U.S. Student Was Studying To Become A Rabbi

Matthew Mitchell Eisenfeld left the United States in October, heading to Israel in a quest to learn more about the land he passionately loved.

His search ended Sunday when he, an American friend and 24 others were killed in suicide attacks on a Jerusalem bus and a soldiers’ hitchhiking post in Ashkelon.

The two explosions were the deadliest attacks in Israel since the late 1970s.

“He was a gentle soul with a very fine mind,” Benny Segal, head of studies at a Jerusalem branch of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, said of Eisenfeld.

The 25-year-old, who had graduated from Yale University in 1993 with a degree in religious studies, was a second-year rabbinical student and was studying at the seminary’s program in Jerusalem.

In the days that followed Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination Nov. 4, Eisenfeld served as the seminary’s class spokesman and talked about the Middle East peace process at meetings.

“Matt was very much in favor of the peace process,” said his uncle, Larry Port of Fairfield, Conn. “I think if Matt were still alive after this violence, he would still be a believer in the peace process.”

Eisenfeld was a close friend of the bombings’ other American victim, said Ethan Felson, acting as spokesman for Eisenfeld’s family.

Sara Duker, 22, of Teaneck, N.J., was a student at Hebrew University and had been dating Eisenfeld, said her aunt, Simah Kraus.

“She was just a very lovely, friendly, outgoing, caring person,” Kraus said Sunday. “She was always concerned about other people.”

Duker went to Siberia last summer on an environmental project but left for Israel in October to be near Eisenfeld and her sister, who was studying at Ben Gurion University in Beersheba, Kraus said.

Duker, who had been to Israel several times, worked in a microbiology lab at Hebrew University while she went to school.

“She had a deep love of Israel from the time that she was very young,” said Rabbi Kenneth Berger, head of Duker’s synagogue, Congregation Beth Shalom in Teaneck.

Duker was the second New Jersey woman killed by Islamic extremists in less than a year. A fellow student at her high school, 20-year-old Alisa Flatow, was killed in April when a suicide bomber drove his explosives-laden car into a bus in which she was riding in the Gaza Strip.

In a prepared statement, Eisenfeld’s family said it is their “hope that the (Middle East) peace process continues and succeeds so that what happened to Matt never happens to anyone else in the future.”

Eisenfeld’s parents and college-age sister had been planning to join him in April to celebrate Passover, said Marvin Catler, chairman of the Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford.