ASSASSINATION AFTERMATH : SOUTHLAND RESPONSE : Jewish Community at a Loss for Answers

On the day after, the Los Angeles-area Jewish community struggled to explain to itself, its children and the outside world how Israel can regain its footing on the road to peace and how they may find hope in the wake of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination by a Jewish university student.

Saturday night was ablaze with the light of thousands of candles as mourners held vigils and sang prayers across the city, but Sunday morning rose in uncertain silence. How could the assassin be one of our own, they wondered in synagogues and religious schools, and where do we go from here?

“It’s a tragedy for the Jewish people, and the fact that it was done at the hands of a fellow Jew is an act that we cannot digest. I can’t articulate how horrendous this is,” said Rabbi Sholom Tendler, director of academic programs at the Orthodox Yeshiva University in Los Angeles. “The Jewish nation is going to have to regroup to assess how to deal with this. A lot of prayers are being said.”

Still, the answers would not come.

At the Sunday school at Temple Sinai in Glendale, teachers discussed the ramifications of Rabin’s assassination with students.

“The kids are asking the same questions the adults are asking: How could this happen, and what does it mean, and will there be peace? Ever?” Rabbi Carole Lee Meyers said. “The pain is just so profound. I think that extremists on both sides rarely understand the power of their words, and if nothing else, this will force us to look at that. This is words turned into action.”

The religious school at Temple Aliyah in Woodland Hills gave children a chance to ponder the assassination and its meaning. “This has just devastated the Jewish community,” said Rabbi Stewart L. Vogel.

“Israel is everything,” Ariella Nissim, an Israeli-born religious instructor, told the students. “We all feel like it is our loss. These things should not happen. A Jew should not kill another Jew.”

At a memorial in the synagogue, the children listened silently with solemn faces as another instructor lighted a candle. They sang a Hebrew song called “He Who Makes Peace.”

Jewish community leaders have planned memorial services and other events throughout Los Angeles today. Among them is a program at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, where Gov. Pete Wilson is expected to join mourners. The office of Israel’s consul general will be open to the public. Officials said they plan to invite mourners to sign a condolence book, like one President Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton inscribed Sunday in Washington, D.C., before leaving for Israel.

“Like Moses, who did not live to see his people in the Promised Land, Rabin did not live to see his vision of a full and comprehensive peace with all of our neighbors,” Consul General Yoram Ben Zeev said in a statement. “We will continue his legacy of reconciliation with our neighbors and healing amongst our own people.”

Just as they have been divided over the direction of the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, Jewish leaders disagreed over whether Rabin’s death would help or hinder the process.

“I think people are slowly going to realize that what was the action of a lunatic was the tip of not an iceberg but a seething volcano of discontent about the pace and advancement of the actions that are taking place,” said Rabbi Yitzhok Adlerstein, director of the Jewish Studies Institute, an Orthodox group affiliated with Yeshiva. “I think that is going to put a damper on the pace of negotiations.”

But Rabbi Allen I. Freehling, who leads University Synagogue in Brentwood, told about 200 fourth- through seventh-graders that the shooting may propel the talks forward by bringing Jews at opposite ends of the political spectrum closer.

Still, the children, many of whom learned only Sunday that the assassin was himself a Jewish student, expressed disillusionment and bewilderment at the prospects for peace negotiations.

“I think there’s going to be a lot of problems now,” said Josh Lederer, 13, of Santa Monica. “I don’t think this is the end of it. It’s going to keep happening.”

At the Shul, a Jewish bookstore on Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade, about 300 mourners lighted candles and sang songs at a Saturday night memorial service, said founder and cantor Esther Schwartz. Another service was planned for Sunday evening.

Sentiments at the bookstore Sunday afternoon, however, ran from sadness to disappointment at the Israeli government’s lapse in security.

One volunteer worker at the store, Susan Aronson-Perry, said Rabin should have been wearing a bulletproof vest. “Our whole lives are in their hands,” she said of Israeli leaders. “They need to take care of themselves.”

At the Wiesenthal center, Executive Director Rabbi Meyer May lamented the loss of Rabin, whom he spoke with less than two months ago to air the center’s concerns about the direction of peace talks. “I did not get the sense at all that he felt, at all, that the danger was from within.”

The men spoke the same day Palestinian extremists bombed a bus, and Rabin had told May, “There is no way to prevent this kind of suicidal attack.”

Children mirrored adults’ concerns; outside Temple Aliyah after school Sunday, 9-year-old Lisa Hendrickson of Northridge said that although her parents told her about the assassination, she still did not understand why it happened.

“I am upset,” she said. “I feel bad that one of our own killed the prime minister and I don’t know why he did it.”

Some of the school’s teen-agers understood the political consequences of the assassination.

“They were in the middle of peace talks when this happened, and maybe the next person [to take Rabin’s place] will be scared it will happen to him too,” said Natalie Auganim, 14, of West Hills. “I wouldn’t want to be in his place.”

In another part of Woodland Hills, members of Temple Judea joined about 30 other San Fernando Valley groups to clean up Taft High School as scheduled for a planned “Mitzvah Day,” a day to do good deeds. But everyone’s mind was on Rabin.

“I had to tear myself away from the TV,” said Marsha Novak of Encino. “In times of crisis we want to connect with others, but I think it was more important today to connect with our own Jewish community here.”

Novak said she was shocked when she heard it was another Jew who killed Rabin.

“That bothered me the most,” she said, “that over a political issue, one Jew could kill another.”

All they can do now, said her husband, Mark, is hope for something better.

“Hatikvah,” he said--”the hope.”

“Hatikvah,” they repeated.

Times staff writer Eric Lichtblau and special correspondent Ed Bond contributed to this report.