by Mike Kelly
Watching the families and others gather, Colette Avital, the Israeli counsel general based in New York City, felt the sadness of the moment envelop her. As an experienced diplomat, Avital knew it was her job to keep her emotions under wraps in moments like this and to offer a brief message of condolence and sorrow. But seeing the two coffins together and knowing the story of how Sara and Matthew were considering marriage, Avital realized that this was not a moment to remain distant.
“The idea of two young people, very much in love and very much looking forward to their future and—poof—they no longer exist is something that hits you on a personal level,” Avital remembered thinking.
Earlier, during a service at the Eisenfeld family’s synagogue, Avital spoke of how the deaths seemed to touch her and indeed everyone so intimately. “There are times when words escape the most eloquent of speakers, when the unexpected events of our lives overtake our ability to understand. Today is such a day,” she said. “For how could I have imagined the day that I would stand here, representing the government of Israel, at this service for two young, wonderful human beings who have now joined the long list of our victims. Yesterday, I stood stunned with the thousands of mourners who came to pay a last resounding tribute to Sara Duker. Yesterday, in Israel, we lowered the bodies of our loved ones into the warm soil of Israel.”
Avital mentioned a twenty-year-old female soldier, Hofit Ayash, who died in the suicide bombing attack at Ashkelon forty-five minutes after the Number 18 bus exploded. Ayash planned to marry in June. She recently completed her military service and was only at the bus stop in Ashkelon because she was traveling to her army base one last time to return her gear and say good-bye to friends.
Avital then mentioned Peretz Gantz, sixty-one, a Holocaust survivor, who died on the Number 18 bus; then Boris Sharpolinsky, sixty-four, a new immigrant from Ukraine; Celine Zaguri, nineteen, and in Israel only six weeks; Yonatan Barnea, the son of the journalist Nahum Barnea, who ran from his office near Jaffa Road to the scene to cover the story, only to realize that his son was dead; the eight-year-old boy who lost both parents.
Finally, she turned to Matt and Sara.
Avital recounted how Matt spoke to his seminary classmates about the importance of continuing the peace process after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. She mentioned Sara’s environmental work in Russia during the previous summer.
“The tragedy that stole Matthew and Sara from you, from their sisters, from their friends, from their people cannot be reversed. We cannot even say, ‘Let them not have died in vain.’ For their deaths were as senseless as the act that took away their lives. The terrorist who strapped around him twenty pounds of explosives did not make individual distinctions. What we can do is to ensure that Matthew and Sara did not live in vain.”
As with countless other funerals after countless other tragic deaths across the arc of human history, the relatives and friends of Sara Duker and Matthew Eisenfeld understood that a burial of someone you love and admire is not just a time for mourning. It is a time for telling stories, too—or simply remembering those now gone.
In his office in Hong Kong, where he worked for a branch of the J.P. Morgan investment banking conglomerate, Xiao-Guang Sun picked up the phone and heard a familiar voice—a friend from Yale, named Josh. Matt and Sara were dead, Josh said. Killed in a bus bombing in Jerualem.
Raised in China, Xiao came to the United States in his final year of high school along with his father, a university professor. After a year in a New England prep school, Xiao found himself at Yale, barely understanding English and with no friends.
On his first day, Xiao met Matt Eisenfeld and the two immediately became close. That connection continued even after Xiao transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after just one year at Yale. Xiao spent holidays at the Eisenfeld home in West Hartford. When he returned to Asia after graduating from MIT, Xiao and Matt kept up a regular correspondence. When Xiao’s girlfriend recently accepted his marriage proposal, one of the first friends he told was Matt.
When the telephone rang at his desk at J.P. Morgan, Xiao already knew about the bus bombing in Jerusalem. He typically began his days by devouring the South China Morning Post, an English-language daily that served Hong Kong. And as he read an account of the bombing, Xiao thought of Matt.
