Celebration of an Escape Turned Into a Death Trap

His daughters had warned him that spending the Passover Seder at a crowded hotel would be dangerous. Undeterred, 73-year-old Isaac Atsits joined his fellow retirees at table No. 17 in the festive dining hall of the Park Hotel.

As the group of 12 got comfortable, chatted and waited for the dinner to begin, a 25-year-old Palestinian armed with a powerful bomb planted himself smack in the center of the room. The deafening explosion brought the ceiling down, hurled tables and chairs into the air and plunged the dinner guests, covered with glass and metal shards, into awful darkness.

Partially blinded by a blow to an eye, Atsits managed to escape, crawling over debris and climbing out of the wreckage. Around him, 22 people lay dead or dying.

Atsits and about 60 other Israelis and foreign Jews who were visiting for the Passover holiday remained in half a dozen hospitals Thursday. He doesn’t know yet what happened to the friends he was sitting with.

“We get used to these attacks daily, but last night’s was especially painful,” he said in the Meir Hospital in Kfar Sava, about 20 miles southeast of the coastal city of Netanya, where the attack occurred. His left eye was bloodshot and badly bruised, as was the left side of his nose; his left eardrum had been slightly torn.

“I would describe it as 10 attacks all together, like the 10 plagues,” he said, alluding to the biblical story recounted on Passover in which God visited locusts, frogs, pestilence and other scourges on the Egyptian pharaoh because he refused to free the enslaved Jews.

Forensic experts had been able to identify only 14 of the 21 dead by Thursday evening, 24 hours after the explosion. The bomber blew himself up in a closed, crowded room, intensifying the deadly force, and his bomb contained screws, nuts and other sharp metal pieces that bored through the bodies of his victims. Entire families suffered casualties.

The hotel dining hall was packed with about 250 people, most of whom paid the equivalent of $100 for the meal and a night’s stay.

Atsits and his friends, men and women in their 70s and 80s, were retirees from the Israeli court system. The Syrian-born Atsits, who immigrated to what is today Israel in the 1930s, had worked in Israel’s Supreme Court as an administrator and Hebrew-Arabic translator until his retirement in 1983.

The retirees always did things together. They took vacations and gathered for Hanukkah parties. Atsits had never before joined them for the Passover Seder. He preferred to spend the holiday that marks the exodus of the Jews from Egypt with his wife and daughters at home.

But this year, his wife was sick and he didn’t trust his daughter to observe Passover’s strict Kosher rules in her preparation of the Seder.

Originally, the group was to celebrate at another hotel up the road. Then the Park offered a special deal, the same price for a hotel with one more star. The group was to have Seder and spend a four-day holiday at the Park.

Atsits’ daughters were worried about him. But it’s not like his home was such a refuge. Atsits lives on downtown Jerusalem’s Jaffa Street, site of repeated bomb and shooting attacks in recent months.

“We know this happens every day,” he said. “But we have to continue with our lives. We can’t give them the joy of interrupting our lives.”

Atsits, like many Israelis, thinks the United States is holding Israel back and preventing it from wiping out Palestinian violence once and for all. The reason, he said, is that the Bush administration needs to curry Arab support for any eventual action against Iraq.

“The U.S. wants to do their war, not our war,” he said.

At the Park on Thursday, crowds gathered to watch the cleanup and see the destruction. A couple of men shouted at anyone who would listen, demanding that Prime Minster Ariel Sharon “do more” and get rid of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.

Workers filled a mammoth dumpster with debris. The dining hall of the hotel was in shreds. Amid the wreckage, some tables still had their white cloths and Passover dishes ready for the meal.

Paulette Cohen, the owner of the hotel, said she was determined to rebuild. “They won’t bend us,” she said, cradling a small machine gun.

Medical examiners worked around the clock to identify the bodies, some so badly mangled that DNA samples would have to be used. Among those identified were Andre and Edith Fried, a couple in their 40s who regularly went to the Park for Seder. They were seated when the bomb exploded; their two children, 16 and 20, were running late and were spared. Andre’s father was also killed.

Outside the Abu Kabir forensic institute south of Tel Aviv, where all the bodies were taken, families gathered. One man, who gave his name as Yitzhak, said his brother-in-law was killed and most of his family was hurt.

“My father was injured, my mother, my brother and daughter,” he told Israeli radio. “His wife and their twins and son were not hurt, but my sister was, with her children. . . . They told me, ‘Come along, it will be fun.’ ” But he didn’t go.

Among others being identified: a 70-year-old woman visiting from Sweden and a 67-year-old Holocaust survivor. The brother of the latter woman was at Abu Kabir. He had hoped to identify his sister by her red fingernail polish but was told that DNA samples would be necessary.

“She had been through the Holocaust and came here from Russia as a little girl,” he said. “She was raised on a kibbutz. What the Nazis didn’t do, Arafat finished.”