This Week

Standing Behind Israel

Canadian immigrants feel a duty to stay despite the daily threats.

ERIC SILVER
Israel Correspondent

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uby Wolbromsky, a clinical psychologist,
drives three times a week from his home
in the West Bank settlement of Efrat to
treat patients in Jerusalem 10 miles to
the north. Other days, he takes his wife, Lynda, and
five children to see a film, shop, eat in a restaurant,
visit a doctor.
It used to be a pleasant spin through the hills
along a new highway, bypassing the Palestinian
towns of Bethlehem and Beit Jala, not to mention
the settler-hostile Deheisheh refugee camp. But since
the al-Agra intifada (Palestinian uprising) erupted
nine months ago, the drive has lost its pastoral
charm.
Three of the Wolbromskys' neighbors, a man and
two women, have been shot dead on the Jerusalem
road. A 14-year-old boy that their daughter Gila
used to baby-sit was bludgeoned to death while hik-
ing with a schoolfriend..The family's van has been
stoned four times.
That wasn't what they expected when they moved
to Israel from Canada in 1986 and made their home
in Efrat, a cluster of stone-faced, red-roofed villas.
"It seemed like the best of both worlds," explains
Lynda, a slim, 43-year-old high-tech executive. "It
was suburban in the way we grew up and at the
same time it was in Israel."
She is not prepared to admit that they were naive.
Not yet, she smiles, anyway. The couple deny that
the settlements are illegal or an obstacle to peace.
Then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak was willing to give
up 92 percent of the territories, they argue, but that
brought intifada, not peace.
Ruby, a chunky, loquacious 47-year-old, admits he's
worried when he leaves home. He tenses as he drives
past the Arab village of el Khader or roadside cliffs
where an assailant might be lurking. He lowers his
hands on the steering wheel so that if a rock comes
through the windshield the shards won't cut them.
"Our van was hit a month and a half ago," he
says. "You hear this boom. Your heart skips a beat.
Your whole body goes into a shock reaction. If it
shatters your windshield, you're blinded for a few
seconds."

Armor-Plated Bus

tiNfi

7/20

2001

22

His wife insists that they try to maintain a normal
family life, but concedes that they don't move
around as freely as before. "If we want to take the
kids to Jerusalem just for fun," she says, "we think
twice. We try to stuff more into it when we do go."
Their son Amiad, 13, travels on an armor-plated

The Wolbromsky family — Ruby, Lynda, Gila and Amiad — in their Efrat backyard.

bus when he goes with his team to Jerusalem to play
baseball. Lynda worries what will happen to him in
the city, which suffered two car bombings in May.
Efrat doesn't feel like a community under siege.
No one has bothered to mend the settlement's rusty,
broken barbed-wire fence. Yet the tension is a con-
stant. The children are reluctant to talk about it,
Amiad brings out his gray baseball shirt. It has
"Kobi" and the number 8 stitched on the sleeve in
memory of Ya'acov (Kobi) Mandell, the murdered
hiker, who played in the same league.
Gila, who used to baby-sit for Kobi, confesses that
she feels "scary" when she hears people have been
killed. "I was angry with the people who killed Kobi,
but also angry with the Arabs in general because
none of them condemned it."
Ruby doubles as father and psychologist. "People
here are less vibrant now, less spontaneous, less avail-
able to their spouses and their kids," he explains. "I
force myself to parry once in a while, I break into a
dance with Lynda, I pick up my kids and swirl them
around. I get together with friends and take out a
bottle of whisky.
Ruby serves on a local emergency team. One of its
jobs is to break the news to bereaved families. Ruby

spent a day counseling Kobi Mandell's parents at the
nearby settlement of Tekoa. "Losing a child who is
bludgeoned to death and trying to imagine what
your son goes through in the last minute of his life is
worse than any hell I can imagine," Ruby says.

Patriotism Or Safety?

Like every Western immigrant, the Wolbromsky
family could pack up and go back. They could leave
Efrat and move down the road into Israel proper.
Ruby admits they have thought about it. "Every
minute, every day," he acknowledges, "I worry
whether I'm being a responsible parent in exposing
my kids to the risks of living here."
In the end, they are toughing it out.
Life, Lynda argues, wasn't meant to be easy. As the
daughter of a mother who survived the Holocaust,
she says she feels a debt to Israel.
"The Holocaust would not have happened had there
been an Israel. There would have been a place for the
Jews, and there would have been one army in the world
that said, 'We'll not let this happen to the Jews."'
Someone, she adds, has to pay the price for Israel's
existence. "We've chosen to take responsibility." ❑

