A Terror Attack That Changed Israel — and Inspired a New Book

Thirty years ago, my childhood neighbor Alisa Flatow — a Brandeis college student on a semester abroad studying at a Jerusalem seminary — was mortally injured by a Palestinian suicide bomber in Israel while riding a bus to the beach in Gush Katif.

Alisa’s father, Steve, received the news while at Sunday morning prayers in our hometown of West Orange, New Jersey. My own father and Steve raced together to Israel, while I flew to Israel from London to meet them to serve as a translator.

We gathered at Soroka Hospital in Beersheva, where Alisa was in a coma from which she would never awake. After consulting with doctors and rabbis in Israel and America, I watched as Steve and his wife, Roz, made the painful but heroic decision to donate Alisa’s organs to six desperate recipients, both Jewish and Arab.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the Flatows’ decision revolutionized attitudes in Israel towards organ donation.

Long a fraught issue because of Jewish views on the integrity of the body, the whole country was moved by the decision of an American family to put aside their personal shock and grief to offer a chance at life to those in need. And sadly, since October 7, 2023, this change of attitude has facilitated many life-changing organ donations from victims of the attack and subsequent war.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin captured the moment in a public statement thanking the Flatows for their magnanimous gesture. He said, “Today, Alisa’s heart is alive and beating in Jerusalem.”

I stood at Ben Gurion Airport with my then-fiancé Becky, Alisa’s high school classmate and friend, as her flag-draped coffin was loaded onto an El Al flight for burial in the United States.

We could not make sense of the unfairness of fate, or the plot behind God’s plan for those religiously-inclined. I had served on the front lines with the IDF and walked away unscathed. Alisa had gone to the beach and was now dead.

The existential questions we wordlessly mulled on the tarmac have left Alisa’s story kicking around in Becky’s heart for 30 years. Life has moved on for the rest of us — weddings, children, jobs — but Alisa is forever 20, a tragic reality that particularly hits home in this year when Becky turned 50 and Alisa should have too.

Alisa’s murder, and the Flatows’ dogged and successful pursuit of legal redress against the Iranian sponsors of jihadist terrorism, is a story that has been written about. Terrorism, Iran, Gaza. A sad reminder that October 7 is just the latest chapter in a generations-long saga.

Rather than again retelling that tale, my wife was inspired by Alisa’s story to publish her recent debut fiction novel, Alive and Beating.

The book follows six people from diverse backgrounds and neighborhoods in Jerusalem, all of whom are awaiting organ transplants. The interwoven short stories track a single day when a suicide bombing will change their lives forever. In a place where ancient divides often seem insurmountable, these characters — Leah, a Hasidic young woman; Yael, a daughter of Holocaust survivors; Hoda, a Palestinian hairdresser; David, an Iraqi restaurant owner; Severin, a Catholic priest; and Youssef and Yosef, two teenage boys whose fates are inextricably linked — are united, despite their differences, by a shared goal of being healthy and finding meaning in their lives.

The book was written before October 7, 2023, and was intended to explore the core of shared humanity that links us all, even as ancient blood feuds continue to plague the Holy Land.

Obviously, the events of October 7 and its aftermath have made the hope of finding that commonality ever more distant. But, in tribute to Alisa, it remains a hopeful story for a seemingly hopeless time.

The book is available on Amazon, and I hope you will support all Jewish authors at a time when the literary world is awash with boycotts and blacklists of anyone and anything Jewish or relating to Israel.

Daniel Wolf is a lawyer living in Teaneck, New Jersey.