Remembering Alisa
Stephen Flatow talks about his daughter, 30 years later
If she were alive today, Alisa Flatow of West Orange would have just turned 50.
But she’s dead, murdered, along with seven Israeli soldiers, on April 9, 1995. She’s been dead longer than she was alive; she died at 20.
Her father, Stephen, her mother, Rosalyn, her four siblings, and the 16 nieces and nephews she never knew are alive, though; vibrantly, defiantly alive.
Her parents started a scholarship fund in her name in 2001, to send young women to Israel on their gap year. The fund was active until 2016, and about 150 students were able to benefit from that scholarship.
Stephen Flatow explained what happened then, and what’s happening now.
First, he said, he and his wife have made aliyah, and now they spend about half their time in Israel, the other half is in Long Branch, although he still practices law in Fairfield. (The internet allows us all to perform wonders.)
He and his family are deeply, profoundly, inextricably Jewish, and that is because of Alisa, who took her once-secular parents and younger siblings on the path that led to greater and greater observance. He’s said that all along, and he retains not only his undying love for Alisa but also his gratitude for her choice of that path.
As he tells the story, when his daughter was 5, she told her parents that she’d be going to kindergarten at a day school, not a public school. That was where she belonged. They took her seriously.
And he and his wife are proud to announce the resumption of the scholarship in their daughter’s name.
First, Mr. Flatow talked about the fund. “When we started the scholarship, we received many thousands of dollars in contributions, but after a few years it started to peter out.” That saddened without surprising him. “Trying to raise money to benefit kids going on a gap-year program in Israel — it’s not the kind of sad story that makes people open their wallet,” he said. It’s important without being glamorous. There are many good causes that truly need money. So once the shock of Alisa’s murder subsided, so did the fund in her memory.
“I was putting money in, money after money, but it was getting very difficult,” Mr. Flatow said. “So a few years ago, I said enough’s enough. Let’s rethink how we are doing this.” So he began “slowly but steadily rebuilding the fund.”
And then, “last summer, I got a call from federation,” he said. That was the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest, the federation in whose catchment area West Orange falls, and the federation that had administered the scholarship when it was functional.
“Do you know this woman?” the federation representative asked him. “And then they threw a name at me, and I said no. And then they sent me a copy of an enormous check, but I had no idea who it was from. I had no clue.”
At first, no one could find the envelope that had held the check. “They didn’t know who to send the receipt to,” Mr. Flatow said. But eventually, “it turned out that someone on the other side of the office did have the information. And then we got a copy of the decedent’s will.
“It was from Edith Lowen, in the memory of Pearl Stein. And then, together with the lawyer, we were able to put two and two together.”
Ms. Lowen, who died in 2021, at 92, was a Brooklyn-born New York City schoolteacher who never married and had no children; Ms. Stein, who died about a decade before Ms. Lowen, similarly unmarried and childless, had been her great friend.
Her lawyer, who also was her executor, told Mr. Flatow that Ms. Lowen “had always told him that she wanted him to make sure that her money goes to educate Jewish women.” She was particularly interested in such education in Israel.
“That’s when the pieces started falling together,” Mr. Flatow said. When Ms. Lowen’s lawyer, following her instructions, started researching scholarships to send young women to Israel to study, they found Alisa’s. “They found us,” Mr. Flatow said.
He tried to learn more about Ms. Lowen. “She had retired to South Carolina, and we found an online interview with her housekeeper about her. It turns out that she had no real extended family; she was close to her caregiver and to Ms. Stein.
“I went through as many records as I could in our files, to see if she had any contact with us before she died. Her name did not pop up at all.
“We are very grateful to her.”
The gift evoked many emotions.
“It feels good to think that 30 years after Alisa’s death people are still interested in her, and in the thing that we are interested in.” That’s women’s education. “There are many competing interests in the Jewish community — you just have to look at this newspaper to see that. So to think that we are able to kickstart a women’s education campaign again, and to help institutions that are dealing with a crisis in funding in Israel…” It’s a good feeling, he said.
Mr. Flatow marveled at the direction his family — his daughters and their husbands and kids live in Bergen County, and his son and his wife and children are in Jerusalem — has taken.
“We have a saying in the family,” he said. “Blame Alisa.”
