Students and community members gathered last week at UCLA to
mourn the loss and remember the lives of seven people killed in an
attack in late July on a “home of dialogue and
tolerance” ““Â the Hebrew University in
Jerusalem.
“(We mourn) the deaths and murder of students
““Â our peers, our friends, our sons, daughters, brothers,
sisters, lovers. … We are mourners who cannot stop to mourn
because we’re running from funeral to funeral,” said
Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, who led about 100 students and
community members in prayer, candle-lighting and memory
sharing.
Many found the recent bombing especially detestable because it
was an attack on a university ““ what Seidler-Feller called
“a refuge, an impregnable safe-house, the home of dialogue
and tolerance.”
The Hebrew University is a place where Jews, Christians and
Muslims study together, and where many professors progressively
push for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. On July 31, a
bomb placed in a school bag exploded in a cafeteria at the
university. Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack and said it
was in response to an Israeli attack in Gaza, which killed a Hamas
military leader and 14 others.
Five Americans were killed in the bombing at the university,
including Marla Bennett, 24, a graduate student who studied at
University of California, Berkeley as an undergrad and was
scheduled to come home to San Diego two weeks ago; Benjamin
Blutstein, 25, from Pennsylvania, who loved to spin records and was
described at the memorial as always alternating between the
“religious world and the green-haired, body-pierced secular
world”; Janis Ruth Coulter, 36, a senior program officer of
the Hebrew University Rothberg International School’s New
York office; David Gritz, 24, a graduate student and dual citizen
of France and the United States; and Dina Carter, 38, a dual U.S.
and Israeli citizen.
Mourners at UCLA also lit candles for Argentinian David Diego
Landowski, 29, and Levin Shapira, 52, of Jerusalem, who also died
in the attack.
Many of the speakers knew Bennett and Blutstein, either as
friends, roommates or classmates.
Lea Buchwald, for instance, studied with both Bennett and
Blutstein in Jerusalem. She recalled that Blutstein took her to
“a beautiful wedding” in Israel.
“We danced together and had a great time,” she
said.
Buchwald also told of a Shabbat, the Jewish sabbath, she spent
with Bennet, remembering she thought she had prepared plenty of
food for Shabbat ““ until, that is, she spent one with Bennet
where there was more food than she’d ever seen.
“There was so much joy in the room,” she said of the
occasion.
Another speaker read a letter written by a friend of
Bennet’s, Roee Ruttenberg, a UCLA graduate.
In the letter Ruttenberg wondered, without answer, why anyone
would want to attack Bennet and Blutstein.
“Could it be that she and her friend Ben, as they entered
the cafeteria, had ulterior motives, other than eating?” the
letter asked.
Ruttenberg also wrote, “Marla was to fly back home to the
U.S. on Friday. Instead, what remains of her will be flown home
over the weekend.”
Indeed, Bennett was to have returned to San Diego to celebrate a
family bar mitzvah and the wedding of a college friend. Instead,
family and friends overflowed a synagogue a few days after she
would have met up with them, mourning her death.
Bennett’s roommate, Deborah Bach, came to the UCLA
memorial the day after the funeral in San Diego. She said
Bennet’s funeral ““ where “the room reached more
than capacity” ““ was like a metaphor for Bennet’s
spirit.
“Marla overflowed with love and compassion. She loved
people. She loved learning. She loved Judaism,” Bach
said.
“(The funeral) just showed how Marla was so overflowing
with life.”
With reports from the Associated Press