I live in Herzliya and on occasion ride my bike to Tel Aviv along the beautiful new bike path snaking along the coast. For a while I kept noticing something near the Glilot interchange — a sculpture, set back from the road, easy for nearby drivers whizzing by to miss. I passed it on my bicycle several times before I finally stopped.

When I walked up to it, I realized it was a memorial. The stone with the Hebrew inscription at the base described what I was looking at: the site where thirty-eight Israeli civilians were murdered on March 11, 1978, in what became known as the Coastal Road Massacre. I stood there for a moment. I had been riding by this sculpture for months without realizing what I was passing.

Then I looked across Highway 2 at Big Fashion Glilot — the brand-new world class open-air mall on the other side of the road, café umbrellas, Shabbat crowds moving between storefronts of the world’s top consumer brands. Forty-seven years have passed. I was twenty-one years old when the events of 1978 which are now memorialized by this modern sculpture, and close enough to have heard the warning siren.

Ma’agan Michael, March 1978

That spring semester of 1978 I was completing the junior year abroad program at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. My girlfriend Shelly and I, had taken a bus north to visit friends from Colorado volunteering at Kibbutz Ma’agan Michael, right on the Mediterranean coast south of Haifa. Wendy Loup was there, her boyfriend Lenny Pepper, and Lenny’s younger brother Scott. A weekend at a coastal kibbutz, catching up with old friends, felt like a good break from Jerusalem academia.

Ma’agan Michael is right on the water, with a nature reserve along the shoreline and a beach. We had been on that beach that Saturday morning in March, not many hours before everything changed.

On Saturday afternoon March 11, 1978 a siren went off. Word came in pieces: something was happening near the beach, an infiltration. We were told to go to the bomb shelter, and we did — all five of us........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)