Alisa Flatow went from the Hebrew Academy — the school that later blossomed into the Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy — to the Frisch School in Paramus, and then on to Brandeis. She took a year off from college to spend in Israel, following all the rules her parents had laid out for her to keep her safe — no intracity buses, no traveling alone — but they didn’t keep her safe enough.
She died on a bus that was going to Kfar Darom; a suicide bomber, supported by Iran, rammed the bus with his car. He died — so did Alisa and six IDF soldiers. Fifty-two passengers were wounded.
Her family has been able to channel their pain, grief, and rage into good. When Alisa was dying, her parents donated her organs, thus greatly boosting the acceptance of cadaveric donations in Israel. Blame Alisa.
The Flatows fought court battles against Iran, which had sponsored the Islamic Jihad terrorists who had murdered Alisa, winning a vast amount of punitive damages, very little of which they received. Later, they discovered a building in Manhattan, purportedly owned by a nonprofit, that Iran actually owned and from which it profited; the Flatows did not benefit from that case, although the BNP Bank Paribas did have to pay an $8.9 billion fine.
It’s because of Alisa that one of his granddaughters is so meticulous in her observance that the hechshers her grandparents find acceptable are not good enough for her. “Blame Alisa,” he said.
Some of his grandsons have begun to dress like chasidim — “black pants, white shirts, head basically shaved except for peyot.” “Blame Alisa.”
It’s important to make clear that “Blame Alisa” is said with pride and love; it’s another way of saying “Thank you, Alisa.” “These are the good arguments,” he continued. “When you look around society today, you see people struggling to maintain their beliefs. It can be difficult to keep their kids marrying other Jews.
“I look at the investment we made in our kids’ education — they were backbreaking investments. I often say that giving your kid a Jewish education is the most effective form of birth control.”
What do you mean, Mr. Flatow? “A few years ago, I found the contract from the first year we sent Alisa to the Hebrew Academy. It was 1979-1980. It cost $1,800 a year then.”
People hear that and often they marvel at how little a year’s education cost then, but, as Mr. Flatow pointed out, back then, he, as a newly minted attorney, “was making $22,000 a year.
“Nothing has changed since then,” he said. The dollar amounts are different, but the proportion of day school tuition to an average family’s income has remained more or less the same. “Every now and then, we see something about a fund for community aid for day schools — but you need people to kick into that community pot. Jewish education is not at the top of that list.”
So if you’re going to help fund some part of Jewish education, which part should it be?
“When you educate a boy, you educate a man,” Mr. Flatow said. “When you educate a woman, you educate a family. It is through the women that traditions are passed down. The boys get book smarts, but it is the mothers at home who teach about Shabbat and yontif and how to do things right.
“That is why we are focusing on women.”
The revived Alisa Flatow scholarships are divided into two parts. The first will go to institutions to provide scholarships to young Israeli women “who are not well off.” The second is to give scholarships to girls who will spend a gap year in a seminary in Israel. It’s for girls who either live in MetroWest or go to school there and whose families can use the help.
“We are looking for girls for whom the year in Israel will make a difference,” Mr. Flatow said. “Especially for girls from struggling families. They are out there, in our own well-off communities. People are struggling with things that can be heartbreaking.
“The ideal candidate will come back not just a better Jew, but a better person.”
He found the gap year — traditionally it’s between high school and college — to be helpful “because kids are not 100 percent on their own. It’s a good 75 percent. They have to take the bus to the shuk, take the bus to a supermarket, argue with a taxi driver, order a cup of coffee by themselves.
“My daughters learned to get on buses by themselves. To go to the hairdresser by themselves. Mommy isn’t there. The schools give the kids the rope to run with, before they yank it back. And they know that they have to integrate these American girls into Israeli society.”
As for the students, “you solidify who you are as a Jew and as a person, and that’s a valuable component of being a Jew in America.”
Alisa’s fund “has a financial value, and a spiritual value as well,” Mr. Flatow said. The girls will know that they are studying not just for themselves, but also for Alisa’s neshama” — her soul — “and for the hostages and for the chayalim” — the IDF. “It is a heartwarming feeling.”
