NEWARK — Surrounded by family members who were seeing him off at the airport, Ephraim Yarmush leaned on his metal baggage cart, smiled warmly and said he was not nervous about going to Israel.
Yarmush was among hundreds of young Orthodox men returning last week to Israeli yeshivas, despite the frequent suicide bombings and Israel’s largest military operation in decades.
But was his family as sanguine about it as he was?
“My mother’s chilled like anything,” said Yarmush, 20, of the Borough Park section of Brooklyn. He grinned at his nervous, youthful-looking mother and she nodded cooperatively, a brave smile on her face.
“My father doesn’t show it, and my grandmother cries all night,” he said. “The truth is, the only reason I would’ve considered not going was not to torture my grandmother.”
It has become a truism that the El Al check-in lines at Newark International Airport — and at other airports around the world — have been eerily quiet as few tourists dare travel to Israel since Palestinian terrorism has intensified.
But Newark’s Terminal B was bustling for most of last week with sold-out flights as thousands of Orthodox yeshiva students prepared to head back to Israel from their Passover vacations.
Despite the rampant terror and Israeli military response while the students were back in the United States, the overwhelming majority who came home for Passover appeared ready to return to Israel.
Not all the passengers on an April 10 flight to Tel Aviv were yeshiva students. But young men — black hats or yarmulkes on their heads and their faces scruffy because of religious prohibitions against shaving between Passover and Lag B’Omer — were clearly the majority, saying goodbye to nervous mothers, bearded fathers and siblings.
Mostly in their late teens and early 20s, the students tended to deny they were afraid.
Eli Braun, of Baltimore, said he was eager to return to his Jerusalem yeshiva, where he had been studying since last summer, because Israel is the “place to be.”
“That’s where all the kedusha is,” he said, using the Hebrew word for holiness. “That’s our homeland.”
A black-hatted 21-year-old in a navy pinstriped jacket and black pants, who said he was returning to a yeshiva in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Me’ah She’arim, said he was “not nervous at all.”
“In my neighborhood,” he said, “there’s no problems usually” — though 10 Jews were killed in early March in a suicide bombing in a fervently Orthodox neighborhood just next to Me’ah She’arim.
The young man said he spends most of his time — from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. most days — inside the yeshiva studying.
But mothers were more skittish.
“Of course I’m nervous. How could you not be?” said one stylishly dressed Borough Park woman, who identified herself as Ruchel. She was sending her 21-year-old son to a Jerusalem yeshiva.
“We talked it over, we asked a rav,” or rabbi, “and they told us the boys who are learning should go back, so they’re going back,” said Ruchel, clustered with a group of other mothers against a railing while their husbands and sons prayed in another part of the airport.
Many parents said they maintain a great deal of contact with their sons by phone when their sons are in Israel.
“We were nervous a year ago. Now we’re beyond nervous,” said one Monsey, N.Y., woman. She sat between her husband and their son, who refused to look up from his page of Talmud except to warn his parents that they shouldn’t speak to a reporter.
“This is not anything we’ve said to do,” the woman said. “The rabbis have said for the boys to go back. You have to have a lot of faith and hope for the best.”
Ellen Shaffren, of the Riverdale section of the Bronx, was seeing off her son, Eliezer.
“You have to have a certain degree of trust in HaShem,” or God, Shaffren said.
Eliezer was headed for Yeshivat Har Etzion, a centrist Orthodox yeshiva near Efrat, and Shaffren said most of her friends also were sending their sons back to Israel.
A sack of Reese’s Pieces and other candy in his arms, a crocheted blue yarmulke on his head, Eliezer said he was “very excited” to go back to yeshiva.
“Israel is where we belong.”
Jackie Adler, of New Jersey, whose son, Michael, was bound for a yeshiva near Tel Aviv, said she considered forbidding her son from going back to Israel, “but he won.”
“He really wanted it and the rabbi said, ‘Send,'” she said. “So we’re all sending. And praying.”
She only consented, Adler said, because the yeshiva is in “complete lockdown,” meaning students are not allowed to leave the grounds.
Looking around the food-court tables where she sat — filled with Orthodox Jews eating only kosher packaged food or things they’d brought with them — Adler said, a bit wistfully, “It’s interesting that everybody on this flight seems to be Orthodox. Seems to be the only people going to Israel.”