I continue to discover new perspectives on Israeli astronaut Col. Ilan Ramon (z"l) that I find deeply moving, such as this excerpt from an article in Ha'aretz:
For Israelis, however, there was nothing humdrum about the flight - down to the kosher food that had been specified by Ilan Ramon, a secular Jew who felt his allegiance belonged to his people at least as much to the credo of the Right Stuff, a tradition that might well have looked askance on deviance from the American norm.
Neither was there anything the least common about his decision to take aboard a picture drawn by a star-struck boy later killed by the Nazis in Auschwitz, a place that Ilan Ramon's mother had somehow survived. The picture, dark and dreamy, showed the earth as seen from the moon.
Nor was there anything in the least ordinary about the fact that unbeknownst to him, the little boy's sister survived the war and moved to Be'er Sheva, where the little boy's niece was in Ilan's high school class. "My brother is finally getting a chance to go into space," said the slain artist's sister, as Columbia lifted off last month. As Meryl has pointed out, the original picture wasn't lost with the Shuttle. But this personal connection seems almost spooky, until you remember what a small country Israel really is.
