Promoting compassion after brush with terror
By Michele Alperin
April 11, 2008

Sarri Singer did not mince words as she described her experience on Bus 14 in Jerusalem when it blew up on June 11, 2003. Singer, the daughter of State Senator Robert W. Singer from Lakewood, spoke to two-dozen students and others on April 2; the event was cosponsored by Princeton University and the Zionist Organization of America and held at Princeton University's Robertson Hall.

During the summer of 2001, Singer was in Jerusalem working with 100 high-school students. She had her first brush with terrorists when her colleague suggested they go out to Sbarro on Aug. 9, and had Singer not put off lunch until after their work was done, they would have been at the pizza shop in central Jerusalem when the bomb went off.

Singer returned to Israel a few months after Sept. 11. She had been working in New York two blocks from the World Trade Center, and her alarm clock didn't go off that morning. When she called her office, she was told not to come in because they were being evacuated, and as she turned on the television to check the weather, she saw the towers burning.

"I couldn't go back to work after a month and pretend nothing had happened," she remembered. So in December she quit her job, went to Israel, and volunteered to work with victims of terrorism.

Singer loved living in Israel, only missing her family and friends, even though it was a tough period in Israel. She was impressed with how people continued to go out to the cafés, to the malls, to the university, "trying to enjoy life as much as possible." But after about 10 months her money was running out and terror attacks were coming weekly basis, so she booked a ticket home.

That's when she got a phone call from a school in Jerusalem looking for an administrator, and she decided to stay and get to know Israel as a resident rather than as the tourist she had been.

In addition to her paid work, she volunteered to help plan a mission to bring Israelis injured in terrorist attacks to the northeastern United States and Capitol Hill "to put a personal face behind the people they see on the news." She added in what turned out to be a great irony, "I was getting twinge of jealousy because I couldn't be in the program when it was being done in the States."

On June 11, 2003, a day that changed her life forever, Singer was supposed to meet a friend at Café Hillel in Emek Refaim, and she remembers every detail of the fateful day. The bus was late, and people around her started to get antsy. As she, too, started to get anxious, with the crowd growing, she decided to hail a cab but then caught sight of bus number 14.

At first Singer didn't see any open seats, and she stood near the back door, where she called her friend to let her know where she was. As the bus pulled up at Machaneh Yehudah, two seats opened up toward the front, and she decided to sit down, figuring that if an older person with lots of packages got on, she would get up. Although usually an aisle sitter, she chose the window this time, a decision that saved her life.

As she was putting her cell phone away, she felt a huge shock wave hit her in the face. Her first thought was that someone had punched her or the bus had had an accident, but her last thought was that someone had come onto the bus strapped with a suicide bomb to kill her and every other passenger on the bus.

Singer described her head as feeling like two pieces of metal hitting hard against each other, and when she tried to bring her hands up to her face, the shockwave kept them down. "For a split second after the blast, there was silence," she said, "not like the silence of crickets, but the silence of death around you." Then her ears started ringing loudly and she started screaming -- and that made all the difference.

A man -- someone who had run to the bus from three blocks away to help out -- told her she had to get out of the bus. Her eyes were nearly swollen shut, but when she said, "I can't," he told her to put her feet on the bar next to her -- she thought it was the window, but it was actually the bottom of the bus. When she managed to get her feet up, he and another man pulled her out and laid her on the side of the street. "It was lucky I was screaming," she said, "because a few minutes later, a small fire broke out in the front of the bus."

For Singer, this anonymous man's act defined an important difference between America and Israel. On Sept. 11, she said, people ran away to safety, as they had been taught, with the expectation that firemen, police, and early responders would go in and help. "In Israel everyone comes to help," said Singer. "They are there to help you just because you're another human being; that's what you don't see on the news."

And she was to see more of the same in the next 24 hours. An old woman waited with her on the sidewalk, and Singer remembered thinking, "What is she doing here -- taking care of me like a parent waiting with her child?"

Within what seemed like seconds, Singer was put on a stretcher and taken to Hadassah Hospital. Because her wounds were light by Israeli standards -- she had shrapnel through her left shoulder, both eardrums were blown out, her legs were cut up badly, and her face and hair were burned and bruised -- she was the last to have surgery. Seventeen people had died in the attack and some survivors lost limbs.

In the emergency room, Singer was lying in one of the curtained-off cubicles for a long time, at first by herself. She hadn't wanted the doctors to call her parents, but preferred to wait and have a friend do it.

While she was waiting for surgery, a woman came up and said that her soldier son remembered getting on the bus with an American girl who was talking on a cell phone. He had told his mother, "Go check on her -- maybe she doesn't have family here."

Another gentleman came up later and said, "My daughter is severely injured and in surgery. I speak English -- what can I do for you?" Again Singer couldn't restrain herself from commenting on the compassion of Israelis. "What you don't see about Israel," she said, "is the kindness of strangers. They don't want anything in return; they just want to help you because you're another human being."

Another story she told gives a sense of the small-town side of Israel. The television stations are not allowed to film victims' faces. But Singer had just purchased some new, distinctive European shoes, and her friend saw the shoes and came quickly to the hospital.

Somehow the reporters got wind of the fact that her father was a state senator, and the morning after surgery Singer ended up holding a press conference with reporters from about 30 international radio and television stations.

The next day she remembered asking about the other people on the bus, but no one would let her see newspapers or turn on the television. The terrorist, it turned out, was just two or three people away from where she sat, and no one else around her had survived.

Singer's father wanted her to come back home, which she did a week later. During that extra week, her friend would take her out for an hour each day, and the last day they walked to Rechov Yaffo where the attack had happened -- because Singer did not want to be afraid to return to Israel.

Ironically, Singer ended up joining the mission of terror victims that summer in the United States, but in the fall she returned to Israel, where she stayed for a year until she had to return home to deal with some remaining medical needs.

A year and a half ago she and a friend whose father was murdered in Israel in 2002 decided to start One Heart Global, an organization for "survivors healing survivors." "Terror is everywhere," she said, "and the best way for victims to fight what they have been through is to heal properly and go on with their lives."

The organization helps victims and their family members with long-term psychological care and with plastic surgery; it helps children who have lost parents; and it educates the public about unmet needs of victims and their families. Sometimes, she said, family members can be more affected than victims. Her brother, for example, says he won't go back to Israel, but Singer has told him, "You shouldn't be afraid; that's what the terrorists want."

One Heart Global is working with similar organizations in London, Madrid, and Australia. It holds a monthly survivor's circle for Americans or Israelis who were either injured or lost family members in Israel as well as for 9/11 survivors. "It's an amazing group," she said. "We get a lot of strength together."

Some people worry about coming to the survivor's circle, fearing they will have to talk about painful things. But recently a young woman who Singer had been after for a year to come tried a meeting. She had been injured in the Sbarro attack where her sister had died. After the meeting, the woman told Singer, "I'm so glad I came, and I'd like to come back. It's nice to be around people who understand what I've been through."

One person in the audience asked whether the organization had considered working with victims in a Muslim country like Thailand or Pakistan. Singer cited what she had said in the interview the day after her injury, when she was in shock and not in control of what she was saying: "I don't hate any Arabs, I only hate those who have no value for human life."

Another person asked whether, given how many people stay away from anything that might remind them of a terrifying situation, could Singer could pinpoint something specific that had helped her heal. Singer replied, "Nobody ever completely moves on. Certain people stay angry the rest of their lives, but I don't want be an angry person, and I don't want to hate."