A Blessing That Came From a Curse

It was early in the morning on May 9 when the police came to the door. They had searched through the night and found the missing boy, Kobi Mandell, in a ravine near his home on the Israeli-occupied West Bank. He and his friend Yosef Ishran had been stoned to death.

“My wife, Sheri, collapsed on the floor,” said Kobi’s father, Rabbi Seth Mandell, recalling the first moments after they heard about their son. “I had a different reaction. I went to wake up our other children and tell them.” He was already asking himself what the family should do to give some meaning to Kobi’s death.

A psychologist friend of the family went to identify the body, worried that the shock of seeing their son might be too much for the Mandells. Kobi was 14. His skull had been crushed, and his blood was smeared on the entrance to the cave where he died in a rugged area a few miles from Bethlehem. He and Yosef had skipped school to go hiking outside the security gates of Tekoa, their settlement.

Over the next seven nights, during the Jewish grieving period of shiva, close to 1,000 friends and neighbors came to mourn. So did local politicians, including the president of Israel, Moshe Katsav. The details of the murders had made international news, in part because the Mandells are American, but also because of the political implications of Kobi’s violent death. Footprints leading from his body were tracked to a nearby Palestinian village. No one has been charged with the crime.

“I was not impressed by the politicians who came to the house,” Mandell said during a recent visit to Los Angeles for a peace march. “They came for their own reasons. To me, politics is bull.”

Weeks after the funeral, friends of the Mandells were still taking turns making dinner for the family. “We never cooked a meal,” the rabbi said. “People showed up at all hours to clean the house or fix something that needed it. They’d tell us they couldn’t sleep, wondering if we were all right.”

Death and good neighbors seem to be all that he remembers about last spring. “It changed our lives,” he said of that time. “We have a new mission.” Wrenched into a public role he never expected, Mandell now finds himself traveling the world to tell his son’s story as a way of raising awareness about the cost of the violence. Putting a human face on it has become his way of fighting back. Since September 2000, at least 233 Israelis and 780 Palestinians have been killed in the escalating conflict.

In the last seven months, Rabbi Mandell has also been to Florida, South Africa and Hong Kong on a tour he calls a blessing that came with a curse. “It raises the level of attention,” he said. “But it pulls me apart. Why am I invited to all these places? Because my kid was killed.”

As he describes his new, unfamiliar life, he detours into comic digressions (“I started out as a small child”) and dips into Yiddish slang, as if humor will lighten the load. But then his voice wavers or drops to a whisper, and he can’t go on. A man in his early 50s, with black and silver hair, he has a rabbi’s way of setting other people at ease, even when he is only passing the time, waiting in an office at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in West Los Angeles. He has a full day ahead, but it hasn’t quite started yet.

Mandell’s journey began last summer when peace activists and Jewish advocacy groups started to call, offering to pay his expenses if he would visit their city and tell his story. Reluctantly at first, he went to explain the human cost of the conflict that led to Kobi’s death. These public appearances became his quiet plea for peace. Before long, he started to welcome the invitations. “I learned that it is very helpful to talk about what happened,” he said. “I’m a meaningfulness junkie. Talking, doing marches, gives some meaning to Kobi’s death.”

In a wood-paneled conference room at City Hall in downtown Los Angeles earlier this month, Mandell stood near Mayor James K. Hahn and accepted his condolences. Members of two other families from Israel stood beside him. All had been invited by Jewish advocacy groups to take part in a fund-raising march for the families of terrorism victims in Israel, as well as in New York and Washington, D.C. Mandell’s 10-year-old daughter, Eliana, shyly leaned against her father. She accompanied him to California because the trip would keep him away from home on the first night of Hanukkah, and she didn’t want him to be alone.

The mayor’s job that morning was to publicize the march. A few polite words later, he introduced Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which sponsored the event and brought Mandell to L.A.

When it was his turn to speak, Mandell’s voice faltered. “The world is divided,” he managed to say, “between those who have lost a child and those who have not. The fact that people care means the world to me.”

Though politics may have been the subtext, he didn’t mention politics in public. Later, he made his position more clear. “Hate killed Kobi,” he said. “I don’t hate anyone. Not even the Arabs who killed my kid.”

If he fit more precisely the image of an Orthodox Jew from Israel, it might be easier to guess where his tentative steps into the public debate will lead him. But Mandell hardly fits the image at all. To meet the mayor on Friday and help launch the march on Sunday, he wore the same dark sports jacket and slacks with a white shirt. He made jokes about airport security personnel at LAX searching under his yarmulke for contraband. “No top hat for me,” he said of the ultra-Orthodox, Hasidic Jew’s attire. No long black coat, no ringlets behind his ears either. “I can’t dress like that,” he said. “I’m kind of athletic, I like to jog.”

