Family Testifies in $1B Suit Against Palestinian Authorities

Members of a Long Island family testified Monday that the Sept. 11 attacks and its lesson that terror can happen anywhere persuaded them to cancel a trip to Disney World and instead visit Yerushalayim in early 2002, when four of them were seriously injured in a suicide bombing.

Mark Sokolow, a lawyer, and his wife, Rena, testified as lead plaintiffs in a $1 billion lawsuit in Manhattan federal court against Palestinian authorities for six attacks in Israel from 2002 to 2004 that killed or wounded Americans. Their three daughters, two of them hurt in the blast, testified as well.

The defense, representing the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization, denies officials were privy to the attacks.

Sokolow said he was sitting at his desk on the 38th floor of the World Trade Center’s south tower when the north tower was struck on Sept. 11, 2001. He fled the building and discussed the attacks later with his then-18-year-old daughter, Elana.

“She said, ‘Dad, you were so worried about sending me to Israel this year and look at what happened in New York,’” he recalled. “I realized she was right. Terrorism can happen anywhere.”

Rena Sokolow agreed.

“9/11 basically changed everything,” she said. “We thought it would be much more meaningful to take them to Israel.”

On the Woodmere family’s last day of an eight-day visit, a bomb went off outside a Yerushalayim shoe store.

Rena Sokolow and her daughter, Jamie Sokolow Fenster, who was 12 when the attacks occurred, dabbed their eyes with tissues during testimony.

When she returned home several months later, Elana Sokolow Rosman said, it was “never the same sort of normal carefree teen experience. I felt guilty if I was having fun.”

She said she thinks about it every day.

Lauren Sokolow said loud noises still scare her, and she gets anxious in crowds. Scars across her body are constant reminders, she said.

Still, she said, she returned from a trip to Israel last week when she again visited the blast site.

“It definitely brings back emotions being there,” she said. “I keep moving.”

This article appeared in print on page 3 of the February 3rd, 2015 edition of Hamodia.