31/8/97

What brought Flickk on aliya

    When Amy Amoch won a free trip to the destination of her choice, there was no hesitation: it had to be Israel.
    Her parents, Jacques and Flickk, had given her a strong Zionist upbringing; her sister Gillah was already here, studying in Jerusalem. This is where she wanted to be.
    It must have been a sweet sight at Ben-Gurion Airport: two vivacious, raven-haired beauties -- Gillah had just turned 20, Amy was then 18 -- hugging, laughing. They had so much to talk about. 
    Fifteen minutes after they left the airport, they were dead.
    A bus jumped the divider on the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway and hit their sherut taxi. Everyone's nightmare, it came true for the Amoch parents.
    Suddenly, Jacques and Flick found they led meaningless lives. Their only children were gone.
    Their daughters, buried in Israel, they, far away in Toronto. 
    What such a person as Flick does with the rest of a destroyed life is one of the mysteries of human nature. To wallow in grief, or to internalize it; to withdraw into a shell, or to seek solace; to turn to religion, or to blame God....
    Flick declared war. Within her welled a commitment: constructive revenge. She decided to mount a campaign against traffic accidents, decided to move to Israel and devote her energies to saving other lives. "If these senseless deaths can be stopped, my beautiful girls will not have lived and died in vain," she wrote in The Jerusalem Post, just 12 days after the 1991 crash.
    A year later, the Amochs immigrated.
    Jacques spends much of his time in Spain, where he has business interests. He is unrelentingly bitter. He feels his Zionism has betrayed him. He hates being here. "He now feels he poisoned his kids with Zionism. Yes, he blames Zionism, the government... you don't look for logic in such feelings."
    Flick, in her 50s -- her real name, Felicity (meaning "great happiness"), seems cruelly inappropriate now -- is a passionate activist with Metuna, the Netanya-based Organization for Road Safety.
    The time she devotes to Metuna is, she says, her only worthwhile activity. She shrinks from public performances, yet gave a speech when asked; she's not demonstrative, yet demonstrates when needed. Orthodox and British-born, Flick was not born to activism, yet she is a dynamic contributor to Metuna, at the very least as a solemn symbol.
    Flick has gone over the story so many times, by now she can recite it almost emotionlessly.
    "It was a run of horrible coincidences. Amy worked for American Express and won the ticket at a Christmas raffle. She went to England first, to see my parents, and at the airport on the way to Israel, she was told she wasn't booked on the plane. She wept, so they put her on an earlier plane. She arrived two hours early and called me to ask what she should do. To my everlasting regret, I told her to wait, that Gillah was on her way.
    "Fifteen minutes into the journey, their sherut was hit by a bus that had jumped the median. The sherut was full. Only my girls were killed."
    The news was relayed to a relative in Montreal, who informed Lubavitch, which sent an emissary to the Amoch home in Toronto to tell the parents.
    "Jacques was away. I was alone."

"YES, THE government is to blame, I agree 100 percent with Jacques. Their inaction over the years indirectly caused this accident."
    Flick is emphatic that enforcement of the law is the greatest need in reducing the death toll. In Toronto, she says, the drivers are disciplined because of fear of punishment. "If you're over the white line by one inch, you get a demerit. People are brought to court for really minor things.
    "This country could solve all its economic problems just by handing out tickets."
    She derides "Project 700," the scheme by which police are supposed to be beefing up patrols along 700 select kilometers of roadway. "It's a black joke, that it doesn't mean '700 kilometers' but '700 killed.' People get caught only randomly. In fact, the death toll has gone up since the project started. One recent week, [Transport Minister] Levy said it had been a good week, nobody had died. What was he talking about?! It had been the worst week for severe injuries, plus 12 dead. I don't know where he gets his numbers from ... he's out of it, he's strictly ceremonial. He'll put a mezuza up at the King David Lounge, that's his bit."
    Levy can now expect to get the week's toll faxed to his home by Metuna every Friday. "That'll spoil his Shabbat."
    She insists that more stringent laws would have protected her daughters. The sherut driver claimed that the bus driver had apparently fallen asleep at the wheel; "we'll never get the truth, but obviously he'd been driving too many hours."
    She began her campaign while still in Canada. "There was a memorial for the kids, and about 600 people came. We asked them all to write letters to [the Israeli authorities], and I think a lot of them did. [Prime minister] Shamir promised he'd put out a highway patrol, and in fact he did, but it petered out after a year or so."
    She immigrated because "I thought I could do more in Israel."
    She received hundreds of letters from Israelis following a TV appearance here, which encouraged her to continue her activism.
    "What else would I be doing? What else do you do with your life when your kids die? There's nothing else for me. My life is almost completely Metuna.
    "If I have any success at all, then they didn't die for nothing."
    Flick found little solace from rabbis she consulted. "Gosh, how many rabbis I've been to. None of them gave me the answers I wanted to hear." One exception was Gillah's rabbi at the Neveh Yerushalayim seminary, who encouraged Flick to take up activism.
    There are so many rabbis here, she says, but you can't connect with them. "If they're any good, they're always so busy. You have to call fifteen times, get through their wives, then you feel you can't take up too much of their time. In Toronto, our rabbi was always available, you could stop by his house or office.
    "I hate to hear 'it was a punishment' or 'you must have done something.' I've heard that. I don't want to hear that, I can feel guilty enough without it.
    "Even a non-religious person in Toronto said I must've deserved it in one way or another. One of Amy's friends was not allowed to visit me. She was a Russian; her parents, who were not religious at all, didn't want to be tainted, or something. Superstition."
    Such comments will stay with her for a long time, but she stresses that "the majority of people have been wonderful. I couldn't be anywhere else but here.”
    She is not enamoured by the Israeli mentality. "They're so used to death. I read that over 1,000 kids were at an ecstasy party on a firing range! They feel that nothing can happen to them. That's the way they drive: it can't happen to them."
    She has trouble with Hebrew, but finds a comfortable environment in Metuna which, she says, is almost entirely "Anglo-Saxon." That may be one reason Metuna doesn't knock the plaster off the Knesset walls.
    Too many Israelis see Metuna as not quite mainstream. "Some drivers pass our demonstrations and give us the thumb's up, but others say, 'What is this, America?'"
    On the other hand, they did enjoy a show of support recently from an unexpected source: "We were at a demonstration at Ben Shemen. To our surprise, some haredim joined us, saying they were also concerned." 
    This is a frustrating form of activism. "There's no return on it. You can't say 'I've saved so many lives today.' You just don't know. Unless you see the numbers plummet after they've taken up a program of ours."
    Metuna has over 1,000 members, who pay NIS 50 a year, but it's desperately short of funds. They do not want government funding, for obvious reasons.
    Metuna seems to want to be a red rag to the big dumb bull (the government, the drivers). That's certainly consistent with the style of Metuna's spokeswoman and dynamo, Zelda Harris.
    Following up on the Women in Black and Women in Green, Metuna's demonstrators called themselves Women in Red. (It was later politically corrected to People in Red.)
    The organization's address sticker is just as subtle: a blood-red label depicting a huge truck bashing a small car, with the words, in Hebrew, "THIS CAN BE PREVENTED!!"
    That is now what Flick Amoch's life is all about.

    For information about Metuna, call Flick Amoch at
    02-561-0023, or Zelda Harris, 09-884-4667.