by Mike Kelly
She invited Flatow into the living room.
“You speak a lot,” she asked, surprised somewhat by her directness. “How do you do that?”
“You find ways,” Flatow began.
In a calm voice, he told Arline that he found some measure of comfort and healing by talking about his daughter’s death. He did not want Alisa’s life, or murder, to be forgotten. And so, he said he accepted as many invitations as possible to speak. And if contacted by the news media, he offered comments on the peace process.
“It doesn’t mean you have to do that, too,” Flatow said. “Don’t do something because somebody is telling you that you have to.”
Flatow’s self-confidence was comforting—even somewhat empowering to Arline. Here, in Flatow, was a father who had not descended into such a deep despair over his daughter’s death that his life and family had been paralyzed. Flatow had seized the tragedy of his daughter’s killing as an opportunity to draw attention to deeper issues of terrorism and how to hold terrorists accountable.
“I just wanted to let Arline know that I was there to support her,” Flatow said later. “She was not alone.”
“I had seen him walking and talking and being active,” Arline remembered. “He seemed like such a powerful person and had such composure. But I sensed he was dying inside. Yet he didn’t disintegrate. And I said, ‘Okay, it’s possible to live with this devastation. You don’t have to die.’ ” After forty-five minutes, Flatow left. As she reflected later on his visit and words of advice, Arline remember how a thought flashed through her mind: “Okay. It’s possible somehow.”
What Stephen Flatow did not mention that night was that he had already convinced himself of the need to hold his daughter’s killers accountable for what they had done. In time, Flatow would become a key guidepost as Arline Duker and Vicki and Len Eisenfeld also ventured down that same path and asked the most basic of all questions when anyone is murdered:
Who did this?
Chapter 4
The matching pine coffins lay side by side, seemingly suspended in time and space above the freshly dug grave. It had been three days since Kathleen Riley called Arline Duker and Len and Vicki Eisenfeld, three days of trying to balance the emotional riptides over the killing of Sara and Matt while weighing such pragmatic logistical decisions as how to bring the bodies back to the United States, what sorts of funeral services to organize and what, if anything, they should say when the TV news crews knocked on their front doors. One decision, however, seemed obvious and inevitable to both families, perhaps even easy in the midst of such a wrenching time.
Matt and Sara would never be joined together as husband and wife, but the obvious closeness of their relationship and the fact that they died together, seated side by side on the Number 18 bus, meant, in the minds of their families, that they should remain together, side by side. And so the Dukers and Eisenfelds agreed that the bodies of their children would lie next to each other forever in the same grave, in a Jewish cemetery nestled in the rolling hills on the outskirts of Hartford, Connecticut, a few miles from the home where Matt grew up.
The joint burial of Sara and Matt underscored the tragedy of their deaths, and the sight of the two coffins together, about to be lowered into the same grave, was like a powerful emotional magnet that brought together all the sorrow and anger that the bombing had touched off. Here, in a quiet Connecticut cemetery, were the side-by-side symbols of how senseless murder was now woven into the fabric of life in the Middle East. The journey to the cemetery and the emotions that accompanied it, however, began two days earlier at an airport warehouse in Israel.
A death can produce emotional tides that wash through the layers of families, friends, colleagues, and even those who may have had only a chance encounter with the person who died. Sometimes those personal tides are strong; sometimes they are nuanced and remarkably subtle. The deaths of Sara and Matt—and especially the brutal way they were killed—touched off a wide array of responses in the media, on their college and seminary campuses in America and Israel, in homes of friends across the world. But their deaths also set off political ripples too that brushed up against a range of public figures in Israel and in the United States, and touched on some of the most complex issues of the Middle East peace process. So perhaps it was not surprising that the first memorial service for Sara and Matt—a hastily organized good-bye ceremony at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport on Monday—had two parts. One ceremony focused on the personal; the other on the political.
