COLUMN ONE : Assassin’s Alma Mater Fights Back : Israel’s Bar-Ilan University has been excoriated as a right-wing hotbed after a student killed Yitzhak Rabin. The school is cracking down on extremism, re-examining its curriculum.

For decades, Bar-Ilan University has seen itself as one of the few institutional bridges between religious and secular Jews in this nation’s increasingly polarized society.

A visitor strolling across its sprawling campus can see observant Jewish men in skullcaps and women in head scarves walking amicably with their secular, bare-headed classmates.

The only state-financed religious university in Israel, Bar-Ilan has prided itself on requiring its 19,000 students to complete the equivalent of a minor in Jewish studies.

“Most universities today try to be ethically neutral,” Bar-Ilan President Shlomo Eckstein said. “We are not neutral here. We have an ethical and moral view that we are proud of.”

But on Nov. 4, Yigal Amir shattered the university’s self-image as an island of tolerance and keeper of Jewish values when he assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Before he fatally shot Rabin, Amir took off the knitted skullcap that he always wore. Within hours of Rabin’s death, though, Israel Television was reporting that Amir was an Orthodox Jew and a law student at Bar-Ilan who had slain Rabin because the killer opposed the Palestinian peace process.

Bar-Ilan reeled, besieged by hundreds of journalists and excoriated by Israeli politicians, academics and commentators as the prime example of how skewed the ideology of religious Zionism had become in the 28 years that Israel has occupied the West Bank.

Over the years, critics asserted, this flagship of religious Zionism had let far-right students and professors drown out moderates on campus. It had, they said, permitted an atmosphere to flourish in which Amir and others like him could openly debate outside classrooms the merits of killing the prime minister.

After weeks of absorbing caustic comments from everyone from Cabinet ministers to newspaper columnists, Bar-Ilan is fighting back.

Eckstein insists that Bar-Ilan is the institution best suited to reconcile religious and secular Israelis, best positioned to teach the importance of tolerance and the values of democracy.

On Thursday the university named a blue-ribbon committee to review courses, including those offered by its Institute of Advanced Torah Studies, where Amir, 25, was a star student for two years.

“We believe that a strong university, confident in its educational direction and record, can afford to open itself up to external review,” Eckstein said after the committee was named.

The day before that panel was appointed, Bar-Ilan also hosted a daylong symposium on tolerance and democracy in Rabin’s memory.

Students from all seven of Israel’s state universities were invited but only 600 attended, a number the organizers said was disappointing.

Bar-Ilan has also announced that next year, in partnership with the Anti-Defamation League, it will offer courses on democracy and tolerance to secondary-school teachers.

*

All these moves were designed to rebut the notion that Amir was a natural product of a university closely linked to the increasingly right-wing, religious Zionist movement in Israel and the United States. But university administrators and outside critics agree that this task will not be easy.

The university’s first battle is to overcome the tidal wave of negative publicity generated by Amir’s killing of Rabin.

Bar-Ilan’s low point came, perhaps, the day after the prime minister was buried, when Avraham Burg, head of the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency, declared on state-owned Israel Television that there was “a straight line from Tehran to Bar-Ilan,” likening the university’s teachings to those of Iran’s revolutionary mullahs.

His comments were doubly damaging because the Jewish Agency is the primary institutional link between Israel and the Diaspora communities that founded Bar-Ilan and because Burg himself is an observant Jew.

Then came the news that other Bar-Ilan students were being arrested in connection with Rabin’s murder. Four who studied with Amir were taken into police custody.

While all were eventually released, police investigators say they may still charge two of those arrested with conspiring to harm Palestinians in the West Bank. The arrests have made it harder for the university to claim that Amir was simply an aberration.

Bar-Ilan has also sought to cope with the reactions of some of its own.

Uri Milstein, a military historian and guest lecturer at Bar-Ilan, boasted to reporters that the confessed assassin had taken a 1993 class of his that “sharpened” Amir’s “operational skills” and helped him plot the assassination.

It has been a series of horrors for a university that American Orthodox Jews founded 40 years ago as a bridge between observant and secular Israelis and between Israel and Jews abroad.

