Playing ‘Chicken’ With Cars, Trucks, Trains : Israeli Youths Often Lose Deadly Game

With only yards to spare, the Haifa-Tel Aviv express train stopped short of the children stretched across the track.

Three 15-year-olds jumped up, jeering at the curses of the shocked driver, and fled.

Baruch Oren was not so fortunate. In the city of Haifa, as his friends watched, the 11-year-old leaped in front of a car to retrieve his school bag from the middle of the road.

He was killed.

Classmates said Baruch had succeeded in evading a car three times before. In a separate “game,” another boy was badly injured.

The boy’s death--the second such recent fatality--spurred the Education Ministry to order teachers throughout the country to crack down and call on parents to help fight what is called a deadly plague.

Israel’s psychiatrists, educators and parents are puzzled and worried by the spread of this deadly adolescent game, called variously “road roulette,” “chicken,” or “Russian roulette.”

Narrow Miss

One driver, badly shaken when he narrowly missed two children sitting on a road in Tel Aviv’s Ramat Hasharon suburb, took the pair to the police station. Both were released because of their ages--14.

In northern Israel a deputy police commander fell onto the pavement after violently braking his unmarked car to avoid hitting a 12-year-old boy. The furious commander gave the boy a tongue-lashing and held him at the police station until his parents picked him up.

Israeli adults fear the game is a misconceived attempt to measure up to a stressful society--a child’s response perhaps to the prevalence of legal lotteries, Mediterranean machismo or risk-taking in traffic.

“Adults gamble, but the children have less money so they gamble with their lives,” said Daphna Moskowitz, a Jerusalem high school teacher. “I believe Israeli behavior on the roads is macho, and this is the way children without licenses behave in the streets.”

Out of Proportion

Others blame the Education Ministry and media, saying they blow the phenomenon out of proportion, and compare it to teen-age suicides elsewhere that spread with exposure.

Justice Minister Dan Meridor believes the answer to the menace is harsh punishment of both children and their parents.

Teachers said a tradition of over-protectiveness among Jewish parents only heightened the alarm sweeping the tiny country of 4.2 million people, which has fought five wars against its Arab neighbors. “Jewish society is overprotective of its children. Children matter a great deal,” Moskowitz said.

Religious leaders have expressed concern at the phenomenon. A spokesman for one ultra-Orthodox group said children killed because of “road roulette” should be viewed as suicides, and not be buried in Jewish cemeteries.

Columnist Maccabee Dean of the Jerusalem Post likened the behavior to that of young Palestinians in the occupied territories who hurl stones, facing the danger of catching a bullet from Israeli soldiers.

When Education Minister Yitzhak Navon asked during a school visit why pupils played the deadly game, students replied: “To show they’re brave” or “to tempt death,” and “just to show off.”

In many of the secondary schools, teachers have spent hours giving lectures stressing the danger of showing off. The night before his death, Baruch had attended one such lecture.