David Behrens — Staff Writer: Newsday — 10/9/2002
 ozens of her friends and neighbors have been killed in terror attacks, making Port Washington native June Oppenheimer Leavitt even more committed to the West Bank life she chose 20 years ago.
With good reason, June Oppenheimer Leavitt fears she has lost her sense of humor.
Since the High Holy Days of 2000, dozens of her friends and neighbors in Israel have been killed or wounded by suicide bombers and roadside snipers.
Her girlhood in Port Washington did not prepare her for the life of a settler on Israel’s West Bank. In college, as an anti—war activist, she never dreamed she would raise a family of five children in Israel or feel that putting a son or daughter on a school bus might be a life—or—death decision.
Leavitt, 52, and her husband, Frank, live in Kiriat Arba, a small Jewish settlement on the outskirts of Hebron, an Arab city of about 120,000. She immigrated to Israel two decades ago — to shape a new life and express her commitment to the dream of a Jewish homeland.
In reflection, Leavitt is a bit surprised at the curious turns of her life. But two years ago, as a witness to violence, she began work on a personal journal to examine her odyssey.
Last month, “Storm of Terror: A Hebron Mother’s Diary” (Ivan R. Dee, $22.50), was published, recounting the author’s experiences as she watched her neighborhood become a killing field.
To her, life in Israel feels like an endless Sept. 11, she said during a telephone interview from her home.
“We went to a funeral a few days ago, and I realized we know more people in the graveyard than we know in this community. At funerals, over here is a mother who lost a son, over there one who lost a daughter. It is frightening.”
• • •
Until she was 18, she lived on Crabtree Drive in Port Washington, where she was barely aware of Israel or her own ethnic roots.
In Israel, as violence intensified, she tried to sort out the realities of her life. She was, after all, the daughter of a Jewish mother who hated Judaism, “who made her daughter promise never to wear a Jewish star.” Like some assimilated Jews in America, her family exchanged presents, hung stockings and decorated a tree each Christmas.
In her memory, the family’s backyard pool has become an icon of her suburban girlhood. She sees herself as a somewhat spoiled young girl, thinking about boys and clothes, about her favorite blue bikini and living the good life.
“June did love to be tanned,” Susan Goetz Zwirn, one of her closest friends, recalled. “She did a lot of sunbathing in those days.”
But her old friend was also a voracious reader, an outstanding student with a gift for languages and hopes for a career as a writer, said Zwirn, an art education professor at Hofstra University who lives in Port Washington.
She remembers June as both serious and wonderfully funny, with a wickedly irreverent sense of the comic. “She made me laugh all the time.” Perhaps, her friends believe, humor helped June to deal with the loss of her mother, who died of breast cancer when she was 10 years old.
When she graduated from middle school in 1965, the yearbook cited her as the student with the best sense of humor. “I’ve pretty much lost that by now,” Leavitt commented in a recent e–mail.
In college in 1968, she became part of the counterculture, growing her dark brown hair long and discarding her matching leather outfits for blue jeans. But she was more attracted to the spiritual side of the revolution, rather than the political.
Soon after, in the mid–’70s, she moved to Vermont, looking for something. “I felt I was dying and needed to find people with a connection to the land. My own soul needed healing.” There, she met her future husband. “That’s why I believe in destiny.”
June and Frank Leavitt, then an Orthodox Jew, were married soon after. Her decision to turn to orthodoxy came as a shock to her schoolmates — and her move to Israel in 1980 was another surprise.
But then, Zwirn observed, “June always wanted to be with people who were interesting, who led important lives, did significant things. She wanted her own life to be significant.”
Another friend, Susan Rapp Kalish, remembers June as inquisitive, always looking for a challenge. “June was always searching,” said Kalish, now a Dix Hills resident. “Her marriage seemed like such a drastic move, because her family was not at all religious.”
But when June moved to Israel, she was happy. “I thought being in a Jewish community would give her the sense of family she really didn’t have after her mother died — a sense of belonging and purpose,” Kalish said.
