Monday 7 July 2014

Alisa Flatow - Age 40

«IF SHE HAD lived, Alisa Flatow would have turned 40 years old this year. But her life was snuffed out two decades ago when a suicide bomber attacked her bus in the Gaza Strip.

Last week, her family in West Orange received a small measure of justice.

Terrorism has become almost a daily fact of life. On any given day, somewhere in the world, someone commits murder in the name of God, politics – or both. Usually the victims are unarmed civilians, merely going through another piece of ordinary life — by riding a bus or eating in a restaurant or boarding an airplane.

Alisa Flatow had just turned 20 when she interrupted her studies at Brandeis University near Boston in 1995 to travel to Israel and enhance her knowledge of Judaism. By April, she felt she needed a break. So with two friends, she took a bus to spend a weekend at an Israeli-owned beach hotel in the Gaza Strip.

She never made it. As the bus cruised along a road, a man in a small truck pulled along side and detonated a massive bomb, killing Alisa and seven Israeli soldiers who had been on leave and were returning to their base.

After her funeral and burial in a Paramus cemetery, Alisa's family made a brave decision. They would not sit idly by, as world leaders prattled on about the horrors of terrorism and how sad it was to lose another innocent life. The Flatows – in particular Alisa's father, Stephen – asked basic questions that all crime victims want answered:

Who did this?»

Opinion: The father who never gave up - Opinion - NorthJersey.com
http://www.northjersey.com/mobile/opinion/opinion-the-father-who-never-gave-up-1.1045904?page=all


Kol Tuv,
RRW

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