Tragedy Leaves Jerusalem in Grip of Grief

The streets of this tortured holy city lay nearly deserted Friday, the day after a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 15 people and himself in a downtown pizza restaurant.

A mournful sequence of funerals for victims of the attack preoccupied Jerusalem’s Jewish residents. The anxiety of not knowing whether the Israeli army’s limited predawn reprisals--aimed largely at Palestinian Authority political offices--were a prelude to a harsher response gnawed at Palestinians.

On both sides, there were questions about whether anything other than a burning desire for revenge could be salvaged from the latest round of bloodshed. Even as the Bush administration and European governments called on Israelis and Palestinians to forswear violence and return to negotiations, talk here was of the conflict intensifying.

Palestinian officials warned that the Israeli government’s takeover of Orient House, a symbolic Palestinian official presence in East Jerusalem, could spell the end of the Oslo peace process, which began when the two sides signed their first peace accord eight years ago.

“The Palestinian people are left without choice but to escalate resistance and intifada [uprising] to liberate holy Jerusalem and regain the Orient House and other Palestinian institutions occupied by Israel,” Ahmed Abdel Rahman, a senior aide to Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, told Reuters news service.

But for many Israelis, politics took a back seat for the day to the achingly familiar rituals of grief. Thousands flocked to cemeteries, weeping as they buried children, mothers, fathers and others killed in Thursday’s blast. Radio stations played sad songs, reflecting the gloom that seemed to grip the nation.

“How do you persevere? Only God has answers. I’m not asking why. I’m asking: Until when will the evil people rejoice?” said Yisrael Meir Lau, one of the nation’s two chief rabbis, as he delivered the eulogy at the funeral for five members of one family who were killed in the bombing.

“I married this couple, and now I have to bury them,” he said, his voice breaking with emotion.

Lau stood before five stretchers holding the shrouded bodies of Mordechai and Tzirli Schijvenschuuder and three of their eight children. A fourth child, 11-year-old Leah, who was seriously injured in the blast, was wheeled to the funeral on a hospital bed. Her 9-year-old sister, Hiya, was too seriously injured to leave the hospital. Three older brothers, who were not on the restaurant outing, also attended.

The couple, who lived in a Jewish settlement in the West Bank, brought their children to Jerusalem for a day of respite from the tensions of the Palestinian uprising, friends said.

At a later funeral, Judith Greenbaum, called Shoshana by friends and family, was laid to rest. An American who grew up in an Orthodox community in Los Angeles, Greenbaum was five months pregnant with her first child. A student at New York’s Yeshiva University, she had been completing a study trip to Israel and was due to return to her New Jersey home Sunday, friends said.

Yitzchok Adlerstein, one of Greenbaum’s former teachers, said he learned of her death early Friday morning. Adlerstein, who lives in Hancock Park, said he was visiting Jerusalem as part of a solidarity mission of Los Angeles Jews.

“That solidarity is now more meaningful than we planned,” he said as he prepared to attend Greenbaum’s funeral.

“She was ebullient,” he said of his former pupil, “her parents’ joy.”

Greenbaum’s death has rocked her tight-knit Orthodox community in two nations, he said. Adlerstein, who has a daughter living in Israel, said he thought of canceling his son’s plans to study at a Jerusalem yeshiva this fall after Thursday’s attack.

“But Israel is an extension of home for our community, and you don’t leave home in response to people who try to push you out,” he said.

As dramas unfolded all day in the city’s cemeteries, its streets and cafes were mostly empty. A tense hush hung over the downtown area.

Police warnings that another attack on Jerusalem is likely in the next few days kept shoppers away from sidewalks that normally bustle on a Friday morning. Those people who did venture out seemed drawn to the site of the bombing. Undeterred by the blazingly hot weather, tourists videotaped the scene as men and women prayed and wept.

Only a shell remains of the popular Sbarro pizza restaurant that was destroyed when a Palestinian detonated a bomb inside during lunchtime. The blood and glass were cleaned up by morning, and workers boarded over the gaping holes left when the blast blew out the restaurant’s plate-glass windows.

Black-framed death notices plaster the boarded-over front, and an impromptu memorial of flickering candles and floral wreaths was growing on the sidewalk below.

“I came to this spot to read tehilim [psalms] for the dead,” said Meir Littman, a 17-year-old Orthodox Jewish high school student. “I was here right after it happened, and again last night when [left- and right-wing Israeli] demonstrators came and began shouting at each other. It didn’t feel right to me that people were shouting on this spot where people had died, so I came to read tehilim for their souls.”

Littman leaned against a police barricade as he prayed, looking down at the Sbarro soft drink cups that people had collected after the blast, now upended and serving as stands for dozens of candles.

“It is a hard feeling,” he said. “I have gone to this restaurant. I stand here knowing that I could have been lying on this spot yesterday.”

In traditionally Arab East Jerusalem, few shoppers ventured down Saladin Street, the usually vibrant main commercial stretch. The walled Old City was free of the crowds of Palestinians who routinely shop there Friday mornings. A tight army closure of the West Bank, a massive Israeli police presence and the fear of being targeted by Israeli extremists kept Palestinians away.

Thousands of Israeli police officers were deployed to ensure that no disturbances erupted during the noon prayers observed by Muslims at Haram al Sharif, the site of Al Aqsa mosque, which dominates the Old City. Jews revere the site as the Temple Mount, where the remains of the Jewish temples of antiquity lie.

Among Muslim men, only those who were Israelis citizens or Jerusalem residents and older than 40 were allowed past police barricades. Less than a third the normal number attended services, and the prayers passed without incident.

But blocks away, Palestinian demonstrators skirmished with police who had seized Orient House and had hoisted an Israeli flag over it. At least one officer reportedly was hurt by a rock, and several demonstrators were arrested. The Israelis closed several other Palestinian Authority offices in the city and in Abu Dis, a village on Jerusalem’s outskirts.

The Palestinian Authority’s presence in East Jerusalem has always been a sore point with the Israelis, who see it as undermining their nation’s claim to all the city as its united capital. The Palestinians insist that any final peace accord must divide Jerusalem between two states, Israel and Palestine.

Israel’s seizure of Palestinian political offices earned it a rebuke from the U.S. State Department.

“We are concerned about the Israeli action against Orient House and the Palestinian town of Abu Dis,” a State Department official said in Washington. “These actions represent a political escalation, undermine faith and confidence in a negotiated settlement of this conflict and increase the risk of further deterioration of the political situation.”

But President Bush criticized Arafat for having done too little to dampen the violence, although he acknowledged that radical Palestinian groups are restricting Arafat’s freedom of action.

“Mr. Arafat can do a better job--I am deeply concerned that some of the more radical groups are beginning to affect his ability and obviously are provocative as heck toward the Israelis,” Bush said in an interview broadcast Friday on ABC-TV’s “20/20.”

“I’m frustrated because I recognize how much better the world will be if we can ever achieve a peace in the Middle East,” Bush said.

Israeli commentators were divided over the wisdom of targeting Palestinian political offices. Some asked what the government will do with Orient House. Sometime during the day, the police lowered the Israeli flag raised after the takeover.

“If the Palestinians will not use the Orient House for political activities,” Justice Minister Meir Sheetrit said, “they will not have any problem getting Orient House back.”

*

Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington and Aron Heller of The Times’ Jerusalem Bureau contributed to this report.