Triumphant Return of Israeli Hero Turns Into Nightmare
By JAMES BENNET
ODIIN, Israel, Feb. 1 — He was the newest hero of a country yearning for one, and in towns like this one across Israel people gathered in front of their television sets today, happy and expectant, to watch the homecoming of Col. Ilan Ramon, Israel's first astronaut.
Colonel Ramon's father, Eliezer Wolferman, was in a studio of Channel Two television, on a panel watching the landing live. Mr. Wolferman spoke about his last conversation with his son, via video link from Houston. He recalled how Colonel Ramon's children asked their father to turn somersaults in space.
Then Channel Two's correspondent at Cape Canaveral sliced in, urgent and grave.
"Danny, there's a problem here," he said. "The communications with the shuttle are cut."
No one here knew it yet, but in the morning sunshine above Texas the spacecraft had begun burning up.
It is not too much to say that along with an Israeli flag and a sketch by a child killed in the Holocaust, Colonel Ramon, a 48-year-old father of four, carried Israel's dreams with him.
Colonel Ramon, an Air Force pilot, had performed his share of military missions, even taking part in the bombing of an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981. But as he rose into space more than two weeks ago, he seemed to transcend the conflict here.
"One cannot remain indifferent to the sight of an Israeli who has the great privilege of being so detached from everything that happens here, floating there in another world, like one of the angels," Avraham Tirosh wrote in the newspaper Maariv on the day after Colonel Ramon took off.
Although he jokingly expressed concern about the possibility of an Israeli settlement on the moon, Yasir Abed Rabbo, the spokesman for the Palestinian Authority, had also set the conflict aside to wish Colonel Ramon a safe return.
A brother-in-law of Colonel Ramon appeared briefly on the radio today, but he was crying so hard that the interview was abandoned.
President Bush called Prime Minister Ariel Sharon tonight and called this a tragic day for the families of the astronauts and for science, the Israeli government said in a statement.
The statement quoted Mr. Sharon as delivering his condolences to the American people and saying, "Let us pray together and support each other." The Foreign Ministry sent a team to bring home relatives of Colonel Ramon who had gone to the United States to welcome him back from space.
Despite an election campaign and the grinding developments of the Palestinian conflict — or perhaps because of all that — Israelis had raptly followed Colonel Ramon's mission.
On instructions from Israeli schoolchildren studying science, he performed an experiment on growing crystals in space. He monitored the movement of a dust cloud over the Mediterranean. He said the kiddush service, celebrating the Sabbath in space, and he was awakened one morning by Mission Control singing a Hebrew song.
Workers at Israel's Army Radio composed and performed an Israeli version of David Bowie's "Space Oddity" in Colonel Ramon's honor. "It's a bummer, because it's very cold and everyone here is speaking English," the lyrics ran.
The swell of public admiration was so great that Colonel Ramon's father, in classic Israeli fashion, was quoted as wondering if a little more modesty might not be in order.
Writing in the newspaper Yedioth Ahronot, the journalist Yaron London noted, "We are not succeeding in preventing Palestinian teenagers from blowing us up with bombs made with organic fertilizer, but we have our first Hebrew astronaut since Elijah the Prophet ascended in a storm heavenwards."
Colonel Ramon was born in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan, but was raised in the Negev Desert, in the city of Beersheba.
Among the mementos he carried into space with him was a flag from a Ramat Gan high school. And he took a T-shirt from a women's group working against road accidents, because, he said, he believed that sometimes seemingly smaller matters were forgotten.
Colonel Ramon's mother survived the Holocaust, and he went to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, to find the right relic of that horror to take with him.
He picked a sketch in pencil by a 14-year-old boy named Peter Ginz, drawn in the Theresienstadt camp in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. It was a drawing of Earth as Peter, from inside the camp's fences, imagined it would look from the moon. Peter died in Auschwitz in 1944.
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