New Yorkers filled Carnegie Hall on Tuesday morning to pay tribute to the memory of slain Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and to find comfort by sharing their loss.
Many had waited more than an hour in a line that snaked a block and a half on a day that was gray and had a harsh chill in the air that later gave way to rain.
“I came to pay my respects,” said Frances Berson, waiting patiently in line. She called the ceremony “a healing thing,” a way to prevent “our distress from breaking out in anger and frustration.”
“There are so few people of Rabin’s stature who are around and who are willing to give of themselves utterly,” she said, tears welling in her eyes.
Roy Wasserman, a lawyer from Manhattan, said he had come because he is “a Jew, very pro-peace and pro-Zionist,” and wanted to share his grief with others.
He said he was especially “hurt that one Jew did this to another” and was “distressed over the reaction of some right-wing Jews” to Rabin’s assassination.
“There are those who are not condemning it and, even further, those who see it as a [welcome] means to slow the peace process,” he said.
“I came because I feel the need to counteract those people,” he said.
Inside, speeches by a host of officials celebrated Rabin as a great and courageous hero at the same time that they portrayed him as humble, shy and impatient with pomp and pretense.
And despite the divisions over the peace process that run especially deep in this city, it was uniformly celebrated at Rabin’s most important legacy. Speacjers said an assassin’s bullets should not be permitted to halt its course.
Some of the more moving features of the event, attended by some 3,000 people, were a mournful interlude by violinist Itzhak Perlman, a speech in Hebrew calling for Jewish reconciliation by a yeshiva student from Flatbush and a reading by the granddaughter of acting Prime Minister Shimon Peres, Michal Walden.
Her voice broke as she read an English translation of the peace song sung by Rabin at the Tel Aviv rally minutes before he was assassinated.
Most wrenching, perhaps, was the sound of Rabin’s deep signature voice booming in the acoustically perfect hall, in a taped speech about the responsibility of national leaders to protect and guard human rights, especially the right to a secure life.
“There is only one way to sanctify human lives,” said Rabin. “Real peace.”
“Mighty he was, Yitzhak Rabin,” said Rabbi Alexander Schindler, who called the prime minister “one of the anointed sons of Israel.”
“The unification of Jerusalem and the catalyzing power of the Six-Day War for Jewish consciousness throughout the world were the gifts of his military brilliance,” said Schindler, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations.
But, “mightier still was he when he became a flaming warrior for peace.”
Schindler said the killing “proves the truth of [Rabin’s] avowal that there is no road back” from the current path toward peace. That road back only holds chaos and “the unwarrantable and unthinkable hatred of Jews for their fellow Jew,” he said. Once before such hatred destroyed the Temple and the nation of Israel, he said, but “we will not tolerate its emergence again.”
In a clear reference to the violent verbal climate that has plagued the debate over the peace process, he warned, “Words are not wind, they are the shadow of deeds.”
He added that words “can hold society together or incite a fanatic to kill. Let us be heedful of our words.”
Joseph Sisco, former undersecretary of state for political affairs, worked closely with Rabin in the years he was an ambassador to the United States. Calling him his “best friend in Israel,” he said Rabin was “hardly the striped- trouser diplomat.”
Rather, he was a “rough diamond,” a “gruff soldier, using words very sparingly,” while at the same time he was a man of “warmth and kindness.”
“His directness engendered trust,” said Sisco. “He said it like it was, no sugarcoating, like many politicians.”
“I hope the process of healing has begun and a new atmosphere is created in which differences are debated and future policies” will be determined “by rational discourse and the ballot box,” Sisco said.
Building real peace was Rabin’s “guiding force, this was his thought, until the last moment of his life,” said Ambassador Colette Avital, Israeli consul general in New York.
“Now we will have to do it daily,” she said. “It will need our patient, constant, daily care.”
Avital recalled Rabin as modest and unassuming.
“He probably would have been embarrassed by yesterday’s pomp [at the funeral] and by today’s ceremony,” she said. “And this is precisely why we loved and admired him so much. And we will miss him.”
“We are left with a deep wound and a whole nation weeps,” she said. “A whole people is orphaned.”
New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, back from the Rabin funeral, also paid formal tribute to the slain leader and to the “very special bond” between the people of New York and the people of Israel.
The mayor only a few weeks earlier had ousted Israel’s peace negotiating partner, Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat, from a local concert hall.
The Carnegie Hall ceremony was organized by the consulate, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York.
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