After doctors at Israel’s national morgue completed their autopsies, wrote their reports and catalogued the clothing and personal belongings, the bodies of Sara and Matt were placed in separate coffins and driven to the airport, a few miles north of Tel Aviv. Just after 2 p.m., on Monday, a van from the morgue pulled onto the tarmac and drove to a warehouse, stacked high with boxes and other cartons to be shipped across the globe. Several dozen friends and colleagues of Matt and Sara stood in silence as airport handlers opened the doors of the van, then removed two coffins and placed them on the warehouse floor.
The gathering was not supposed to be a funeral service for Sara and Matt—that would take place in America. But many friends and colleagues in Israel felt the need to come to the airport, if only to offer a silent good-bye and perhaps recall what Sara and Matt meant to them.
A rabbi who had grown close to Matt, Menachem Schrader, stepped forward and turned to the group. Schrader grew up in the New York City borough of Queens, just across the East River from Manhattan. But he moved to Israel as a young man to teach Hebrew scriptures and bore the soft-spoken demeanor of someone who had spent much time quietly reflecting on the meaning of life’s ups and downs, as chronicled in thousands of years of Jewish writings.
Two years earlier, as Matt watched a stream of ambulances rush down the Hebron Road to try to save Palestinian victims of the shooting at the Cave of the Patriarchs, Schrader had been his primary teacher. Schrader had an unusually personal connection to the shootings. The gunman, Baruch Goldstein, had been Schrader’s personal physician. “He was deeply depressed,” Schrader said of Goldstein recalling the incident. “It was such a needless act.”
After that shooting, Schrader, the scriptural scholar, and Matt, the eager student, grew closer. During their year together, Matt looked to Schrader for guidance on a delicate topic he had been wrestling with: Whether to become an Orthodox rabbi or to remain with the more egalitarian branch of Conservative Judaism where Sara seemed to feel most comfortable.
In time, Matt left Schrader’s school and enrolled at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan, a Conservative institution that had embraced egalitarian roles for women and that sits like a proud castle on the northern edge of the Columbia campus and across the street from its Christian counterpart, Union Theological Seminary.
Matt kept in touch with Schrader. Six months before returning to Israel and his studies at the Schechter Institute, the Jerusalem branch of Jewish Theological Seminary, Matt wrote a four-page, handwritten letter to Schrader in which he touched on an entirely new topic—his desire to marry Sara someday. “We speak about marriage often,” Matt wrote. “If all goes well, I could see being engaged within the next year, to be married the following summer. I pray to bring it about, and to do so quickly if this relationship is correct.”
Schrader kept Matt’s letter. When he learned that Matt had been killed along with Sara, Schrader thought of the wide-open trust that his former student displayed as he confided how much he dreamed of making a life with Sara and encouraging her work as a scientist. Before driving to the airport and anticipating that he might have an opportunity to speak at a memorial service to Sara and Matt, Schrader took out three pages of blank computer paper and began to sketch out his memories of the promising rabbinical student he had mentored and the young research scientist that Matt wanted to marry. In hand-printed block letters, and sprinkling an occasional Hebrew word o
r two amid his English sentences, Schrader recounted a meeting he attended less than a month before at Matt’s apartment in Jerusalem, in which Matt gave a formal presentation to fellow rabbinical students and friends on a Talmud tractate that he had been studying. For any rabbinical scholar, a detailed and meticulous study of an entire Talmud tractate took considerable effort. Among his colleagues at the Schechter Institute, Matt was the first to complete one. And the fact that Matt took on this particular endeavor as an independent project to be done on his own time underscored how monumental was his achievement. Schrader also was impressed by the subject of the Talmud tractate that Matt had selected: marriage and the ideals that Judaism inspired in husbands and wives.
When rabbinical scholars complete their study of a section of the Talmud, it’s customary to make a presentation of what they have learned to a gathering—or siyum—of fellow students.
