“It’s just exactly the equivalent of popping a bomb at noon on Market and Montgomery.”
That’s how San Francisco attorney Mark Schickman described the attack in which a suicide bomber killed 15 people at a Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem on Thursday of last week.
Schickman, who was in Israel as a local participant in the Wexner Foundation educational program, had pored through bookstores and eaten lunch just the day before at Jerusalem’s most popular intersection of Jaffa and King George, where the restaurant was located.
“You couldn’t pick a better spot to get innocent civilian casualties than that corner,” said Schickman, who is chairman of San Francisco’s Israel Center and president of the Holocaust Center of Northern California.
“At the time I got on the plane [to come home] two hours before the bombing, I thought I felt safer there than I do walking up Market Street at night.”
For Schickman, “It was an unbelievably successful trip, the kind of trip that makes you feel real good you went and really happy Americans are still going to Israel.
“Then this happened.”
Schickman was one of 60 Wexner fellows and alumni who came to Israel for a week-long trip after spending the year in biweekly seminars studying Jewish history and texts. For many of the fellows, the lesson of the bombing is that constant fear of terrorist attack is a grim part of everyday Israeli life.
“I have a new appreciation of what it is to be an Israeli,” said Julie Brandt, a special assistant in the mayor of San Francisco’s office of economic development. “It’s a totally different reality. Do you know that Israel is the only country where they check your bags on the way in to the shopping center, and not the way out? I don’t think any of us appreciate what it’s like to tell your child to get on a bus and not know if he’ll come home every day.”
Julie’s brother, Elliot, was just stepping out of the hotel to walk to the Jaffa and King George intersection when he received word that a bomb had gone off right where he’d been intending to go.
Immediately, the Wexner fellows began to take inventory. Several hours later, everyone on the Bay Area trip had been accounted for.
Still, the contingent was shaken, explained Elliot Brandt, the regional director of AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby. “For as much as a sense of tremendous relief it was every time one of us came through the door, it just meant another Jew, another Israeli had died.”
In addition to the regular Wexner fellows, a class of fourth-year alumni also made the trip to Israel. They spent a week in the Negev meeting with Israeli Wexner counterparts prior to taking short, organized trips throughout the country and heading back to Jerusalem.
Wexner alumna Ellen Kahn chalked up the experience as “the most extraordinary trip I’ve ever had” to Israel.
“I’ve been to Israel a number of times where you go from place to place…and key Israeli leaders involved in various wars point out what happened here. There’s a tremendous sense of history and a tie to the land,” said Kahn, a San Francisco attorney and wife of Rabbi Doug Kahn, the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council’s executive director.
“This trip was the first time where I felt a tie to the people. And that changes the entire dynamic of what Israel is as a country. We talked with them about their lives.”
Debbie Cohen, the daughter of an Israeli and a frequent traveler to Israel, also noted many extraordinary aspects of the trip — and not all good.
“I have never felt a greater disparity between living here and being there,” said the self-employed San Franciscan, who worked 10 years for AIPAC. “There’s a total feeling of isolation. They truly feel as if they’re living through a war.”
And despite the attack, the fellows stress that more American Jews need to make the trip to Israel — which, many admit, is a hard sell right now.
The bombing “doesn’t help. But it doesn’t obviate the need” for going to Israel, said Elliot Brandt. “This is family, and, you know what? We still have an obligation.”