LOOKING AROUND: Coming of age
By Barbara Sofer
January, 31 2002
(January 31) In recent months, one gory attack has followed another with such sickening rapidity that we are beginning to lose track of the chronology and depersonalize the victims. Nonetheless, the events of January 17 were haunting: the image of Nina Kardashova, 12, celebrating her bat mitzva in David's Palace hall in Hadera while a representative of PA Chairman Yasser Arafat's Aksa Brigade made his way to the gate with an M-16.
"I didn't even get a chance to cut the cake," said Nina, wearing the earrings her grandmother's husband, killed in the attack, had given her.
The bat-mitzva attack made me think of the canceled bat-mitzva party of Jerusalemite Michal Belzberg. Her Hebrew birthday came out on August 9, the day a terrorist with a guitar case blew himself up at the Sbarro pizza parlor in Jerusalem. "I don't want to have a lavish party when people are suffering," she said. Her parents used the party money to start up a fund for victims of terror.
A bat mitzva, a Jewish girl's coming of age, is supposed to be a moment of melodiousness and joy, an earnest taking on of mitzvot, a unique juncture in a girl's growth process, soon to be replaced by both the responsibility and tempestuousness of adolescence. Bat-mitzva girls shouldn't have to deal with terror.
With this on my mind, last Sunday morning I stopped at MaTaN, the Jerusalem women's Torah study institute, for a copy of Bat Mitzvah, a volume of essays and sources edited by Sara Friedland that Ben-Arza published to celebrate the school's bat-mitzva year. The anthology, written mostly by women, explores halachic and philosophical issues, offers practical suggestions to make the celebration meaningful, and includes nostalgic reminiscences of women's experiences of this life marker.
Who could have guessed that within hours another 12-year-old, my petite and pretty cousin Jamie Sokolow from Long Island would join the sorority of Jewish girls whose childhood had been blemished by malevolence. Winding up a visit to Israel, Jamie's parents Mark and Rena mentioned their plans to buy Israeli sandals for their three daughters at a well-known shoe store on Jaffa Road. Did I think it was safe?
Mark, a corporate attorney, was on the 38th floor of the Twin Towers on September 11. His narrow escape was one of the reasons they'd made the trip to visit their daughter Ilana, 18, studying Torah at Midreshet Lindenbaum, a yeshiva for women. Another reason was the family's desire to make Jamie's bat-mitzva year particularly meaningful.
Like most Israelis, I avoided a direct answer about the safety question. I told them about seeing shoppers in the dress store sprayed by machine-gun fire even while the glaziers were repairing the glass.
My own office is on Rehov Harav Kook, just a block from where they'd be. They would phone me when they finished their shopping, and I'd meet them, bringing along a manuscript I'd edited for Mark's stepmother Reha - the story of her miraculous childhood survival in Nazi Germany.
THE MOMENT Mark phoned me, I sprinted down the stairs. The sun was out, the air was crisp. I'd crossed Harav Kook when the noxious, now familiar boom reverberated.
From the smoke and the direction of running border police, the explosion had to be near the shoe store. I begged a border guard to let me through to look for my cousins, but to no avail. The road was sealed within minutes for fear of additional bombs. The emergency room of Bikur Holim Hospital was already being readied for the injured. The guard let me in.
I have often heard stories about the difficulty of recognizing loved ones after a terrorist attack. They're true. Not only the cuts and burns and bruises made Jamie look different. She looked much older than she had the night before. A doctor was saying she'd be all right. And then I found Mark, more lightly injured. We learned that Rena and Lauren, 16, were in Shaare Zedek Hospital and they would be all right, too. Ilana was in class.
Because of her eye injury, Jamie was moved to Hadassah-University Hospital, Ein Kerem. We sped through Jerusalem, siren sounding. Ironically, we passed Yad Vashem, where Jamie had looked for the tree of the Righteous Gentile who had saved Reha's life.
The "good news," said the ophthalmologists at Hadassah, was that this particular bomb was not loaded with nails and screws soaked in rat poison, like the December terrorist attack on Rehov Ben-Yehuda.
Bar-mitzva celebrations have been documented since the 13th century, but feting a girl's coming of age is a 20th-century innovation, according to the new Bat Mitzvah anthology. This provides the opportunity to experience the joy of creative innovation.
The bat mitzva should be part of an educational process, stress the authors, as she goes on to become "the author and hero of her own life."
Hero was a word I thought of often as Jamie lay bandaged in the emergency room, undergoing examinations, answering key questions about her allergies and contact lenses, recounting the dismal event for doctors and camera-wielding journalists.
"Of course I'll want to come back to Israel," she told a surprised reporter. "I'm a Jew and this is my land."
Jamie's inner strength, her beauty and nobility which had been nurtured by her loving family, impressed everyone who came in contact with her. The hospital staff actually applauded her as she came out of treatment. Was this amazing girl really only 12?
Jamie was now "12 plus." Twelve, plus one lethal encounter with the demonic enemies of the Jewish people who violated the sanctity and innocence of her childhood.
May the God of our fathers and mothers protect our children from all harm.