On that evening for the siyum, Matt’s apartment brimmed with friends and fellow students. Along the wall, a table held bottles of wine. Another table was crammed with plates of food, including a vegetarian dish Sara had created. Matt took a seat near the table with wine and looked out on the apartment living room and his friends and fellow students.
Sara watched Matt intently from a nearby chair.
Rabbi Schrader watched them both, admiring how much his former student had grown and how promising his future looked, not only as a rabbi but as a man with Sara as his partner.
Now, standing silently in the airport warehouse, with the coffins of Matt and Sara, were some of those same friends and fellow students who attended Matt’s siyum only weeks earlier. Schrader could feel their collective sorrow filling the warehouse as they waited for him to speak.
He began by remembering the siyum—and the happiness and pride that so many felt that evening for Matt. “Matt had the crowd completely engrossed in his presentation,” Schrader said. “For a brief moment, I saw the power which could have been, the teacher who could have taught, the mentor who was already serving as a model for his friends.”
Schrader then turned his thoughts to Sara—and what she meant to Matt.
“For Matt, Sara was a dream,” Schrader said. “A dream for which Matt waited to realize with great anticipation. A dream Matt waited with great patience.”
Schrader did not need to remind everyone how broken that dream had now become.
Several hours later, another farewell ceremony took place. For this, the coffins were draped in US flags and moved to the tarmac near the door of a baggage compartment of an Israeli El Al jetliner that was scheduled to fly that night to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City.
Ambassador Martin Indyk stepped from his car and walked to a small podium. Two bombings that seemed to have been orchestrated to take place the same day had unearthed a wave of unease among Middle East diplomats about the stability of the Oslo process. But to Indyk such concerns seemed secondary now with the sight of the two coffins on the tarmac. Not only had two Americans died in one of those bombings, but two others who had dual US and Israeli citizenships—Leah Stein Mousa and Ira Weinstein—were being treated in Jerusalem hospitals for life-threatening burns and other wounds.
“Friends,” said Indyk. “We are gathered here to send Matthew and Sara on their last journey back to their parents for their burial in the United States. They were two of America’s finest, the best, the brightest. One from Yale, the other from Barnard. One a rabbi, the other a research scientist. They came here together to celebrate their love of Israel. They leave here in caskets. They were good friends who, bright and early yesterday morning, were starting out on a trip to Jordan in order to taste the fruits of peace, when a fanatical suicide bomber ended their lives along with the lives of twenty-three Israelis—snuffed out their futures that a mere twenty-four hours ago looked so bright and full of promise.”
Indyk offered his official condolences “on behalf of the United States government, President Clinton and Secretary of State Warren Christopher.” He reiterated his hope to “close the circle of peace and to go on with the fight against terror.” He then returned to a personal theme. “It is not in the natural order of things for parents to bury their children,” Indyk said. “I pray, I know, the day will come when this will not happen again.”
Schrader’s soft-spoken eloquence and Indyk’s measured phrasing set a tone for what would come in the following days. The coffins, still draped in American flags, were loaded into the belly of a jetliner for the eleven-hour flight to New York.
Almost forty hours later, on Wednesday afternoon, with a stiff New England breeze rattling the bare branches of the maples and oaks that lined the perimeter of the Temple Beth El cemetery in Avon, Connecticut, and with the sun blocked by a somber blanket of gray clouds, Sara’s and Matt’s remains arrived at their final resting place.
A traditional Jewish funeral is governed by exacting symbolism and customs that date back thousands of years. But the final rite—the burial itself—is uniquely personal and intimate. Friends and family do not rely on the help of cemetery workers to shovel dirt atop the coffins after they are lowered into the earth. The k’vurah—the Hebrew name for the filling in of the grave with dirt—is performed by family and friends. The rite is so intricately choreographed that those who pick up a shovel are instructed to turn the shovel backwards so as not to show their enthusiasm for what they are doing. Also, the shovels are not handed from one person to the next but are merely shoved into the ground when one person is finished so that another person can grab the shovel.
