On July 2, between noon and 1 p.m., former Milwaukeeans Rochelle and Rick Eissenstat were driving with their three youngest daughters on Sarei Yisra’el Road in Jerusalem near Yafo Road, one of the city’s main streets.
They were planning to spend some time with friends visiting from the United States in the Mahaneh Yehuda open-air market. They had no idea they were about to be caught in a dramatic terrorist attack.
As they described it, several construction workmen suddenly ran into the street and gestured frantically for people to clear away.
Rochelle, who was driving the family’s Mazda minivan, tried to do that, but “the street we were on was very busy. It was packed with cars. The first thing you have to understand is that there was no place to maneuver.”
Then a construction vehicle appeared in view, a large Caterpillar front-end loader. “I never imagined a vehicle that big could go as fast as it was going,” said Rochelle in a telephone interview with The Chronicle on July 3.
“As it bashed into a car to the left of us,” wrote Rick in an e-mail on July 5, “it was not entirely clear whether the vehicle or driver was out of control.”
Neither was the case. News media later reported that the loader’s driver was an east Jerusalem Palestinian Arab, Husam Taysir Dwayat (as spelled by the Jerusalem Post).
He was, reported the Post (July 3), a “convicted rapist, burglar and drug dealer turned jihadist.” He commandeered the vehicle at the construction site of a new light rail system, said Rochelle, and went on a deliberate murder rampage.
The future, not the past
After attacking two cars to the left of the Eissenstat’s, both of whose drivers managed to escape, Dwayat turned on the Eissenstats.
“He crashed his dozer into the front of our car two or three times,” wrote Rick, “but did not succeed in crushing our car.”
“We were frozen, numb,” said Rochelle. “We did not have the presence of mind to get out.”
Dwayat then drove the loader on top of the Eissenstats’ car, apparently seeking to crush the car with the loader’s weight.
The roof bent inward, striking the arm of Nechama, 13, as she held it above her head; and the car’s structure crimped enough that only one door and one window would open.
But the car’s frame proved strong enough not to collapse. “This is truly a miracle,” wrote Rick.
Eventually, Dwayat and the loader moved on and turned onto Yafo Road. Dwayat would overturn one bus, crush several more cars, crash into another bus, kill three people and injure more than 40 more before an off-duty Israeli soldier shot and killed him.
Meanwhile, Rochelle and Rick managed to get out of the one car door that would open, the passenger’s door on the right. The daughters escaped through a left side back seat window.
“Everybody reacts differently” to events like this, said Rochelle, a radiologist. “We saw men and women sobbing and screaming,” but “we reacted the opposite way; we got quiet.”
Rochelle went with Nechama to the hospital, where it turned out her arm was not broken but had only soft tissue injuries. Everyone else in the car — Rick, Rochelle, Dvora (13 and Nechama’s twin) and Liora (16) — sustained “minimal little scratches,” Rochelle said.
(The Eissenstat’s also have two older daughters: Sandy, 29, lives in New York City; and Shoshana, 18, is doing Sherut Leumi national service.)
The car, however, was totaled. At least one of the daughters took photos of it with a cell phone before and just after it was towed away.
Both Rochelle and Rick said they had a sense that “truly everything is in Hashem’s hands” during the attack. Afterward, “as to why God saved us, we don’t know now,” wrote Rick.
Rick is an economist and money manager originally from Rochester, N.Y. He and Rochelle, who is originally from New York City, lived in Milwaukee from 1989 to 2000 and “became religious” mostly through the local Chabad Lubavitch movement.
About a year ago, they toured Israel with, among other people, Rabbi Yoseph Samuels, director of Milwaukee’s Chabad of Downtown; and they donated money to the Chabad Terror Victims Project. (Samuels alerted The Chronicle about the Eissenstats’ experience.)
“Some rabbis have told us [we were spared] because we are so involved with tzedaka,” wrote Rick.
Rochelle, however, said, “I don’t think what we did in the past is as important and what Hashem is expecting of us in the future. I personally think Hashem kept us alive for the sake of what we will do in the future.”
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