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Survivor recalls bombing©Los Angeles TimesMarch 29, 2002 KFAR SAVA, Israel -- His daughters had warned him that spending the Passover Seder at a crowded hotel was dangerous. Undeterred, 73-year-old Isaac Atsits joined his fellow retirees at Table No. 17 in the festive dining hall of the Park Hotel. As the group of 12 got comfortable, chatted and waited for the dinner to begin, a 25-year-old Palestinian armed with a powerful bomb planted himself in the center of the room. The deafening explosion brought the ceiling down, hurled tables and chairs into the air and plunged the dinner guests, covered by glass and metal shards, into awful darkness. Blinded by a blow to his eye, Atsits managed to escape, crawling over debris and climbing out of the wreckage. Around him, 20 people lay dead or dying. Atsits and about 60 other Israelis and foreign Jews who were visiting for the Passover holiday remained in half a dozen hospitals Thursday. He doesn't know what happened to the friends with whom he was sitting. "We get used to these attacks daily, but last night's was especially painful," he said in Meir Hospital in Kfar Sava, about 20 miles southeast of the coastal city of Netanya, where the attack occurred. His left eye was bloodshot and badly bruised, as was the left side of his nose; there was a slight tear in his left eardrum. "I would describe it as 10 attacks all together, like the 10 plagues," he said, alluding to the biblical story recounted on Passover in which God visited locusts, frogs, pestilence and other scourges on the pharaoh because he refused to free the enslaved Jews. Atsits had never before joined his fellow retirees for the Passover Seder. He preferred to spend the holiday that marks the exodus of the Jews from Egypt with his wife and daughters at home. But this year, his wife was sick and he didn't trust his daughter to observe Passover's strict Kosher rules in her preparation of the Seder. So off he went to the Park Hotel.
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