San Diego, CA (special) — When Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995, former American Arthur Lenk was a new staff member at Israel's Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem. In those horrifying times, he was given a stunning assignment: to handle the VIP arrangements for 16 visiting heads of state from Africa and the Middle East.

"I dealt with the flight of King Hussein from Jordan; I was there when he stepped on the soil of Jerusalem for the first time," Lenk recalled prior to attending a ceremony at UCSD marking Rabin's fourth yahrzeit. 

"I was at the funeral and guided them all around," he continued. "When the funeral ended and we were shuttling everyone on the buses, I wasn't responsible for Europe and I don't remember how I recognized him but I saw the prime minister of Denmark just standing there, kind of lost on the streets of Jerusalem after the funeral. And I went over to him and got him on the right bus -- you don't usually do this with prime ministers." Lenk said it was the most intensive 72 hours of his life, yet he felt better off than most other Israelis who were at home during the mourning period, "not knowing what to do with themselves.

ARTHUR LENK.

"I was running, running and doing something that was important and had value, and about four days later I was coming back to Jerusalem from a meeting in Tel Aviv, and it hit me," Lenk said. "I was listening to a talk show in a car; they were talking about it, and it finally hit me, the grandness, the awfulness of what had happened to us. It finally hit me; it took me four days."

And he had to pull his car over to the side of the highway to mourn.

"But I felt lucky about it in retrospect," he said. "I was able to do something about it and channel the energy that was so awful."

Five weeks later, Lenk's second of three children was born in Israel. He and his wife Ruth decided to name the daughter Ilana Rabin Lenk.

Raised in New Jersey, Lenk went to Israel on a high school program, continued his studies at Hebrew University, and eventually decided to make aliyah and serve in the Israeli army. 

He became an attorney in Israel, and "hated it" before joining the diplomatic corps. After serving inside the Foreign Ministry, he got his first overseas assignment: a three-year posting at the Israeli embassy in New Delhi, India, as the staff member responsible for cultural affairs and public affairs.

His second assignment is his current one at Israel's Consulate General in Los Angeles as consul for cultural affairs and communications. In that capacity, at the memorial service, he quoted a moving statement to Congress that Rabin had made July 26, 1994, on the occasion of signing the peace treaty with Jordan.  "I stand here on behalf of the parents who have buried their children, of the children who have no fathers, and of the sons and daughters who are gone but return to us in our dreams," he quoted Rabin as saying.  "I stand here today on behalf of those youngsters who wanted to live, to love, to build a home. I have come from Jerusalem in the name of our children who began their lives in great

YAHRZEIT — Guests light yahrzeit candles at UCSD, where Hillel members teamed with the Union of Jewish Students, the United Jewish Federation and San Diego State University's Lipinsky Institute for Judaic Studies to memorialize slain Israeli  Prime Ministrer Yitzhak Rabin

hopes and are names on graves and memorial stones, old pictures in albums, fading clothes in closets. ..."

Attendees at the memorial sang Israel's national anthem Hatikvah; watched a moving video on Rabin's life which was coupled by student readings; sang Shir L'Shalom, the song that Rabin had just joined in singing at a giant peace rally moments before he was shot to death, and recited Kaddish

Lenk also introduced Prof. Haggai Erlich of Tel Aviv University, who is serving as the Israeli scholar-in-residence this year with SDSU's Lipinksy Institute of Judaic Studies. Although at UCSD, the memorial was sponsored by the Hillel students from both universities, as well as the Jewish Student Union and the United Jewish Federation.

Erlich said part of Rabin's enduring legacy was his willingness to admit that things have changed and that old world views needed to be changed accordingly.

Suggesting that most people's ideas are engraved into their minds between the ages of 18 and 26 -- the age of many of the 65 people in his audience -- Erlich enumerated three ideas which Rabin had embraced and cherished during his formative years but had to change subsequently.

