Columbia students killed in Israel

Students at Columbia University were shocked when they heard that two of their classmates were killed in a terrorist bombing of a Jerusalem commuter bus yesterday morning. Barnard College graduate student Sara Duker and her boyfriend Mattityahu Eisenfeld, a rabbinical student at the Jewish Theological Seminary, were among the 23 people killed in the blast. Forty-nine people were wounded in the bombing that militant Palestinians said was a response to last month's assassination of their primary bombmaker. A memorial service organized by IsraeLink will be held tonight at 8 p.m. on College Green. Duker had moved to Israel in October to be closer to Eisenfeld, who was in the process of writing a Haggadah, a book read at Passover discussing the freedom and liberation of Jews. The Jewish Collegiate Festival of the Performing Arts, which was held yesterday at Columbia, altered its schedule to accommodate mourning students. Both students had been very active in Columbia's performing arts, according to Columbia student Fran Amkraut. "The general feeling was in terms of continuing what they would have done," Amkraut said. "This is still important and we can't let terrorism destroy our personal lives." But two of the performing arts groups did not perform after hearing that their former members had died. One was a singing group from Yale University which Eisenfeld had sung with as an undergraduate. The other was a Columbia theater group that Duker had participated in. A collection was taken up at the festival in their memory, Amkraut said. An impromptu service was held at the JTS last night in memory of the two students. News of the attack also shocked Penn students. College sophomore Meyer Potashman said his first reaction to the bombing was to think of his family and friends living in Israel. "I've just been extremely bothered and I've been checking the Internet all day, trying to find out more information about it," Potashman said. Seth Lasser, a College sophomore and Daily Pennsylvanian columnist, said because of the frequency of terrorist attacks in the Middle East, he was not surprised upon hearing about the bus bombing. "I firmly believe that it doesn't matter which government is in power because it's going to take a long time for the terrorist infrastructure to be broken," Lasser said.