For Israel, not just a hero lost

Ilan Ramon's death on Columbia left a nation buoyed by his historic feat feeling fated once again to despair

By Joel Greenberg. Joel Greenberg reports from Jerusalem for the Tribune

February 9, 2003

On the morning after Col. Ilan Ramon, Israel's first astronaut, perished with six other crew members in the Columbia space shuttle disaster, Avri Gilad, a popular Israeli radio host, voiced the feeling that hung like a pall over the country.

"Nothing works out for us," Gilad said on his show. "Whatever we try doesn't turn out right. Even something that was supposed to lift our spirits from the mess we're in had to go wrong."

In their grief last week over the loss of Ramon, Israelis also seemed to be mourning their condition, the grim state of their country after more than two years of violent conflict with the Palestinians, suicide bombings, economic recession and a looming threat of war in Iraq. There was a pervasive sense that a battered nation couldn't get a break, even in space.

For many in Israel, Ramon's voyage had offered a welcome escape from the country's troubles, satisfying a thirst for something to cheer about, for a hero, for a dose of patriotic pride free from the political and social divisions that roil the country.

Ramon, keenly aware of the symbolism of his flight for Israelis and Jews, fit the bill perfectly. A former fighter pilot with an easy smile, he radiated confidence and optimism that were an antidote to the gloom.

Tributes to his people

Although he was not an observant Jew, he chose to eat kosher food in orbit. He reported that as he flew over Jerusalem he had recited a traditional Jewish prayer and that his country looked "small but lovely" from space. He told Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that it was an honor to represent Israel.

The son of a Holocaust survivor, Ramon took with him a copy of a drawing of an imaginary moonscape made by a 14-year-old Jewish boy who was killed by the Nazis at Auschwitz. He also brought a small Torah scroll given to him by an Israeli professor who guided one of the experiments Ramon performed on the shuttle. The professor had used the scroll to study for his bar mitzvah as a 13-year-old boy in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

"I was born in Israel, and I'm kind of the proof for my parents and their generation that whatever we've been fighting for in the last century is coming true," Ramon said before his flight. "I feel that I'm representing the whole Jewish people."

The enthusiasm in Israel sparked by Ramon's journey harked back to a more naive patriotism of years gone by, a sense of national pride that obscured internal divisions and the conflict with the Palestinians.

Then the dream literally shattered, leaving many Israelis feeling that they somehow were fated to suffer tragedy. A resigned despair that has taken hold during 28 months of deadly strife reasserted itself.

Ramon's death was viewed widely as the latest in a series of jackhammer blows to Israel, with little thought given to how the country had reached its current state or whether the policies of its leadership had contributed to the crisis.

The fatalistic mood was captured in newspaper columns.

"How can you explain the jinx that has pursued us the length and breadth of the country in recent years, and yesterday chased us to the ends of the atmosphere?" wrote Arik Bachar in the Ma'ariv newspaper. "Ilan Ramon fell victim to that same curse that has turned Israelis into a paranoid people. And how can you blame them? Representatives of 30 different nations have hitched a ride with the American space fleet and they all returned safely to Earth."

Ari Shavit, writing in Ha'aretz, remarked that Israelis who had been exhilarated by Ramon's mission were jolted by "this hope that keeps shattering, the hope of breaking away from the gravity of our fate, of floating with a kind of weightless normalcy above the gravitational pull of our existence."

And in Yediot Ahronot, Israel's most widely circulated daily, Eitan Haber lamented: "In recent years we have been so lacking in moments of happiness and pride, and we sought relief in Ilan's smile, in the flag. Just one moment of happiness. And even this one and only moment was stolen from us."

Blood bond with U.S.

Consolation was found in the shared grief with the United States, in a feeling that Israelis and Americans had sealed their bond in blood, even as possible war with Iraq approaches. Reflecting that mood, Yediot Ahronot reported on its front page that President Bush told Ramon's children at a memorial ceremony last week that he was about to finish the job started by their father, who participated in the Israeli bombing of Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981.

In death, Ramon has become a national icon, idolized as a hero of Israel and the Jewish people.

Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial, unveiled a special exhibit in his memory, calling him "a symbol of our revival." Communications Minister Reuven Rivlin ordered that a stamp commemorating Ramon be issued on the anniversary of his death. Posters of Ramon were published in newspapers, and one paper issued a special supplement on his mission titled "Glory and Memory."

Israel's chief rabbi, Yisrael Meir Lau, called Ramon a national symbol, "a man who glorified the name of the state of Israel and the Jewish tradition."

In a radio interview, the chief army chaplain, Rabbi Yisrael Weiss, effusively praised Ramon as a Jewish role model who conducted himself as the representative of Jews everywhere.

"I, like the whole nation and the world, have been moved by his greatness, his power, his spirituality, his humanity and also by his Judaism," Weiss said. "This Jew, who on the face of it was not defined as a religiously observant Jew, is in my eyes the real Jew."