When the awards began, Mr. Flatow and his family read through them. “We used to sit down at a table with the top 30 or 40 applicants, and we’d look through them one at a time,” he said. They’d winnow them down. This time, because the awards will be smaller, “it won’t be as stressful.” Still, it’s a massive responsibility, he said. “We try to pick the best of the best. We learned that the best applicants rise to the top. They have to write an essay. We don’t look at their finances, but their principals can tell us.
“We used to get letters tucked into the applications. The number of divorced families, of families who’ve had a parent pass away, of families with younger children who are disabled” — there’s a great deal of need in the community, much of it hidden unless you know where to look.”
All the applications, and all the information in them, are confidential, Mr. Flatow said.
Thirty years after her murder, Alisa Flatow is still a potent force in the family, he said. “Each of our children’s families, our three daughters and one son, has one child named for Alisa, so there are four.
“They’re different ages. Michal was the first one named after her aunt, and the number one grandchild. She can be a pain, just like her aunt was. Alisa, who will be 12 this summer, talks about Alisa all the time. If the subject of Israel comes up in school, she raises her hand and says, ‘My aunt was murdered by a terrorist there.’ A friend asked her if she isn’t afraid to go there, and she said, ‘No! It is safe there.’
“I have learned that grandchildren are the bonus for not killing your children when they are teenagers,” Mr. Flatow said, laughing.
It might be wise to add here that Mr. Flatow is a man of great warmth. His grief remains with him, but — or maybe and — so does the clear pleasure he gets out of living. Alisa powers him forward, and because she was so full of joy, so is he.
“I consider myself a very lucky person,” he said. “I haven’t been mired in grief. I’m not making light of people who are. But what saved me, personally, was that I was part of the speakers bureau for Israel Bonds and the United Jewish Appeal. I traveled all over the country; I’d speak four or five times a month. One day, I spoke in three different communities in one day — breakfast in Queens, lunch in Queens, back in New Jersey for dinner — and they started and ended with Hatikvah, so I sang it six times that day.”
By the way, he added parenthetically, “In America we usually sing it wrong. Even the great Paul Zim sings it wrong.” Everyone adds another syllable to the word “hatikvah,” he said. It sounds like “ha-a-tikvah.” It shouldn’t.
Getting back to Alisa, because Stephen Flatow always gets back to Alisa, “now, 30 years after her death, I’m still writing articles and op-eds, sending letters to the editors, and we are still getting comments. I meet people at shul — they look at me, or I introduce myself, and they say, ‘I know your name.’
“I often get asked how I do it. And I say, you do it.
“When I make a shiva call to the parents of a victim, I sit quietly with them, and I talk very softly. I say, ‘I want you to realize something. Tomorrow morning you will get up, and shiva will be over. And then you have to start putting one foot in front of the other.’
“I think that it is hopeful and helpful advice. You can’t lock yourself into tragedy. You will have very sad days, and you will have very happy days.
“Sometimes I go to affairs, and I just look at the happiness on people’s faces, and I say, I wish Alisa could have been there.”
He sees glimpses of her in unlikely places, and that gives him pleasure. “There’s a TV show that I just stumbled on,” he said. “All Creatures Great and Small.” It’s a British show about a veterinarian in mid-20th-century Yorkshire. He loves it. “One of the women on the show has tremendous dimples, just like Alisa’s. I think of Alisa’s great smile. Her friends say they always saw her smiling. No one ever saw her down.
“We’re still in touch with some of her high-school friends. Life goes on. It doesn’t come to a crashing halt. It’s part of Jewish life.
“You don’t wish this on anyone, of course, but you do wish them good things, and the strength to get through the terrible things. And that’s where the Jewish family and the Jewish community come in.
“My daughter still has an impact in the New Jersey/New York area, and really in America. She is a tough act to follow. She was the leader religiously.
“It is hard to imagine where she would be standing, what she would be doing today — I know that it is impossible to know — but the fact is that my children and grandchildren are all following in her footsteps, and they all admit it.”
Mr. Flatow models how to live with loss, how to remember and also keep going. Now, with the revived scholarship in his daughter’s name and memory, he’s offering to help support young women as they spend a year in Israel, strengthening their Jewish souls, living a life that Alisa would have lived.
To learn more about the scholarship, for young women who live or go to school in Essex, Morris, Sussex, Union, and parts of Somerset counties, call the fund coordinator, Pam Greenwood, at (973) 929-3005.
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