Israel mourns her first astronaut
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Your support makes all the difference.One of the astronauts on board the space shuttle Columbia when it broke up in the Texas skies yesterday was carrying the dreams of a nation with him. Colonel Ilan Ramon was the first-ever Israeli astronaut, and his journey into space had captured the imagination of Israelis in the same way the Apollo moon landings gripped Americans.
"A great step for Israel" ran the headline in one local newspaper when the shuttle lifted off just two weeks ago. The launch was shown live on Israeli television; so was a conversation between Col Ramon in space and Israel's Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon.
Col Ramon took with him a small child's drawing called Moon Landscape. It was drawn by Peter Ginz, a Jewish boy who died, at 14, in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Col Ramon's mother and grandmother were in Auschwitz too, but they were among the few who survived.
For his two weeks in space, Israelis, worn down by the brutality of their conflict with the Palestinians and the economic meltdown it has brought about, had something entirely unconnected with all those concerns to be proud about. Yesterday, all that had been shattered.
The news broke in Israel as the sun went down and the Jewish Sabbath ended. Observant Jews would have heard nothing until they turned on their TVs and saw those broken vapour trails far away above America. Col Ramon's 79-year-old father was sitting in a TV studio, waiting to speak to excited Israeli audiences, as the pictures of the shuttle landing and his son returning from space came in. Instead he saw the terrible pictures from Texas. Understandably, he did not appear on the broadcast. The astronaut's wife and children were with the other astronauts' families in the US, where they have lived for several years while Col Ramon trained.
Ramon was a combat pilot who fought in the 1973 Yom Kippur war and the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. While that record made him a hero to Israelis, it was not without controversy.
One feature of his past seemed eerily connected to the concerns gripping the world today. In 1981, he was one of the Israeli fighter pilots who flew into enemy territory and destroyed the uncompleted Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq.
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