“I can’t say it was superstition,” Xiao said. “But I did think: ‘Well, Matt is there. What’s going on there?’ ”
Now he knew. Xiao got off the phone, left his office and walked to a nearby park and sat on a bench in silence, his mind tracing how his life had intersected with Matt’s. “I couldn’t come to the reality of what happened,” he said. “It was the first death in my life of someone I knew well.”
Xiao remembered having a drink with Matt in a Manhattan bar near Columbus Circle only the summer before when he had flown from Hong Kong on a business trip. He thought of a postcard a year earlier from Matt. Then Xiao thought of his last communication, a letter Matt wrote two months earlier. In jagged handwriting that covered two pages, Matt congratulated Xiao on his upcoming wedding and sketched out his life in Israel—rising at 5:30 for morning prayers and spending weekends with Sara—while also hinting of the country’s internal troubles. “Needless to say, this has been a difficult year in some ways,” Matt wrote. “Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was killed a month ago, sending us all into depression. It’s hard to act when such terrible things happen, but one must. One must continue to contribute to one’s community, perhaps with more energy than before.”
That hopeful look into the future was typical of Matt, Xiao thought. So were Matt’s final lines: “Tell me the date of your wedding! And send me an invitation! Sara might even come too!”
Across continents and oceans, other friends of Sara and Matt settled into the same ritual of remembrance.
In Austin, Texas, another of Matt’s Yale roommates, Ted Scott, thought of the letter he had also received recently in which Matt mentioned that he and Sara planned to travel to Jordan. “Now that there is peace, this type of travel is safe,” Matt wrote.
At Barnard College, where she was finishing her senior year of studies, Oshrat Carmiel, recalled Sara’s whimsical wardrobe—especially her love of Keds purple sneakers—that camouflaged her intense intellect. “She wanted to be different,” Carmiel said. “She was very proud of being very smart. She was not going to hide that. There was a part of her that was emboldened. It wasn’t in your face. It was how she presented herself. She just wanted to do something different.”
“Everything about her was petite, but when she was ready to announce a thought she spoke with force,” Carmiel said. “It was easy to dismiss her. It was easy to think that she was the soft, quiet person. It takes a while that you have this creeping realization that this is a person with a serious intellect.”
Another friend of Sara’s at Barnard, Celia Deutsch, had just stepped off the subway at the Columbia University stop when a colleague stopped her.
“I’m so sorry,” the colleague told Deutsch.
“What?” Deutsch said.
It was the Monday morning after the bombing, and Deutsch had not yet heard the news about Sara and Matt.
Deutsch and Sara had bonded in a unique way the previous year. Deutsch, a Roman Catholic nun and religion professor at Barnard, was an expert in ancient Jewish scriptures. Sara had been selected for a special Barnard program—Centennial Scholars—that required her to write a research paper. Sara had chosen to examine the writings of a first-century rabbi, Elisha ben Abuyah. She asked Deutsch to guide her.
With the news that her former student was dead, Deutsch’s mind raced back to the hours she had spent talking with Sara the previous year about Judaism and the rich tradition of scripture.
“She had a liberty of mind,” Deutsch said years later. “In my mind, I kept seeing her.”
Many others felt the same way. The news that Sara a
nd Matt had been killed unleashed a steady torrent of memories that seemed to grow in the days leading up to their joint burial. The sharing of memories seemed almost to bring them to life again. But of course, the very act of speaking of a memory was a stark reminder that only the memories were left now, mixed now with the conflicting emotions of anger and disbelief over what had taken place.
At Sara’s funeral in Teaneck, Tal Weinberger, who befriended Sara in high school and Matt at Yale and then watched their relationship blossom, stepped to the podium in the front of the synagogue, and paused for a moment as she looked out over the crowd that included New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman. “The only reason I can stand up here and talk reasonably calmly is because I’m still in denial,” Weinberger said. “I always imagine all the milestones of my life with Sara in the background. I still haven’t realized that I won’t be at her wedding and that we won’t be able to babysit for each other’s kids.”
