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July 23, 2004/Av 5 5764, Vol. 56, No. 44
Kerry brother visits Jewish homeland
DINA KRAFT
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
TSUR NATAN - His sneakers crunching under a stony path, Cameron Kerry makes his way to an overlook and sees Israel's security fence slice between the slopes of two villages - one Israeli, the other Palestinian.
The brother of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry looks on as a guide shows him where they are on the map of the country - on the easternmost edge of the pre-1967 borders of the Jewish state, which at its narrowest measures only 10 miles across.
"Seeing it for real makes it clearer, closer, more vivid," Cameron Kerry said in an interview with JTA as he traveled in a minibus from Tel Aviv to the northern border. "One of the things when you come here for the first time you notice how close together everything is - from hilltop to hilltop, village to village."
Kerry, an adviser to his brother's presidential cam-paign, was in Israel for the first time last week, traveling throughout the country on what he termed a personal visit.
The Kerry campaign is seeking to maintain support in the November election from Jewish voters, who have long been a solid Democratic voting bloc.
Cameron Kerry grew up Catholic, but converted to Judaism when he married Kathy Weinman, a Jewish woman he met while the two worked at a Washington law firm. She traveled with her husband to Israel and recalled the very different trip she first took to Israel - backpacking across the country after college in 1976.
It was revealed last year that the Kerry family has Jewish roots in Europe. Their paternal grandparents were Jews from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire who changed the family name from Kohn to Kerry before immigrating to the United States in the early 20th century.
There is just a feeling of "an extraordinary sense of irony," he said of the revelation. "I called up Kathy's parents and said 'I'm Jewish,' and they said, 'Yeah we know' and I said, 'No, I'm really Jewish.'" Kerry said that according to family legend, the family chose its new last name by blindly planting a pin on a map of Europe. According to the story, the pin fell on County Kerry, Ireland.
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