After her mother’s death, June and her brother often were left to themselves, she said. “But I think she became stronger. She always adapted to almost any circumstance.”
Adapting to terror has been the most difficult adjustment Leavitt ever made. It is only possible, she said, with an unshakable impulse to live.
“When I’m full of happiness, I try to understand, ’How can it be?’ But the will to live is very strong. In Israel, people go from a funeral one hour to a wedding the next. With my children or my grandchildren at my side, I hear the news of another terrorist attack. I look for such things to give me some tranquillity — or else I would live in constant fear.”
Today, she and Frank feel more committed than ever to Israel’s survival. Once she had supported the peace process — but not any more.
Like some Israelis who once favored liberal policies, she believes there is no hope for peace unless the Arab populace gives up the notion of a Palestinian state. “Or else there will be a terrible war.”
A decade ago, the Leavitts had felt at home with left—wing politics. “In the beginning, we believed that if an Arab autonomy could live side by side with us in peace, there might be a possibility that religious Zionists never dreamed of.”
The Leavitts thought coexistence was possible — before barbed wire separated the Arab and Jewish communities around Hebron. And they were seen by some of their religious neighbors “as too liberal, too soft, too educated with Gentile values.” Today, she finds herself moving closer to a hardline position she once found uncomfortable.
“There is a very Biblical feeling that if we have an enemy in our midst that wants to destroy us, we cannot allow them to be here. ... If we have any right to be here at all, that right comes from the Bible.” It was a view held by people on the political right, she said, whom she had considered xenophobic and narrow–minded.
The summer of 2002 had been very quiet, Leavitt said during the phone interview. “We were all exhausted from what was happening, so August was a time to catch your breath.” But a few days later, she e–mailed news that the snipers were back — firing again at the gate in front of her home.
“I should never have said things were quiet. That is an invitation for trouble. Just now, Arab gunmen opened fire on people as they came up from the Tomb of the Patriarchs after sabbath prayer. My daughter and son had just come home. Miracle: no injuries.”
• • •
Leavitt began her journal entries on the first day of the Jewish New Year, when the sounding of the shofar, a ram’s horn, is a traditionally joyous note.
“This Rosh Hashanah,” she wrote, “it was difficult to hear the shofars over the sound of gunfire.”
That evening, her 21–year–old daughter, Estie, was called to the phone. “She quickly dressed, picked up an A–3 sharpshooter’s rifle and was picked up by a military jeep.”
How different their lives were, Leavitt mused. “She’s seen many people die. ... At her age, I was a sophomore in college ... not serving in the Israeli Army.” In college, she had purchased a pair of matching leather shoes for each dress and suit in her campus wardrobe.
For her children, there was early exposure to sudden death. Her son, Yehoshua, was 12 when he rode a bus attacked by Arabs. “When the bullets pierced the windows, one flew by his head and into the back of his best friend.” Now 19, Yehoshua has become a religious Jew.
His parents are no longer observant. When they moved to Kiriat Arba in 1980, they were part of a movement of Jews into the West Bank — to resettle land won in the Six Day War in 1967.
“We said, ‘Let’s go where we are really needed.’ In Israel, the kibbutzim were already settled. The only way to pioneer was to join a settlement on the West Bank.” It was, for some Jews, a new frontier, she said during the phone interview.
Still committed to Israel as a homeland, they have become secular Jews — and Leavitt is still struggling to find inner fulfillment.
“I no longer find spiritual enrichment in the synagogue or in the rituals, not at all. I do find it in meditation, in yoga.” But she and her husband also are traditionalists — still observing holidays such as Passover and the High Holy Days. On the Sabbath, she turns on lights, uses her computer, works on her journal. “But I try to keep a quiet day.”
Kiriat Arba, with about 500 Jewish families, is on the Hebron border. When the Leavitts arrived, there had been only sporadic violence.
“Someone would throw a Molotov cocktail. Or a shop would suddenly close. But we had time to run. You might have a friend who was killed, but even if it happened every few months, you had time to breathe.”
