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U.S. teen’s murder in Israel ripples among L.A. parents

When Leat Silvera wakes up in the morning and sees alerts on her Facebook news feed for terror attacks in Israel — which is 10 time zones away — she quickly looks for words such as “Alon Shvut” or “Gush Etzion,” the area of the West Bank south of Jerusalem where her 18-year-old son, Joshua, is spending a year studying at Yeshivat Har Etzion before college.
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November 24, 2015

When Leat Silvera wakes up in the morning and sees alerts on her Facebook news feed for terror attacks in Israel — which is 10 time zones away — she quickly looks for words such as “Alon Shvut” or “Gush Etzion,” the area of the West Bank south of Jerusalem where her 18-year-old son, Joshua, is spending a year studying at Yeshivat Har Etzion before college.

It was near there that a Palestinian terrorist, 24-year-old Mohammed Abdel Basset al-Kharoub, opened fire with an Uzi on the afternoon of Nov. 19, shooting at a row of cars sitting in traffic, wounding at least five people and killing three — Rabbi Yaakov Don, 49, an educator and a father of four; Shadi Arafa, a Palestinian resident of Hebron; and Ezra Schwartz, an 18-year-old Bostonian studying for the year at Yeshivat Ashreinu in Beit Shemesh. Schwartz and his classmates were in Gush Etzion that afternoon to hand out food to Israeli soldiers and to visit the memorial site of three Israeli teenagers abducted and murdered last year by two Palestinian terrorists.

“Joshua was in the beit midrash [study hall]” when news began to spread of the nearby attack, Silvera said. “He said that their alert system went off, all the walkie-talkies went off, and everyone with a gun ran out.”

The yeshiva holds regular security meetings with students to stipulate where they can and can’t travel, Silvera said, and students are allowed to leave the school, even in the midst of a surge of Palestinian terror attacks since late September — most of them knifings — that have left 22 Israelis dead and nearly 200 injured. 

Schwartz’s slaying in particular hit home for American parents like Silvera and her husband, Albert, who have a child in Israel for a gap year between high school and college. And while all such attacks make parents more nervous, particularly ones that hit Americans, parents are still committed to letting their children go to Israel to study, which is a staple for many American Jews who finish a Jewish day school education.

“People ask me all the time, would I bring him home?” Silvera said. “I wouldn’t. He’s 18, and it’s really up to him.”

She follows the Facebook page The Muqata, which gives frequent and detailed reports on attacks in Israel. If a notification pops up on her phone about violence near Yeshivat Har Etzion, she texts Joshua to make sure he’s OK. 

“Little bubbles come up and he’s typing me back, ‘I’m OK mom,’ ” Silvera said. “You have a little bit of guilt in you, because you know your child is OK, and then you just start crying because you know it’s somebody else’s child.”

Nancy Melamed, whose son, also named Joshua, was a friend and classmate of Schwartz's at Yeshivat Ashreinu, said she learned about the attack through a text from her son telling her a friend had been shot.

Melamed said she doesn’t want to bring Joshua home, and that when she asked him if he was thinking of leaving Israel, he clearly said no in a manner that made her think, “ ‘Why would I even say those words?’ And I go, ‘Good, because I wouldn’t even think to bring you home.’ ” 

Melamed said Yeshivat Ashreinu has brought in counselors and speakers, including Rachel Fraenkel, mother of Naftali Fraenkel, the 16-year-old Israeli-American teen murdered last year in Gush Etzion along with two of his classmates. The yeshiva also holds conference calls for parents to get updates. Since the stabbings began, it also has conducted self-defense classes for students to help them be more prepared in case of an attack.

“The school has been just superb,” Melamed said.

Jeffrey and Amy Rabin, whose son Avishai is studying at Jerusalem’s Yeshivat Eretz HaTzvi — their fourth child to do a gap year in Israel — said last week’s attack “rattles” them in that their “prior cautious optimism is now diminished.”

“There is now the grim reality that while we have always known, in the back of our minds, that Israel lives in a dangerous neighborhood, this is now going to be much more of a frontal reality,” Jeffrey Rabin wrote the Journal in an email on the day of the attack.

“But,” he continued, “I’ll live with the new reality. I’ll still go to Israel … and my son is staying for the rest of the program.” He said Avishai spent Shabbat after the attack at Kfar Etzion, a kibbutz adjacent to Alon Shvut. “We told him he has to travel to and from there in a bulletproof bus — not in a private car,” Rabin said, adding that their daughter, Yael, plans to move to Israel in 10 months. “This has not deterred her, nor us, in supporting that decision,” he said.

Two of the Silveras’ children will also travel to Israel in the next several months, and while those plans remain on track, Albert Silvera said he’s going to look closer at the itinerary and security precautions for a cross-country trip “that happens to be a little more exposed,” in that it will be bringing students to popular Jewish sites across Israel.

To put the dangers in Israel into perspective, he pointed out that Israel has 8 million people, Los Angeles County has 10 million, and that he knows three people who have been killed in Los Angeles — two in car crashes and one who was murdered. “Terrible things can happen anywhere,” he said. “At this point, I feel that overall it’s a very low crime area where he’s at, and that he’s basically safe if he follows the rules.”

Marnin Weinreb, whose daughter Adina is spending her gap year at Machon Maayan, a seminary outside Ashdod, said the school requires parents to pre-approve certain types of travel — like taking Jerusalem buses or traveling to popular shopping areas — and that he and his wife, Alison, have approved all of Adina’s requests.

“It definitely adds a much higher level of anxiety,” Weinreb said of last week’s attack, adding, “we are trying to stay calm.” 

He warns Adina, “Be more aware; be careful where you go. If something looks odd or different, go the other way.”

And in December, Marnin said, he and his wife will visit their daughter in Israel.

“There’s a part of me that feels it’s very important to not run away.” 

Correction: This article originally stated that Jeffrey and Amy Rabin, whose son Avishai is studying at Jerusalem’s Yeshivat Eretz HaTzvi, is their sixth child to do a gap year. It has been corrected to say fourth.

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