San Diego family feared for student killed in Israel bombing

SAN DIEGO -- Every time a bomb exploded in Jerusalem, Marla Bennett's parents feared for their 24-year-old daughter, a student at Hebrew University. But within minutes she would be on the phone, assuring them she was safe.

On Wednesday, Marla Bennett never called after a bomb went off in the university cafeteria, killing seven people, five of them Americans. Bennett died just two days before she was to return to San Diego.

Michael and Linda Bennett had hoped "that it didn't happen, that she had somehow survived, that maybe she was unconscious somewhere on an operating table," family spokesman Norman Greene said Thursday. "But it wasn't meant to be."

Bennett, a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, was completing the second year of a three-year program toward a joint graduate degree from Hebrew University and the Pardes Institute, said Greene, co-publisher of the San Diego Jewish Press Heritage newspaper. Afterward, she hoped to perhaps become principal of a religious school.

Bennett's love of Israel and concern for its future kept her there despite her fears of terror attacks, she wrote in a column for the Press Heritage in May.

"There is nowhere else in the world I would rather be right now," she explained. "I have a front-row seat for the history of the Jewish people. I am a part of the struggle for Israel's survival."

Bennett's interest in her religion grew after she spent an undergraduate year in Israel, and visited the country a half-dozen times, Greene said. She traveled widely and volunteered in Jerusalem, writing that she hoped to help "put back together all that has broken."

In an April e-mail to a cousin, Bennett said, "I admit it. Israel is really scary right now. ... But I still feel so strongly about being here."

She signed off by saying: "Don't worry too much!"

Also killed in the explosion of the remote-controlled bomb was Benjamin Blutstein, 25, of Susquehanna Township, Pa. He was enrolled in a two-year program to teach Jewish studies and had planned to return to Pennsylvania on Thursday.

A third American victim, Janis Ruth Coulter, 36, was an assistant director of graduate studies for the university's Rothberg International School, based in New York. She had been escorting American students when the attack occurred.

A fourth, David Gritz, 24, of Peru, Mass., held dual American-French citizenship. Gritz grew up in Paris, but spent his summers at his parents' house in Peru. Friends said he was to begin a graduate course in Jewish thought.

The fifth victim, Dina Carter, 37, also had Israeli citizenship and was to be buried there, police said.