April 15, 2002

Less than 48 hours after he was nearly blown up by the female Palestinian suicide bomber near Jerusalem's Mahaneh Yehuda market, a bruised, burned, but unfazed Rabbi Phil Chernofsky returned yesterday to the site where he had his brush with death.

Standing lost in reflection at the spot where six people were killed, the New York-born Chernofsky, who has lived in Jerusalem for two decades and who serves as the educational director of the Orthodox OU Israel Center, said he had to come back to the spot.  Not for shopping, he said, but to prove a point - to himself and to others.

His hand in a cast, his neck still reddened with burn marks that he suffered from the heat of the explosion, the father of three had just completed his shopping and was heading to the bakery Friday afternoon when the bomber set off her explosives.

His shopping bags were blown away, his kippa was knocked off, but miraculously he himself was left standing, if bloodied.  All around him he saw body parts, and pieces of human flesh.

"Let me put it this way: The people around me were not able to be interviewed," he said.

Taken to Hadassah-University Hospital in Ein Kerem, the observant Chernofsky was able to get to his home in the Ramot Eshkol neighborhood after candle lighting but before the start of Shabbat, he said.  "The first thing my daughter said to me when I got home was: 'That's it, you are not going to the market anymore,'" the 54-year-old father of three recalled.  Dozens of memorial candles and an equal number of onlookers and residents marked the spot where the bustling market area had turned into a sea of carnage two days earlier.

Chernofsky decided not to tell his family about his plans to return to the site yesterday, his birthday. Part of the reason he came, he said, was also for himself.

"I came to see if I could stand in place without shaking," he said, displaying a defiant mixture of willpower and courage, and "I have done it."

Courtesy of The Jerusalem Post

Rabbi Phil Chernofsky is Educational Director of the The Seymour J. Abrams Orthodox Union Jerusalem World Center and editor of the popular Torah Tidbits