Such gestures and the act of tossing dirt atop a coffin in the grave is not considered a burden. This final rite is seen as a labor of love for friends and relatives, a “mitzvah” and gift that cannot be reciprocated, which helps to bring a sense of spiritual closure that allows the soul to be released.
Arline Duker and her daughters, Tamara and Ariella, stood silently with the Eisenfelds and their daughter, Amy, and hundreds of mourners who clustered on the neatly trimmed grass to await the moment when the coffins would be lowered and covered with dirt. As mourners recited the last prayers of Judaism’s ancient burial rite, the symbolism of what Sara and Matthew might have become was made clearer. Death cut short their lives together, separating them from friends and family. But in eternity, they would always be united, side by side.
In eulogizing the couple during Sara’s funeral the day before at Teaneck’s Congregation Beth Shalom, Rabbi Kenneth Berger called the decision to bury the couple together “a fitting end to a great love story.” Now in the cemetery, as he gazed at the matching coffins, Matt’s family rabbi, Stanley Kessler, echoed Rabbi Berger’s sentiments. “It’s so appropriate that they be buried near each other,” Rabbi Kessler told one of the dozens of news reporters who covered the burial. “Their souls are surely intertwined for all eternity.”
Even before this final trip to the cemetery, Sara and Matt had become noteworthy figures in the news media, in America, and across the world. Obviously, there were other victims in the bombing of the Number 18 bus on Jaffa Road, some with deeply tragic stories. The dead included soldiers, a Holocaust survivor, recent immigrants to Israel from Romania, a Palestinian commuting to work, and a husband and wife who had come to Israel from the Ukraine and were taking the bus to look at a new apartment. When they died, the couple left behind an eight-year-old son who promised, when interviewed by Israeli television just after his parents were buried in Jerusalem, to try to remember them as best he could.
“How do I see things? I think things will be okay,” the boy said, sounding far older than he was. “I already missed them yesterday. But I’ll have to get over it.”
The deaths and lives of Sara and Matthew and their budding relationship seemed to capture a deeper essence of the tragedy, though. Sara and Matt were bright, handsome, and, of course, in love. In a sense, they were seen as a modern day Romeo and Juliet. But unlike the Shakespearean characters, Sa
ra and Matt were not victims of misguided suicides that stemmed from a pointless family feud. They were killed in a suicide-murder that seemed equally pointless and had been carried out by a young Palestinian man misguided by a theology that called for the deaths of innocent people in the name of a larger political and theological cause.
As touching as it seemed to bury Sara and Matt together, the fact that they died so uselessly and violently seemed to add an unspoken emotional weight that each mourner carried through the funerals and to the cemetery.
During Sara’s funeral, Rabbi Berger drew attention to the inexplicable tragic nature of their deaths by referencing the Book of Job and how the central character, Job, a good man who attempts to lead an exemplary life, looked heavenward and asked why God seemed to have abandoned him.
“Today we stand here with Job,” said Rabbi Berger. “We know there are no answers, no words with which to mitigate the pain or console the inconsolable. It’s so hard to believe that Sara’s life ended so suddenly and tragically. All we can do is sit here today with each other and remember the light that Sara and Matt brought to our lives and to the world.”
What also captured the world’s attention—and underscored the tragedy and its irony even more—was that Sara and Matt had been outspoken, in the US and in Israel, about their desire for Israelis and Palestinians to live in peace. When Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had been assassinated five months earlier, Matt’s seminary colleagues selected him to speak at a memorial service, in part because he wanted to talk about the need to find a peaceful solution to Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In an essay she wrote a year earlier to win a grant to help fund her trip to Israel, Sara pointed out the importance for Israelis to treat their Arab neighbors with respect.
“Extremism characterizes political debate with deep rifts between religious and secular Jews,” wrote Sara. “And no matter what our national and religious beliefs regarding the West Bank and Gaza, there are few Jews who do not experience at least some discomfort with Israeli policies toward the Palestinian Arabs.”