But the differences between expectation and reality go deeper than that. It’s assumed that only a Zionist would put down roots in the West Bank, someone convinced that Israelis belong there because God gave them the land. But the charged overtones of his choice aren’t something he acknowledges. It almost seems that he is in a state of shock, or denial. He and his wife settled on the West Bank by coincidence, he said, not planning. They had a friend who lived there, and they went to stay with her as a way of getting started. But then they found Tekoa, the settlement nearby, and they were infatuated with it. “I loved the feeling of community, the spirituality,” Mandell said. “People weren’t just living for the weekend. They saw every moment as precious. I wanted my children to grow up with that.”

Argue with him that the West Bank is not safe for his children--he still has three, Eliana and two sons--and he says that no place in Israel is safe anymore. “Growing up in America you don’t think this way, but there’s a life-and-death struggle for survival in Israel,” he said. “Jews get killed. Security issues exist that don’t come up elsewhere. But I went to Israel because I want to take part in Jewish history, and the West Bank is part of that history.

“Some people go to live on the West Bank for political reasons,” he said. “That’s not me. I went for personal reasons, spiritual reasons. I ignored the political situation, to my ultimate tragic loss.” If he is defiant, it is in a distinctly American way. “We Americans aren’t used to people telling us where we can and can’t live,” he said. “I wasn’t going to let anyone do that.”

Mandell was raised in Connecticut as a cultural Jew who never observed a Sabbath or ate kosher food. In the early ‘70s, after graduation from the University of Connecticut, he saw a television news report about the shortage of farmhands in Israel. Volunteers were needed to work the land while the local citizens served their military duty. Three weeks later he was in Jerusalem.

For months, he worked in a banana field and collected chicken eggs. He enrolled in a school for American Jews who wanted to learn about their religious roots. “It was the most exciting time of my life,” he said. “But I had one problem. I didn’t believe in God.”

That first trip to Israel was only a stop on a tour of Europe he planned. By the time he got home to the U.S., he knew he would return to Jerusalem. He did go back, this time as a seminary student preparing to be ordained.

He became a believer by a sheer act of will. A rabbi advised him to go through the motions for just one month and see if it made a difference. It was conversion enough for him. “Faith is still very difficult for me,” Mandell said over lunch in a kosher restaurant not far from the Wiesenthal Center. He had been whisked back to Beverly Hills after his brief photo opportunity in the mayor’s office. “Faith is an intellectual choice more than an emotional thing. I’ve spent 25 years asking myself almost every day what it is that I believe. If I had abandoned all of that when Kobi died, it would negate the entire meaning of those years.”

Back in the U.S. after he was ordained, Mandell married, had children and worked with Jewish college students at the Hillel Center of Penn State University and later, the University of Maryland.

One night in September 1993, he watched Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shake hands with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat at the White House, in a step toward a peace accord.

“I thought to myself, maybe my boys won’t have to go into the army,” Mandell recalled. “Maybe by the time they grow up, there will be peace.” Three years later he and his family left Maryland for the West Bank.

Tekoa has 250 Jewish families living in a close community, Mandell said. Doors are open to all the children, and everyone helps keep an eye on them. The biggest problem, he said, has been finding ways to make a living. At first, he taught American Jews who wanted to learn about their religion, but that didn’t pay enough. He started writing manuals for computer software companies, but the technology market’s crash last year cut his income.

If his life has become a round of public appearances and emotional speeches, he is always thinking about a more lasting memorial to his murdered son. “Kobi was a normal kid,” he said. “My son wasn’t a superstar, but he would have done a certain amount of good in his life. My wife and I want to put some of that good into the world.”

One way they found to do this was to start a summer camp for the children of Jewish families struck by attacks in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Mandell wants to open similar camps in Bosnia and other countries where war has decimated the community. “When Kobi died, my family got a lot of support because we’re Americans,” he said. “Most families don’t get that.”

The morning of the fund-raising march that brought Mandell to Los Angeles, close to 7,000 people crowded into the courtyard and onto the streets around the Museum of Tolerance on Pico Boulevard in West Los Angeles. Some of them carried posters of Kobi Mandell and other young Jews who have been killed during the last 14 months in Israel and the occupied West Bank. Two relief organizations, One Family and the Israel Emergency Solidarity Fund, sponsored the event that raised more than $250,000. Some of the proceeds went to the Sept. 11th Fund.

In a ceremony before the march, Mandell and his daughter lighted a Hanukkah candle. They couldn’t stay longer; they had a plane for Israel to catch. “Leaving Tekoa now would be like adding salt to a wound,” he said. The religious commitment, the sense of Jewish history and the beauty of the landscape are a part of him. Danger is part of his life too, he said. “If it’s worth living in Tekoa, it’s worth the risks.”