“Bar-Ilan teaches respect for tradition, tolerance of diversity, commitment to the community and ardor for academic excellence,” the university declared in a news release on its 40th anniversary in June. “Bar-Ilan has been a catalyst for Israel’s scientific, social and spiritual development.”

The school’s founders believed that by requiring the equivalent of a minor in Jewish studies it was offering students a unique opportunity to build an ethical foundation to their studies.

“An ethical foundation is fine,” said professor Nachum Ben-Yehuda, a sociologist at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University who is highly critical of Bar-Ilan. “But the question is, what kind of ethics? At Bar-Ilan, they teach a monochromatic form of Orthodox Jewish ethics that increasingly reflect the views of the extreme religious right.”

Drawing many of its students and some of its faculty from the religious Zionist camp in Israel, Bar-Ilan could not help but be affected by the trend toward the right in that camp, critics and even some faculty members and students say.

“What is happening at Bar-Ilan is only a reflection of what is happening within religious Zionism,” said Dedi Zucker, a left-wing legislator and head of the law committee of the Knesset, or Israeli parliament.

*

Zucker said he is unconvinced that Bar-Ilan is truly committed to serious change.

“The university has a lot to clean,” he said. “Bar-Ilan became a center of too many extremists, too many fundamentalist Jewish groups and individuals. It was a greenhouse for people who came there after attending yeshivas [religious high schools] or after serving in the army in the hesder yeshiva program.” (Amir served in that program, which allows observant soldiers to split each day between Bible study and military service.)

“At Bar-Ilan, these people stayed relatively isolated from the rest of Israeli society,” Zucker noted. “They stayed together with the same bunch of kids, in the same climate, hearing the same educational line.”

Bar-Ilan administrators are quick to point out that only about 53% of its students identify themselves as coming from a religious background. The university also attracts secular Israelis, Israeli Arabs and a large number of army officers.

But professors and students say the numbers do not tell the entire story.

“The proportion of non-religious students on campus certainly has not fallen,” said professor Charles Liebman, a specialist on relations between Israel and the Diaspora who has taught at Bar-Ilan for 25 years. “But they perhaps do not feel as comfortable expressing themselves forcefully as do the religious students. And even within the religious camp, the moderate majority has deferred to the activist, very right-wing minority, letting them take the leadership role.”

*

Rabin’s murder, and the attacks on the university that followed, produced a confused response of shame, remorse and outrage on the part of administrators, faculty and students.

The immediate response was profound shock. Classes were canceled for two days as the university plunged into formal mourning. When classes resumed, professors held “town meetings” urging students to talk about their feelings.

“That was the first day I regained my appetite after the murder,” recalled professor Yedidia Stern, the law school dean. “The situation in this faculty is more severe than in others, because the killer and others implicated in the crime came from here. Our town meeting was cathartic for faculty and students.”

All agree that none of Amir’s classes--he had taken law and computer science courses, besides his studies at the Torah institute--taught the interpretation of Jewish law that led him to conclude that Rabin’s assassination was morally acceptable.

Still, some professors called for a university-wide soul-searching and reassessment of course content.

Perhaps, some argued, the university’s failing was in what it did not teach.

“There was a tendency, perhaps, to stress the particularist elements of Jewish tradition rather than the communalist elements,” Liebman said. “Many believe that there must be something wrong, somewhere, with an educational system out of which those people came.”

Others insisted that the university bore no more responsibility than any other segment of Israeli society, and they claimed that the attacks against Bar-Ilan were actually attacks on all religious Jews.

In the eye of the storm is Eckstein, the university’s soft-spoken president.

He is a Harvard-trained economist and observant Jew who wears the same sort of knitted skullcap that Amir wears, a sign that identifies the wearer as a religious Zionist.

“I came to this university 35 years ago because I believe that Jews with a traditional background have a message to deliver,” Eckstein said. “I believed, and I still believe, that there is a necessity for finding a common denominator between Jews and Israeli citizens, to strive together for a better future.”

He was on the telephone for days after he learned that Rabin had been killed by a Bar-Ilan student.

He has been in touch with major donors in Israel and abroad, reassuring them that the university was as shocked as they to learn that one of its students had killed Israel’s leader.

