Transplanted Angeleno Comes Face to Face With Carnage

JERUSALEM — David Kosak was eating kebab in Hebrew University’s Frank Sinatra cafeteria when the force of a blast slammed him to the floor. His first thought was that the oven had exploded, the reaction of a man who had once been a chef.

But in the next instant, the terrible realization came to him: another bomb. This was what his relatives had worried about, the reason they had urged him and his wife, Laura, not to leave Los Angeles a month ago and move to Jerusalem.

At first, the room was chillingly quiet. Then there was movement as those able to move clawed through the smoke and debris and glass shards. The room was dark, all the lights blown out.

Kosak got to his feet and began making his way to the door, hands over his head, barely aware of the carnage around him. His first goal was to get out of the room, to get away from the smoke and the flying debris that just seconds before had been the ceiling.

“We were just moving to get out,” Kosak said. “We just went into battle mode. I saw people going through the door and I did the same.”

Kosak was one of the lucky ones. His wounds were superficial, but his ears were ringing from the blast’s deafening noise, which was amplified by the closed room. He was taken to Bikur Holim Hospital near downtown Jerusalem, along with 23 other people--including foreigners, Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs--whose injuries were not considered life-threatening.

Hours later, Kosak was sitting on his bed in the hospital trauma center, talking about the last months. He and his wife had decided to move to Jerusalem, where they would first study Hebrew and then he would begin his rabbinical studies.

The decision was not an easy one. There was the major factor of family members opposed to his coming. They warned about the dozens of suicide bombings, the danger of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“My family was worried about that possibility,” said the 35-year-old Kosak, who had worked as a chef and caterer in Los Angeles for a number of years. “But just to get by you have to think nothing is going to happen to you.”

They moved here a month ago, renting an apartment in the pleasant, upscale neighborhood of Rehavia. One thing they did promise their parents was that they would never take buses in Jerusalem because those are frequent targets of suicide bombers.

Laura Kosak was not in the cafeteria when the bomb went off during the lunch hour. She was studying at the library and did not hear the blast. Her cell phone, which she’d gotten only last week, rang. It was her husband, telling her that there had been an explosion. He wasn’t badly hurt, but a lot of other people were.

“I’m coming now,” she said, but she was unable to find her husband in the crowd. She dialed his cell phone and finally found him around the corner from where she had been looking.

Laura Kosak sat on the hospital bed next to her husband Wednesday afternoon. She said her parents had also been against her coming to Israel, until Sept. 11.

“Then they realized there are no guarantees anywhere,” she said.

Three beds over was Sawalha Assad, 27, a dentistry student at the university for the last six years. He was just walking into the cafeteria when the bomb detonated, sending him flying through the air, shards of glass piercing his skin. Assad, from the small village of Kfar Kama, near the Sea of Galilee, said he thought of the school as a second home.

“I feel really bad that they [the bombers] can get to the university. This isn’t supposed to happen in a place like that,” he said. “It’s terrible. These things continue, and I call on those doing it to think again and take different steps to solve your problems. I don’t know one student who agrees to this kind of thing going on.”

At the other end of the room, David Oliel, an Israeli Jew, lay with his hands tucked behind his head. He had been overcome by smoke when he raced into the cafeteria and began looking for people to pull out of the wreckage.

“At first I thought it was a sonic boom,” said Oliel, 26, who is studying communications. But then he saw someone running toward the cafeteria and gave chase himself. Inside the room and through the smoke he saw two bodies under a table and was sure those people were dead. He saw the scorched body of an Asian student, who also appeared to be dead. Another student on the floor had a huge splinter of wood embedded in his leg. He, too, was dead.

Finally, he found a young woman who was bleeding but alive. He carried her to safety and the waiting ambulances.

“The ceiling was gone,” he said. “The place was just destroyed.”

In the hours after the bombing, David and Laura Kosak went home and marveled at their luck. David Kosak thought he had been close to the bomb, perhaps no more than a few table rows away, yet he had lived while others had died. He, the new arrival from the United States, had survived while three other Americans had perished.

Friends came by the apartment. They ordered Chinese. Kosak said he would be returning to school, maybe not tomorrow but certainly the day after. As far as he is concerned, two years of study in Jerusalem lie ahead of him. And at least in the hours after the bombing, he said, he felt as if his relationship with his new country had changed.

“I feel more connected to Israel,” he said.