When you talk about intifada, it reminds me of my friend who got married, and then got on a bus two weeks later and was blown up - along with several others. The only way they could 100% identify him was from a piece of twisted metal half melted into what was left of his hand with part of the message his wife had inscribed before they met under the wedding canopy: I am my beloved and my beloved is mine.I knew one person who was murdered during the Second Intifada: Ben Blutstein. He was killed on July 31, 2002, when the Frank Sinatra cafeteria on the Mt. Scopus campus of the Hebrew University was bombed.
I wrote in this blog a year afterwards:
A year ago today, a terrorist bombing at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem took the lives of 9 people, including two young American students who were studying at the Pardes Institute. One of them, Benjamin Blutstein, was the son of people I know in Pennsylvania, and it was a tremendous shock to see his name in the list of the dead.
"At 25, Ben, a graduate of the Rabbi David L. Silver Yeshiva Academy, Susquehanna Township High School and Dickinson College, was enrolled in a Masters Degree Program at Hebrew University, in conjunction with the Pardes Institute, in preparation for a career in Jewish education. Ben had just completed two years of advanced Jewish learning at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies when he was killed in a bombing attack in a Hebrew University cafeteria on July 31, 2002."
He also quotes from a letter that Ben wrote to his grandmother in the fall of 2001, before Thanksgiving: "'I want to bless... all of us that we should have strength to continue doing the things we know are right even when others might think we're crazy or be concerned for us. And that all of us should continue to strive and grow....' Ben continued to strive and grow until his life was tragically ended."