Eckstein said no major donor has threatened to cancel a gift because of the assassination.

Still, he felt compelled to take some steps.

The contract for outspoken Milstein, who was to deliver three lectures this year, was canceled. And in an interview on Israel Radio after the latest Bar-Ilan student was arrested on suspicion of involvement in Rabin’s murder, Eckstein said any professor who speaks approvingly of the assassination will be fired.

*

“Academic freedom is a sacred principle,” a visibly agitated Eckstein said in an interview in his campus office. “But these are not normal times. This is a state of emergency. And in such a situation, perhaps there should be some limiting of academic freedom.”

Over the vigorous objections of some faculty members, and at the urging of Education Minister Amnon Rubinstein, Eckstein said he decided to appoint the independent review committee “to find out whether there is anything in them [the courses] which could have promoted or allowed by acquiescence these ideas to come up.”

On campus, some professors and students complain that appointing the committee is tantamount to an admission of guilt.

Eckstein said it is no such thing. He said he is confident that the committee will find nothing wrong with Bar-Ilan’s course content.

But what seems obvious, he said, is that there was at least “some physical place [on campus] where these people could meet, did meet, which we were unaware of,” where they discussed attacking Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and possibly also killing Rabin to stop the hand-over of parts of the West Bank to the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Ben-Yehuda, the Hebrew University sociologist, said Bar-Ilan was much more than just a meeting place.

“Why did students like Yigal Amir choose to come to Bar-Ilan?” he asked. “Because they believed that the atmosphere there supported their ideological views. Amir and his friends felt comfortable there. They felt it was an environment in which they could safely express their views. It is no coincidence that they picked Bar-Ilan.”

For 25 years, the men’s Institute for Advanced Torah Studies that Amir attended was the jewel in the crown at Bar-Ilan, spokesman David Weinberg said.

Each year, it receives about 2,000 applications but accepts 100. All come from a religious-school background, and many served in the army’s hesder yeshiva program.

“We have always thought that the institute brought a certain flavor, a certain atmosphere to campus,” Weinberg said. “These were 400 quality young minds, very active in the student union, active in weekend activities.”

*

Eckstein passionately defended the Torah institute’s record and said he is certain that the outside committee will find that no professor taught anything that contributed to Amir’s decision to kill Rabin.

“Bar-Ilan gets those kids when they are mature,” he said. “It is not even like college students in the United States, who are 18 when they start university. Here, Israelis start university only after they serve in the army. They are 20 or 21 when they come here.

“A student is a mature man with most of his political views formed when he arrives on campus,” he said. “All we can hope for is to open a window into his mind. His character is formed much, much earlier.”

The institute’s counterpart for women, the Midrasha, with more than 900 students, will come under the scrutiny of the committee Eckstein is assembling, Weinberg said.

It will also examine weekend programs that often brought students to Jewish settlements in the territories to study the Bible.

It was at one of those programs, organized by Amir, that Milstein expanded on theories he set out in a course he taught at Bar-Ilan.

*

Milstein, author of a highly critical book on Rabin, “The Rabin File: How the Myth Swelled,” told reporters that he lectured for about seven hours to Amir and a group of his friends one weekend in August. He spoke mostly about his book, which police found in Amir’s home.

“I gave to my students, including Yigal Amir, tools to analyze a security organization and how it can ruin itself,” Milstein told the Jerusalem Post. “With this analysis, he could have planned a way to murder the prime minister.”

Eckstein defended the university’s decision to hire Milstein.

“Under normal circumstances, our decision to hire Uri Milstein would be considered not laxity but openness,” he said. But had Milstein expressed his views in his job interview, Eckstein said, “he wouldn’t have been hired.”

The university’s task now, Eckstein said, “is to do more of what we have always done” and to reemphasize its commitment to tolerance. But he insisted that it is not only Bar-Ilan that must do this.

“Basic education in Israel must be looked into,” he said. “Not only the religious education, but also secular education. For too long, we have set aside the education of values--the teaching of the sanctity of life--to teach more about computers. We must all ask ourselves whether the content of our education is up to the crisis we are dealing with.”