In a letter read to the congregation, Sara’s younger sisters, Tamara and Ariella, invoked their sister’s love of purple sneakers and how she had taken a job recently in Jerusalem as a housecleaner to earn extra money but had been fired for incompetence. “For those who would use her death as an excuse to blame and hate, we can only say that our sister never hated anyone and would never have wanted to contribute to the hate in this world,” the sisters wrote.
At Matt’s funeral, Cantor Joseph Ness wept as he sang a dirge. Matt’s uncle, Larry Port, told reporters outside that “if Matt were still here, he would want the peace process to continue. He believed in it strongly.” Matt’s friend and roommate, Shai Held, recalled how Matt and Sara regularly prayed together. And yet, as Held also noted, Matt’s spirituality was not without its lighthearted moments. Matt loved studying the Torah, said Held. But he also loved an occasional sip of whiskey.
Matt’s sister, Amy, too choked up to speak, wrote a letter that was read to the congregation in which she described how her brother helped her with a newspaper route. The two siblings piled newspapers in a wheelbarrow, then walked the streets of their hometown. But Amy conceded she quickly tired. “Because I was always exhausted, it became our routine that I would get into the wheelbarrow and Matt would push me uphill, the rest of the way home,” she wrote. “Matt will never push me home again.”
Rabbi Benjamin Segal, the president of Jerusalem’s Schechter Institute where Matt was studying, called his promising student “a gentle soul with a very fine mind.” Then, Segal turned his thoughts to both Matt and Sara. “Such wonderful young people who could have been great leaders, great people, are lost,” he said. “It’s an old story.”
And so it went.
The memories multiplied as the funerals unfolded, told often in brief stories that touched on Sara’s whimsy or Matt’s ability to listen when someone needed to vent, stories of their spirituality, their academic pursuits, their careful nurturing of friendships and even their acceptance of strangers.
One story, repeated often in public and in private discussions among their friends, involved a homeless woman at the Columbia campus who was befriended by Matt and Sara as they walked to their classes during the year before they left for Jerusalem. The woman’s name was Annie.
The Columbia campus, which sits atop a series of craggy hills called Morningside Heights on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and is flanked by the massive Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine on one side and the tomb of President Ulysses S. Grant on the other, has been home to an extraordinarily diverse population. Dwight Eisenhower walked the campus as its president. Barack Obama was there as a student. Other noteworthy residents included beat poet Allen Ginsberg, choreographer Twyla Tharp, author-monk Thomas Merton, singer Suzanne Vega, the Yankees’ Lou Gehrig, comedian Joan Rivers, and an endless list of writers, philosophers, mathematicians, revolutionaries, performers, physicists, artists, sociologists, and dreamers. In World War II, the Manhattan Project, which led to the invention of the atomic bomb, was born on the Columbia campus. In the late 1960s, Columbia was also home to one of the most radicalized of student groups in a time when almost every college campus brimmed with radicals.
But like almost every other New York City neighborhood, the campus was also a magnet for its share of homeless, or street people.
It was wintertime on the Columbia campus. Sara was winding up her courses at Barnard College and diving into work with Sister Celia Deutsch on her final thesis before graduation; Matt was midway through the first year of his studies at Jewish Theological Seminary.
Annie seemed to have no real home, except the streets. She spent her days sitting on a patch of sidewalk near the corner of 121st Street and Broadway, just up the block from the seminary and a few steps from a cafe where students often gathered for a cup of coffee.
Sara and Matt often walked by Annie’s spot—Sara to attend the egalitarian prayer group at the seminary and Matt on his way to classes there. Friends are not sure whether Sara or Matt spoke to Annie first or, indeed, whether the two of them stopped and talked to her at the same time. At Barnard, Sara had volunteered to work with a campus group that visited with homeless people and brought them food. Sometimes, friends said, Sara even brought food from the Barnard and Columbia dining halls.
