News Nation & World Ramon a role model for young Israelis
Joel GreenbergSpecial to the Tribune
Pausing a moment as they arrived for classes Sunday morning, students at a high school here gazed at a bulletin board plastered with the front pages of the day's newspapers reporting the death of Israel's first astronaut, Ilan Ramon, with his colleagues on the space shuttle Columbia. "Crying for Ilan," said one headline. "Pieces of the dream" said another, over a picture of the disintegrating parts of the shuttle falling earthward.
Knots of students gathered silently around the posted papers, still absorbing the reports that Ramon had perished with the other crew members when the shuttle broke apart. Ramon's journey to space had captured the imagination of many Israelis, especially youngsters who saw him as a role model. On Sunday, the pride and exhilaration of his mission evaporated as Israel mourned his loss.
Radio stations played somber music, flags flew at half-staff, teachers discussed the disaster in their classrooms, and pupils wrote letters of condolence to Ramon's wife and children. At the high school, students hung newspaper photos of Ramon over a notebook in which students wrote messages to his family. "Ilan will always remain in my heart," wrote one student, Alisa Valshansky. "We will always remember him as a national hero." Anat Gershon, another student, wrote: "Ilan realized his dream, and that's what matters."
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon paid tribute to Ramon at the weekly meeting of his Cabinet, calling him "a man of values" who personified Israel's "hopes, dreams, history and future." The American ambassador to Israel, Daniel Kurtzer, sitting next to Sharon, said: "Americans and Israelis are brothers indeed, on Earth and in space." Young Israelis said that Ramon symbolized what they would like to be. "For me he was a role model," said Ofer Hirsh, 17, one of a group of high school students who put together an experiment that Ramon performed in the shuttle, an examination of the growth of crystals in near-zero gravity. Hirsh said that he met Ramon two years ago when the astronaut visited his school in the northern Israeli town of Kiryat Motzkin to learn about the experiment. "He was very friendly, curious and down to earth," Hirsh said. "You wanted to be like him: talented, determined, persistent." Ilana Zibenberg, 16, another student in the group, said she was struck by Ramon's readiness to invest time and energy in their project, and by the unassuming way he chatted with students about their work. "He was someone special for us, and we were tied to him spiritually and emotionally," she said. "Ilan Ramon died but his mission hasn't," Zibenberg added. "The legacy of his death is to continue research in space, to investigate, because that's human nature." There was also resentment on Sunday, a sense that a rare moment of celebration had been snatched from a country mired in deadly conflict with the Palestinians, an economic recession and the threat of war with Iraq. "As if we're not going through enough in Israel," said Neta Kalimi, a 17-year-old student at the school in Jerusalem. "Another blow, this time from the skies, and precisely at a spaceship carrying one of ours. Why?" Writing in the Ha'aretz newspaper, Ari Shavit, a columnist, said that Ramon's voyage had inspired the country, but its tragic end dashed hopes of Israelis that they could "break away from the gravity of our fate, and float with weightless normalcy above the gravitational pull of our existence." Late Sunday, Israelis heard Rona Ramon, the astronaut's widow, speak for the first time since the disaster. "Ilan left us at his peak, with the people he loved, in the place he so enjoyed," she told Israeli reporters near the Johnson Space Center in Houston. She added that her husband, an inveterate optimist, did not even leave a will, but during the shuttle's liftoff, when everyone was elated by the smooth ascent, their 5-year-old daughter had shouted, "I lost my daddy." "Apparently she knew," Rona Ramon said.
Sign the guest books for the members of the space shuttle Columbia crew.
NASA's official Web site