Alisa Flatow of West Orange, NJ, took her third trip to Israel as a senior in high school. She went on the March of the Living, where they visited the concentration camps in Europe and then on to Israel. It made her decide who she was and what she was going to be. She was going to be an activist, working on behalf of Israel and the Jewish people.
Alisa went to Brandeis University, working very hard, taking extra courses plus summer school. But she loved Israel so much that she still found time to travel those summers to Israel. In the summer of 1994, she went with Aish as an outreach activist and then became a campus representative.
In 1995, as a junior, she was granted a leave of absence by Brandeis and she went to study for six months at Nishmat, a women's seminary in Jerusalem. She found an apartment in Jerusalem and pursued an "education in life." Alisa was thrilled that after two years of sociology at Brandeis, she was now studying Judaism all day long. She wrote of being inspired by the initiation of the paratroopers at the Wall, seeing them presented with the two Jewish weapons -- a rifle and a Bible.
That spring, Alisa was to stay in Israel a few weeks after Passover to finish the semester, and decided on a pre-Passover trip with friends to Gush Katif on the Mediterranean, to get some sun. Alisa was killed in a suicide bombing of the bus near Kfar HaDarom in the Gaza Strip, April 1995. Her parents donated her organs so that others might have the chance to live.
