Within 24 hours he was on a plane headed back to Israel.”It was important for me to come back here-and soon,”says the Jewish Theological Seminary student who was enrolled here with Eisenfeld in a year-abroad program of Jewish studies.”This is where the community is mourning intensely. This is where I can best do my personal healing.” Israel’s American student population has been hard hit by the recent suicide bombings that claimed two gifted members as victims: Eisenfeld, who was studying to become a rabbi, and his fiancee, Duker, a marine chemist and environmentalist.

Still, despite the pleas of loved ones in the United States moved to panic by the gruesome television scenes of four recent terror attacks, most of the estimated 4,000 to 5,000 American students in Israel have chosen to ride out this period of political unrest rather than pack their bags and flee.


It is the seminary students in Jerusalem, studying to become Jewish educators or rabbis, who have felt the impact of the tragedy most personally-both via their proximity to the attacks and their social connections to the victims.

And they say that the bombings have taught them some painful face-to-face lessons about Jewish history and its recurrent tragedies-which they rarely had to confront in the United States.

For Eve Rudin, a rabbinical student at Jerusalem’s Hebrew Union College, it was the irony of first discovering anti-Semitism in the Jewish homeland.”I’m from New York City, where 95 percent of my classmates were Jewish, and I’ve never felt hatred because we were Jews,”she says.”Here, when the bombings took place, our teachers told us, `this is part of the Jewish historical experience-but Jews always survive’ and I really felt it.” While she has had her jitters about the recent political tensions-she has stopped riding buses and is staying away from big shopping centers which might serve as terror targets-she feels committed to remaining.”In 20 years I don’t want to tell my congregation that I fled.””Coming here has taught me what it means to be part of the Jewish nation,”says Rudin’s fiance, Robbie Weiner, 24, a native of the Detroit area and another Hebrew Union College seminary student.

He recalls that when one of his teachers apologized for the discomfort the students were experiencing, he responded,”You shouldn’t be sorry. I thank you for allowing me to learn that Judaism is not just a religion but a people.” Still, the strong sense of community has come with a price. The Hebrew Union College’s Jerusalem campus sits right on the number 18 bus line that was twice hit by suicide bombers.

Most of the HUC seminary students knew Duker and Eisenfeld, who died in the first attack on February 25. Eisenfeld-who was studying in another Jerusalem institute-used to visit the Hebrew Union campus to use its library.”We used to pray mincha (afternoon prayers) together,”recalls Rudin.

Significantly, for the students, the bombings took place during Jewish celebrations of the Purim holiday, in which Jews read the Bible story of Esther. The story describes a plot, devised by an aide to the king, to annihilate the ancient Persian Jewish community-and the eleventh hour delivery by Queen Esther.

This year, the text, with its obscure narrative of plot and counterplot inside the Persian royal house over 2,000 years ago, seemed entirely modern to them.”I think that this Purim was more real for a lot of us then elsewhere,”says Hoffman.”The Hamas suicide bombers fundamentally want to destroy the Jewish people and this is no different than anything else that happened in Jewish history. When we sang `the people of Israel are alive’ during Purim, it took on a special meaning.” The senseless deaths of the two American student victims were nonetheless laced with ironies that couldn’t be explained easily by anyone’s theology. When they were struck down, Eisenfeld and Duker were setting out on a trip to Jordan, an Arab country that only recently opened its gates fully to tourism from Israel, relates Rudin.


The couple were known in their seminary community as people who were dedicated to the Jewish concepts of”tikkun olam”-or improving the world, adds Hoffman.

He recalls how Eisenfeld, as a student at Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, had tackled the thorny problem of street people wandering below his upper west side Manhattan apartment by adopting one homeless woman.”He fed her and taught her how to make things that she could sell to the seminary community,”said Hoffman.”They were people who would have contributed to a lot of healing in the world. Unfortunately the last lesson they taught us was that we have to rededicate ourselves to improving the world that much more intensively and that much more urgently.”(STORY CAN END HERE. OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)

Still, on the political front, much of the optimistic hopes that the seminary students had for Arab-Israeli reconciliation when they first arrived here have suffered a serious blow because of the bombings.

Hoffman observes a hardening of political attitudes among students-similar to that which has swept the American Jewish community in the United States.”I think people are glad there is a closure (of Israel to Palestinian workers). There was a tremendous desire among the people I spoke to in the seminary community for (Prime Minister) Shimon Peres to act decisively and strike at Hamas cells wherever necessary-regardless of the peace process.” Still, for some students, being in Israel has also allowed them to see the government’s behavior in more nuanced shades than they would have from home.

Rudin says she was”really glad that Peres acted with restraint”by refraining from a high-profile military raid into Palestinian-controlled areas.”I think it is important that he keeps the support of the international community.” Laments another colleague, Lev Herrnson, a left-leaning student who lived in Israel for five years during the 1980s,”This is going to freeze the peace process for years,”he says,”I’m afraid the Likud (opposition party) will come to power, and eventually we’ll have a war. Unfortunately, the extremists have won.”

MJP END FLETCHER

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