Annie seemed to touch Sara and Matt deeply. Some friends say it was Annie’s vulnerability. She was thin, worn, fragile, in her mid-fifties but looking much older because she had spent so many days and nights living on New York’s streets. Others said it was Annie’s friendly nature that reached out to Matt and Sara.
Far too many homeless people in New York City are often handcuffed by addictions to drugs and alcohol or are plagued by various mental illnesses, so that they can seem angry, unapproachable, even dangerous to strangers. Annie was different. She was also a bit of an entrepreneur. Unlike many homeless who simply hold out a cup and beg for spare change from passersby, Annie had set up a business. She knitted small bookmarks for students.
Sara and Matt spoke frequently about Annie to their friends, especially about the hardships the homeless woman faced. She had several illnesses, including breast cancer, recalled seminary student Matthew Berkowitz, who became Matt’s roommate a year later in Jerusalem. Many students simply passed by Annie, often feeling sorry for her or giving her a modest donation, but never speaking to her.
Matt and Sara brought the news of Annie’s health problems to the other students.
“I remember feeling so shocked,” said Berkowitz when told about Annie’s sicknesses. “Matt and Sara found this out because they were the kinds of people who wanted to find this out.”
On one especially cold morning, Matt brought Annie to an apartment he shared with several rabbinical students. “Matt offered her a cup of tea,” said Edward Bernstein. “Even in a community of idealistic people, with people looking to go into the rabbinate or into Jewish education or just trying to believe that they wanted to make the world a better place, Matt stood out.”
Matt and Sara told friends they were frustrated; they wanted to do more for Annie.
One day, they came up with an idea, which would be recalled again and again at their memorial services after their deaths because it summed up so well their mix of ideals and practicality.
Sara and Matt felt that Annie needed to make more money on her own. And if she could knit bookmarks, could she knit other items? Sara and Matt felt that the nearby Jewish Theological Seminary was a natural customer base for what could be a small business venture knitting yarmulkes or Jewish skullcaps for male students. Many seminary students wore yarmulkes—or, as they often called them, kippots or kippahs. Among college students at least, knitted yarmulkes were popular, especially if they were colorful.
“I remember going to Barnard and seeing homeless people,” Arline Duker said of her own experience as a student there. “But I don’t remember any of us getting to know them the way our kids did.”
Sara and Matt approached Ann
ie with the idea and she agreed. Sara bought yarn, then she and Matt took orders from the seminary students for the custom-made yarmulkes from Annie. The hand-knitted yarmulkes were an instant success, although not the sort that would suddenly propel Annie into a comfortable life. Annie earned less than $100 on the project, students said. But as many friends remembered, the inherent value and meaning of the story for others was far greater.
“They shared this passion for acts of loving kindness and social justice,” said another rabbinical student, Michael Bernstein, who was one of Matt’s roommates at the seminary when he and Sara befriended Annie. “That was a big part of who they were.”
Less than a year after leaving the Jewish Theological Seminary for studies in Israel, Michael Bernstein saw Sara and Matt again—this time, with an entirely different topic on their minds. In Jerusalem, on a Sunday afternoon several weeks before they were killed, Matt and Sara dropped by the apartment that Bernstein shared with his wife, Tracie.
Like Matt, Michael Bernstein had come to Jerusalem for a year of intense scripture study at the Schechter Institute. The two rabbinical students were not merely close friends, they were frequent study partners in the complicated analysis of Torah and Talmud passages that rabbinical students customarily engage in. But on this day, Matt and Sara had not come to the Bernstein’s apartment to discuss scripture or to reminisce about Annie.
The couples talked about life in Jerusalem, especially how they were adjusting to the language differences, bus schedules, new apartments and roommates, and the food. But the Bernsteins sensed this was not a casual visit. Matt had indicated as much when he telephoned several days earlier. “They basically called up and said ‘We want to ask you a question,’ ” Bernstein remembered.