It was my first visit to Paris, and I was both excited and relieved. I arrived in the French capital on a warm summer’s day after a tense month in Israel. My mother’s cousin Rolf, a travel agent in Tel Aviv, had written down a list of sites of Jewish interest to check out, and I was eager to begin exploring. As I unpacked my suitcase early that Monday afternoon, I heard the sound of sirens, and instantly thought, “Ah, it’s just like New York; always something happening in a big city.”
After a brief stroll around the neighborhood of the Paris Opera, I returned to my hotel to plan the rest of the week. I don’t speak French, so I tuned in the BBC on my transistor radio for the latest news from Israel. Instead, I heard an announcer say, “Dozens of people have been killed or wounded in a terrorist assault on a Jewish restaurant in Paris. The attackers reportedly threw a grenade and fired machine guns at patrons of the popular Jo Goldenberg deli in Le Marais district.” I sank down on the bed in utter shock and disbelief, and turned on the TV to watch live coverage. Minutes later, I reached for the piece of paper cousin Rolf had given me. The top suggestion on his list of “must-see, must-do” locations and activities: Jo Goldenberg’s.
The dark memories of August 9th, 1982 came flooding back earlier this year when French authorities said that three men suspected in the attack, which killed six people (including two Americans) and injured 22, had been identified, and international warrants had been issued for their arrest. In June, one of the three – who all belonged to the Abu Nidal Organization, a Palestinian terror group that split from the PLO – was apprehended in Jordan; France is now seeking his extradition for trial. The other two are said to be living in Norway and in Ramallah in the West Bank.
The summer of 1982 had already been chock-full of unexpected events. I had taken more than a month off from my job as a newscaster and correspondent at NBC Radio’s young adult network, with a hoped-for relaxing vacation in Israel to be followed by what I anticipated would be an emotional journey with my parents to my mother’s hometown in Germany… her first visit since fleeing the Nazis in the 1930s.
The relaxing vacation was not to be. Several weeks before my long-planned trip, Israel invaded Lebanon, in response to repeated cross-border attacks by PLO forces there. The escalating war was in full force by the time I arrived at my beachfront hotel in Tel Aviv, from where I daily watched helicopters and military aircraft heading north along the coast. Cousins of mine were called up to active duty, and the anguish and controversy in Israel over the conflict and the nine-week-long siege of Beirut reached a fever pitch.
Menachem Begin was then prime minister, and several years earlier, I’d become acquainted with his longtime chief of staff, Yechiel Kadishai. To my astonishment, despite all that was going on, Kadishai invited me to his office, adjacent to Begin’s. This, at a time when Begin had not been seen in public for many days, and was refusing to take questions from any reporters.
After making my way through the most intense security screening I’d ever experienced, I found myself sitting in front of Kadishai’s desk. He offered me a cup of tea and said, “The prime minister will be coming in here in the next few minutes. I will introduce you, you can chat, but you may not remove your tape recorder from your bag, nor can you ask him any questions about the war.” He had barely finished the sentence when Begin strode into the room. I stood up and was introduced, we shook hands, we spoke about nothing of any consequence, the two men went over Begin’s schedule for the rest of the day, and then he was gone. It was a moment of personal exhilaration and deep professional frustration.
The next day, I visited my colleagues at the NBC bureau in Herzliya, and heard John Chancellor, who’d recently stepped down from his position as NBC Nightly News anchor and had been sent to cover the war, bitterly complaining that none of his producers could arrange an interview with Prime Minister Begin. “Why can’t we get into that office?” he demanded. I couldn’t resist. “Excuse me,” I interjected. “I actually was with Begin in his office yesterday. Perhaps I can help; I’ll get you in touch with his chief of staff.”
I later found out that Chancellor called the NBC newsroom at 30 Rock within minutes, apoplectic that a 20-something-year-old radio reporter had met the cloistered Israeli leader in Jerusalem, while he, a vaunted TV legend, was left to cool his heels in Tel Aviv.
Although officially on vacation, I filed a number of reports for NBC Radio about the somber mood in Israel during the war and the growing debate over the tactics of Begin and his defense minister, Ariel Sharon.
A couple of days before I was set to leave for Germany, my mother called from New York. She had broken her ankle, and our trip would have to be postponed. Her travel agent cousin suggested I might want to decompress in Paris, since I still had another week’s vacation coming, and I happily agreed.
The atmosphere in Israel had been unrelentingly stressful, and I was selfishly looking forward to croissants and cruising on the River Seine. News of the terror attack at Jo Goldenberg’s dashed that hope to pieces in an instant. I plunged into a kind of despair I had never before felt. I’d just left Israel, where Jews were fighting and dying in a quest for security, and had arrived in Europe, where, four decades after the Holocaust, Jews were now being murdered at lunch.
I sat transfixed in front of the television in my hotel room, simultaneously seeking any radio reports in English. I was less than two miles from the Rue des Rosiers, yet I could not bring myself to head over there. The rest of the day was a blur.
I went the next morning. The empty restaurant’s iron bars were shut tight, and one woman stood outside, peering through the front door’s window, as if to catch a glimpse of the previous day’s horror. A dozen curious onlookers stared quietly from the street, and a lone policeman stood guard outside a kosher butcher shop across the way. Bullet holes were visible, but no blood, and an eerie silence had replaced the screams.
I wanted to return to the U.S. immediately, but after bumping into a group of Israeli tourists and spending the afternoon with them, I decided to stay. Over the next few days, I saw competing graffiti throughout the City of Lights: one sign on the Metro read “Mort A Israel”, death to Israel, accompanied by a swastika; the phrase “Am Yisrael Chai”, the nation of Israel lives, was painted next to a synagogue; and a similar sentiment, “Israel Vivra”, had been scrawled on a wall of posters.
Two days after the killings, way calmer and more composed than I’d been 48 hours earlier, I sauntered down the Champs-Elysees and stopped in to the NBC bureau. After a warm greeting, the employees there were not pleased to discover I’d been around on Monday, but hadn’t offered to do radio reports. “We were short-staffed”, one said. “How could you have not gone over there for an event of such magnitude?”
He was absolutely right. On a professional level, I had failed. In fact, I never wrote about that dreadful day until this moment. If I ever were to be asked, “What are you first, a Jew or a journalist?”, the attack on Jo Goldenberg’s answered that question for me in a crystal clear way.
Goldenberg himself died last year at the age of 91. His restaurant is now a clothing store, with a commemorative plaque outside the entrance. And 33 years after the onslaught, for the first time, the families of those killed and the wounded victims who survived have been given a glimmer of hope that justice may yet be served.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.