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Insight
Updates
UV &
From the Jewish News pages for this
week 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 years ago.
Heartbreaking
z,
Close Israeli family shattered by suicide bombing once lived here.
DEBRA ISAACS
Special to the Jewish News
C
hen Keinan rem-embers herself as a serious girl,
a teenager who felt "deaf and dumb" as she
struggled to learn English during her stay in
America. She plunged into books as an escape
from her peers' adolescent pursuits — makeup and boys,
among them — and to keep up with them at Orchard
Lake Middle School.
Such were the three years she spent in West
Bloomfield, from 1982-1985, when the Israeli Army sent
her father, Retired Lt. Col. Natan Peled, to Michigan.
He was assigned to be a liaison between the U.S. Army
Tank Command in Warren and the Israeli Defense
Forces.
Today, Keinan cannot stop talking about the horror of
losing her mother and 15-month-old daughter in a sui-
cide bombing in Petach Tikvah, outside Tel Aviv, on
May 27.
The 31-year-old woman and her husband, Lior, sur-
vived the attack with light wounds, but their hearts were
shattered. Before their eyes, their only child, Sinai, and
Keinan's mother, 56-year-old Ruth Peled, were blown
apart as a Palestinian bomber ignited his cache of explo-
sives outside a small bakery in a commercial shopping
strip. The family, as it often did, was having coffee
together on a sunny afternoon outside the shop.
"It's a horror show," Chen Keinan said. "I can't imagine
anything worse. The only one who could comfort me was
my mom."
Of her daughter and mother, Keinan said, "They were
soul mates. They had to go together, I guess. I'm a tree
with my roots gone and my branches gone."
Sinai was her "flower," a little one who loved dogs and
had just learned to kiss and hug, her mother said. Keinan
asked a friend to close the windows in her house to pre-
serve the sweet scent of her daughter.
When Israeli-born Nira Lev heard there had been an
attack in Petach Tikvah, she frantically called friends from
her home in West Bloomfield. She learned from her sister-
in-law that her good friend, Ruth Peled, was a casualty.
Lev, head of the Agency for Jewish Education of
Metropolitan Detroit's Hebrew program, still can barely
contain her shock and sadness.
"When you think of a man who is willing to die so he
can kill an innocent person ... I haven't lost hope, but
something must be done so this can't happen. This shows
you closely how it's killing people. The whole family is
ruined. The victims are not just Ruthie and the baby. The
real victims are the people left behind," said Lev.
She and her family became very close with the Peleds
when they lived here,
and visit them every
time they go to Israel.
Ruth, Lev said, was an
idealist with a strong
sense of justice who
could easily convince
others to the rightness of
her way. Because of a
kidney disorder, Ruth
became a strict vegetari-
an, and Lev followed.
"Ruthie was a model
to all of us," Lev said.
But Ruth Peled's true
achievement was the
closeness of her family,
Lev said. Chen and her
sister, Lee, live a few
doors away from each
other in Petach Tikvah,
and the children, includ-
ing Lee's 13-month-old
twins, were always
together. Son Udi, now
Ruth Peled and her granddaughter 24, who attended Hillel,
is nearby.
Sinai Keinan, 18 months, were
"Ruthie was really the
"soul mates." Both were killed
central figure, though
May 27 in a suicide bombing
outside a bakery in Petach Tikvah. (Natan) was the central
figure in the army. She
was a very tiny, thin
woman. She didn't look 56; she looked 26," Lev said.
Uri Zachor, an executive at a Macomb County company
that manufactures spare parts for the military, recalls the Peled
family as a formidable unit.
About two years ago during a visit home, Zachor, an
Israeli who lives in West Bloomfield, ran into them at a
shopping mall in Tel Aviv. Naturally, grandparents, chil-
dren and grandchildren were together, he said.
Zachor has been touched by the deaths of other close
friends in Israel, too. The man who built his family's home
in Ramat Hashon 40 years ago was among those killed in
the Pesach massacre in Netanya.
Natan Peled, Zachor recalled, maintained an optimism
that Israelis would be able to live in peace, that a day would
come when men would not have to serve in the army every
year. Even in the eulogy he delivered at his wife's and grand-
child's funeral last week — a copy of which was sent to
Zachor — Peled did not rail against Palestinians, but
HEARTBREAKING
Remember
When • • •
on page 32
,sgrAe
Howard Gelberd, former executive
director of the San Francisco
Bureau of Jewish Education, is
named head of the Agency for
Jewish Education of Metropolitan
Detroit.
The Michigan Jewish AIDS
Coalition is working on Jewish
AIDS curriculum for synagogue
education programs.
Residents of metro Detroit's Jewish
Federation Apartments will hold a
park groundbreaking ceremony at
its first strawberry festival.
„.—
The new Congregation Beth Israel
of Flint is dedicated.
A permanent memorial to the 6
million will be unveiled in a cere-
mony by Congregation B'nai
_Moshe of Detroit in Section P of
Oakview Cemetery, Royal Oak.
HC
Detroit pro-Nazi supporters paint a
red swastika on Ahavas Achim syn-
agogue in Detroit in response to
the hanging of Adolf Eichmann.
Hillel Day School of Metropolitan
Detroit announces it will now be
housed at the Jewish Community
Center in Oak Park.
Vtir
ik*WW' AU A,
,
attam,Imvxma,„toiVen,
Beth Aaron Synagogue and United
Hebrew Schools enter into an
agreement to open an afternoon
Hebrew school at Wyoming and
Thatcher in Detroit.
As part of the interracial program
of the Council of Mothers Clubs,
the New Study Club and Pasadena
Club are sponsoring a tour of -
Detroit's Mexican neighborhood.
The first official report since Pearl
Harbor shows more than 20,000
Jewish refugees in Shanghai under
Japanese control are without jobs,
food or aid. .
— Compiled by Holly Teasdle, Archivist
The Rabbi Leo M Franklin
Archives Temple Beth El
IN
6/7
2002