First, that Israel could be an idealistic, agricultural, socialistic, kibbutz like state. Second, that Israel should be a melting pot in which would be fashioned a new Israeli, shorn of extraneous Diaspora culture. And third, that security for the state of Israel could be obtained only through militarily occupying the higher and more defensible ground in the hills around Jerusalem.

Liberal capitalism overtook socialism, and the melting pot idea was replaced by the concept of diversity and "hopefully pluralism," Erlich said.

As for security, "the Gulf War spelled it clearly, that security is no longer the little hill with a machine gun and barbed wire; that holding to the territory is ....surely not the key to security."

As Rabin and Israel were able to reevaluate cherished ideas, so too must Palestinians go through such a reevaluation, Erlich suggested.

"Their story is much more difficult and painful," he said. " Remember, 1948 for them is not a story of salvation; it is a story of exile. the formative stage of most PLO members . ..was the idea that a Pan-Arab revolution will redeem the Palestinians, that a united Arab world will join hands together in a great revolution of unification, of socialism (and form a) secular state, an Arab state with Jews tolerated as citizens," Erlich said.. "This is the formative episode of Yasser Arafat."

In the 1970s, he said, a younger generation focused on another vision: "not necessarily pan-Arabic; but Muslim, pan-Islam. ' We will recreate the Muslim state and then Jews in the Muslim state, after victory, they may be tolerated like Jews were underIslam (as) second-class citizens. Jews will enjoy autonomy, not Muslims.'

"These were legacies of the past that the Palestinians have to shed in order to make peace with us and with themselves," Erlich said.

"I believe that Yitzhak Rabin understood that as well, and became much more considerate with the Palestinian side," the professor said. "He also made peace with the Palestinians, understanding their difficulties."

 * * *

Hatkafah is a sudden and decisive thrust into another's territory. Lenk's boss, Israel's new consul-general in Los Angeles, Yuval Rotem, decided to adopt a similar strategy on the diplomatic field of encounter.

Five weeks after his appointment to the Los Angeles post, he decided to make his first call to another city in his Southwest region and chose San Diego.

Instead of having members of his staff go in turn to San Diego, as the need seemed to arise, Rotem decided that "if four people concentrate on San Diego all at once and spread ourselves out and go across the town then we can meet a lot of different people in a lot of different areas and compare notes all at once, with San Diego on our minds, and really get ideas for projects," Lenk summarized.

With the Rabin memorial service at UCSD providing the occasion, it was decided that Lenk would deal with the media -- thus his interview with HERITAGE, as well as another interview with the Catholic newspaper Southern Cross, and a visit by Lenk and Rotem to the Union-Tribune editorial board for an off-the-record discussion about the Middle East Peace Process.

Rotem meanwhile met with UCSD faculty members with such specialties as Jewish studies, Middle Eastern studies and global studies, and also parlayed with United Jewish Federation leadership as well as with Assemblywoman Susan Davis, a member of the Jewish community who has carried pro-Israel resolutions in the Legislature and now is running for Congress. Rotem also spoke with directors of the World Affairs Council of San Diego.

Meanwhile, Dena Weisbaum, who is the consulate's director of academic affairs, met with Hillel members and faculty at UCSD, SDSU and USD. And Paul Barin, a San Diegan who now serves as a political aide to the consul general, met with aides to four members of Congress representing the San Diego area.

Lenk said the consulate believes more dialoguing between Israelis and American Jews should be encouraged. Linkage between the two was taken for granted by previous generations but not by the younger generation, Lenk said. "I think we have to take that tie which we have taken for granted too long and not take it for granted. We have to show each other why we are family and why we do need to care."

He said that many more traveling Israeli exhibits and programs which now stop in Los Angeles should "come down the 405" to San Diego County. Additionally, he said, the consulate is exploring with San Diego's Museum of Contemporary Art the idea of mounting a major exhibit in 2001 or 2002 on how life styles have affected Israeli architecture and interior design.