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February 1, 2002/19 Shevat 5762, Vol. 54, No. 20
Terror victims span demographic spectrum
NAOMI SEGAL
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
JERUSALEM - The recent attacks that turned downtown Jerusalem into a horror gallery demonstrate the randomness of Palestinian terror: Victims included a fifth- generation Jerusalemite; a Russian immigrant; a student from Chicago who was studying at a girls yeshiva; a tourist from New York who survived the Sept. 11 Twin Towers attack; and two Arabs who already were injured in previous terror attacks.
They were diverse individuals who had one thing in common: being at what one Israeli commentator called "our Ground Zero" at the wrong time.
Two attacks occurred within days of each other - a Jan. 22 shooting spree in which a Palestinian gunman killed two Israelis and wounded more than 40 people, and a bombing carried out by a Palestinian woman on Jan. 27 that killed one person and wounded more than 120 others, most of them lightly.
Pinchas Takatli, 81, was killed in the Jan. 27 bombing on Jaffa Street.
Police believe he was standing close to the female terrorist when the bomb went off. Born in Jerusalem's Yemin Moshe neighborhood, he was a fifth-generation Jerusalemite. He served in the Haganah, the precursor to the Israel Defense Force during the British Mandate, and later worked in advertising.
After retiring, Takatli became interested in cycling and was one of the founders of the Jerusalem Cycling Club. His son Gilad said his father rode his bicycle daily.
An amateur artist, Takatli was returning from an art class and had gone downtown to pick up supplies when he was killed.
Svetlana Sandler, 56, represented the opposite end of the Israeli spectrum - an immigrant whose roots in the country were so shallow that it took two days to find her family, which had remained in Russia.
Sandler was critically wounded in the Jan. 22 shooting attack on Jaffa Road. She and another woman wounded in the attack, Sarah Hamburger, 79, later died of their injuries.
Shayna Gould, of Chicago, was studying at a girls yeshiva in Jerusalem when she was injured in the Jan. 22 attack. She had been nervous over the summer about returning to Michlelet Esther for her second year, said Steve Kost, who employed Gould at Tov Foods in Skokie, Ill.
"Her parents didn't even want her to go, but she had paid all this money for her ticket and for school," Kost said.
But Gould, who was active in the National Conference of Synagogue Youth, an Orthodox youth group, wanted to finish her studies.
For American tourist Mark Sokolow, 43, of New York, the Jan. 27 attack was his second brush with terror in less than five months.
Sokolow escaped from the second tower of the World Trade Center during the Sept. 11 attack. He and members of his family were wounded in the Jan. 27 bombing in downtown Jerusalem.
"I was a lot luckier last time," Sokolow told reporters from his hospital bed in Jerusalem on Jan 27. "This one involved my whole family."
Members of an Orthodox congregation in Cedarhurst, N.Y., Sokolow, his wife, and two of their daughters were in Israel to visit their eldest daughter, Elana, 18, who is studying at Midreshet Lindenbaum, a prestigious girls' yeshiva in Jerusalem.
Mark, wife Rena and teen-age daughters Jamie and Lauren - were injured and are still in Jerusalem, said Mark's father, Al, in New York.
Also among the injured in the Jan. 27 attack were Amir Zachayka and Moussa Awad, Arab employees of the Sbarro restaurant on Jaffa Road - itself the scene of a suicide bombing last August in which 15 people were killed and more than 130 wounded.
Zachayka survived that attack, but he was wounded in last week's shooting spree, and then again in the Jan. 27 bombing.
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