But by the autumn of 2000, she wrote, the roads into Kiriat Arba and Hebron often were closed, “as Arabs take up the weapons that the Rabin government gave them as part of the peace process — and use them against us.”
• • •
By 1991, it was the periods of quiet that became sporadic, Leavitt wrote. “The uprising had begun. Fences were erected and concrete walls were built, separating Jews from Arabs. Hebron began to look like Berlin after World War II.”
At the end of the decade, people stayed in their homes. The buses seldom ran. Snipers took cover in the hill town of Bait Jala, overlooking the road to Jerusalem, firing down on Jewish traffic, she wrote.
Much of Leavitt’s diary is a litany of deaths.
Just after Yom Kippur, a close friend of her son Yossi was killed while helping a friend build a house in the hilltop settlement of Maon. Soon after the wedding of Yossi, who is 23, and his wife, Adi, her rabbi was shot and killed on a bus outing to a religious site.
“So many of those we know are now widowed and orphaned. Arab gunmen lie in wait. I teach English three days a week in Jerusalem. How will I get there? I pray with only a half a heart. The other half tells me there is a cancer in this land,” one of her entries laments.
As the violence escalated, the entries became more terse. A young mother in the Mahane Yehuda market was killed by a car bomb. A lawyer, Yair Levy, stopping to buy pita and falafel, was killed by a sniper. Before Hanukkah, a neighbor was killed outside the Kiriat Arba gate on her way to an elementary school. “One clean bullet through her head.”
Levitt lamented in her diary: “When will it end? We’re all so tired, God. Please protect me and my family. Don’t let my children be orphaned. ... Don’t let us be maimed. What is keeping us rooted in Kiriat Arba?”
Yet, there are joyful moments, too. Last year, Yossi and Adi’s first child, Shachar, was born. Their second daughter, Oriah, was born seven months ago.
“How much happier I am than my mother, who never even saw her own children grow up,” Leavitt wrote.
But the deaths continued to intrude. Arieh Hershkowitz, who gave Yossi a table as a wedding gift, was killed as he drove home from work. Another friend was murdered as he picked up his car at a Jenin garage. A doctor was slain in his car, “shot in head, wearing a bulletproof vest,” Leavitt’s entry noted.
On Aug. 10, 2001, a suicide bomber struck the Sbarro fast–food food restaurant in Jerusalem, killing 14 people, including seven children. At first, Leavitt wondered if any of her children were there. Among the dead was a young woman from Kiriat Arba. She was working at the cash register, getting ready to begin her army service.
“Judaism was suppressed in my childhood home,” Leavitt wrote, “because it was associated with too much suffering. The establishment of a Jewish state was to be the panacea for the tortured Jew. Yet statehood has been no cure.”
A few weeks later, when the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were destroyed by terrorists, one of Leavitt’s neighbors exclaimed: “Now the Americans can understand how we feel.”
Fear continued to haunt everyday life, Leavitt wrote. “We peep at one another like figurines on the mantel in Agatha Christie’s book, ‘And Then There Were None.’ So who will be killed next?”
From New York, a letter arrived from her brother, Robert, who lost many friends in the World Trade Center disaster. “He asked, ’How is it humanly possible to live with terrorism day in and day out?’”
The following spring, Frank Leavitt called for a family gathering — to give the children “a chance to decide finally if Israel is where we should live.”
All five children vowed to remain in Israel. “This is my country,” said Shmulik, 24, the oldest of the five and the first to speak.
“This is where I will bring up my children,“ said Estie, who had been thinking of moving to the United States.
“And what about me?” Leavitt wrote in her diary. “I have crossed the point of no return. This is where I live.”
The diary concluded with June and Frank recalling days when Jews and Arabs lived together.
In the distance, they heard an Arab peddler with a wagonload of goods, crying out in Yiddish: “Old things — old things to buy and sell.”
“I think those days will return, Junie,” Frank said. “I think we’ll be happy here.”
|
