Campus News

Students hold vigil for eight killed in Israel

Written by Cynthia Therrien, AmherstWire.com Saturday, 08 March 2008 15:55

Standing on the Student Union steps, about 20 University of Massachusetts students quietly sang Israel’s national anthem Friday afternoon, mourning the eight students who were shot in a Jewish seminary in Jerusalem Friday.

“You don’t actually need to know the language to feel what it’s saying in our hearts,” said Matt Hoffman, president of the UMass Student Alliance for Israel. “It’s the national anthem and children learn this song in childhood, either in camp or Yeshiva or other Jewish Hebrew schools.”

A gunman open fired late Thursday afternoon at the Merkaz Harav religious school in Jerusalem, killing eight and injuring nine before he was shot and killed by police.

Hoffman organized Friday’s vigil shortly after hearing about the news. During the event, he mentioned that the students were just trying to get an education. “They were studying – like we do,” he said. “They were not engaged in any activity that would harm anyone else. They were students on campus like ours.”

While Hoffman addressed the crowd, freshman Anat Goldberg sat on a wall near the steps, holding the Israeli flag with Samantha Kaplan-Zantopp, also a freshman at UMass.

Goldberg was there, she said, because her friend lives in Israel around the corner from where the students were killed. Goldberg, a psychology major, was born in Israel. Larry Goldbaum, Director of Jewish Affairs at UMass, said the vigil is important to “just to show our concern.”

As the vigil came to an end, a few voices from the crowd disagreed with what Hoffman was saying. “You’re making blanket statements,” said an unidentified man. “You’re misleading people…you’re living in a dream world.”

“It’s Israel’s reality,” Hoffman responded as the man walked away from the area.