By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO—For Leslie Caspi, being the new San Diego regional chair of the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is not simply another honor in the pantheon of Jewish causes. She considers the assignment to be one that can affect the lives or deaths of numerous loved ones.  Her biography helps explain why she feels so strongly.

Having grown up in the Point Loma area of San Diego, where she said she first felt the sting of anti-Semitism when a kindergarten teacher ridiculed her for staying home for a Jewish holiday, Caspi fell in love with Israel in 1972 at the moment that she and a friend from the University of Arizona set foot on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv, and saw that everyone there, everyone, was Jewish.

Following graduation, Caspi got a job in the office of U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) on the political desk—a perhaps not unnatural assignment for the daughter of Gerry and M. Larry Lawrence. Her father was the controlling

 Shlomo and Leslie Caspi at home in San Diego

 shareholder of the Hotel del Coronado and a major force in the California Democratic party. 

She was visiting her sister Andrea in New York City over the High Holidays of 1973 when the Yom Kippur War broke out. She felt so strongly about the coordinated attack by the Arab states on the State of Israel that she quit her job as a U.S. Senate staff member to volunteer as a substitute worker for kibbutzniks who were called up by the Israel Defense Force.

Through a friend at the Israeli Embassy in Washington D.C., Caspi was able to get a ride on the second flight to leave for Israel from the United States after the outbreak of the war—the first flight having been filled with reserve Israeli soldiers, and the second flight having only a few spaces for civilians.  The plane landed in Rome where Caspi remembers the mood in the transit lounge as being one of dread as they waited for an El Al plane to come pick them up and take them to Israel.

For security reasons, the airport at Lod was kept in complete darkness until just before the El Al flight touched down, and then the runway lights came on just long enough for touchdown. When the passengers entered the airport terminal, they found it awash in camera lights because television crews from all over the world wanted to film the arrival of the returning soldiers. 

The civilians were taken to a small hotel in northern Tel Aviv for the night and the next morning given their choices of different kibbutzim where they could serve. Caspi first was offered a kibbutz right on the Lebanese border, and she recalls thinking that her parents in San Diego would have a heart attack if she went there. So she picked Regavim, a kibbutz on the Green line, which had been the boundary with Jordan before the 1967 Six Day War, about 20 miles east of the coastal city of  Caesarea.

She moved  into a former chicken coop without heat or air conditioning. Plastic surrounded the structure to prevent inside lights from being seen during the times of blackout. She and the other volunteers were assigned initially to work in the  grapefruit orchards, which needed to be harvested immediately.  The volunteers were awakened at 4:30 a.m. each morning, and picked grapefruit for several hours before being driven back to the kibbutz for breakfast.  Then they returned to the orchards.  Once the harvest was brought in, Caspi was assigned to the agricultural industry for which Regavim was best known: roses.

Populated by French-speaking North African Jews—whose children spoke Hebrew—the English-speaking Caspi was something of an anomaly at the kibbutz, a woman who worked in agriculture instead of at the jobs traditionally reserved for women such as the kitchen, children's house and laundry.  The head of the rose growing and packing operation was a Tunisian man named Neldo Douieb, who was so well respected he also was president of the Israeli association of rose growers.  Under his tutelage, Caspi learned "what you cut, what you don't cut; how to grade them, and then there was a whole way of packing them, so that they make it to Europe in pristine condition."  She stayed at the kibbutz for eight months, working long hours every day except on Shabbat or on an occasional day off.  And she loved it.

Before she left Regavim, she and the few other volunteers who had lasted that long were honored by being offered permanent membership in the kibbutz.  Caspi declined. Although she loved the people there, she had difficulty with the Tunisian and Moroccan foods which were very spicy.  Also she felt quite isolated in Regavim; she wanted to be closer to a city with libraries and other cultural attractions.  So after taking four-month home leave, she returned to Israel and was assigned to Kibbutz Yagur, on the road between Haifa and Nazareth.  It was a fateful choice because it was at Yagur that she met Shlomo Caspi, who was to become her husband.

Leslie Caspi said her husband later told her that he spotted her one day while she was setting tables in the dining hall. Attracted by what he described as the way she seemed to dance around the tables, Shlomo commented to some unmarried friends, "Do you see that girl over there?  She will be mine."  The couple has been married 32 years.  They  have three grown children—Sarit (born 1977), Tamar (1980), and Ben (1984).

Shlomo tried to get his family to "adopt" Leslie; that is, serve as her family while she was going through ulpan (intensive Hebrew language training).  However, the Caspis had just completed being honorary parents to another ulpanist, and they asked for a break. After another suitable family was found, Shlomo walked up to her and said, "Hi, Leslie." "How do you know my name?" asked the surprised American.  "Mental telepathy," he answered mysteriously.  "That's Shlomo," Caspi laughed while recalling the story during a recent interview.  They were married about nine months after that meeting.

Although Leslie's experience under Neldo Douieb made her a prime recruit for Yagur's rose-growing operation, the fact that she had a teaching credential from the University of Arizona as well as a specialty in reading disabilities eventually led to her being reassigned as an English teacher at the kibbutz where Shlomo, meanwhile, worked as the manager of a canning factory.  He wanted to go to university, but was disappointed when the kibbutz declined to pay for formal schooling. Knowing that Leslie was pregnant, her  parents said if she and Shlomo would come to California, they would help pay for their higher educations. It was an offer they could not refuse. 

Leslie obtained a master's degree at San Diego State—and eventually a doctorate at the University of San Diego. Shlomo pursued and obtained a degree in accounting, eventually becoming a CPA. Along the way, the couple worked at various jobs at the Hotel del Coronado. Shlomo worked first in maintenance, later in accounts receivable and payable, and later still in finance. Leslie worked at the front desk and in reservations.

Every second year, the Caspi family returned toYagur for a summer visit. Leslie, having made aliyah previously, has dual nationality.  In San Diego, they have several social circles, including a chavurah consisting primarily of families, like their own, with Israeli members. They maintained their Israeli connections in various other ways, including  memberships in organizations like Hadassah and AIPAC, and through participation in Israeli festivals and Israeli-programming at the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center, named for her family.  Leslie has been particularly active as well in the JCC's Astor Judaica Library, which is named for her great-grandparents.

Leslie taught education classes at both San Diego State and the University of San Diego, but in 2000 decided to leave the university world to serve as education director for the "World War II Through Russian Eyes" Exhibition at Balboa Park—an exhibit which included items confiscated by Soviet troops from Adolf Hitler's bunker at the end of World War II.  Among these items was the jacket that Hitler was wearing when he committed suicide—a jacket that Leslie said had such "evil emanations" that she avoided being near it.   The exhibit was to travel from San Diego to other cities around the country, but it ran into financial difficulties and subsequently was returned to the Central Armed Forces Museum in Moscow.

After the Caspis'  son, Ben, developed adult liver cancer which he survived in what Leslie describes as a "miracle," Leslie and Shlomo also became quite active on the board of the Children's Hospital where Ben was treated.  Ben will graduate later this year from film school at the University of Southern California.

The Caspis ratcheted up their Israeli activism in response to the second intifada.  "I got really tired of American Jews and others talking about the' poor Palestinians' and not understanding that the Israeli young soldiers are  just like our own kids, that there aren't any differences between them and the kids here," she said.

Their daughter Sarit was studying at Hebrew University at the same time that a bomb exploded in the cafeteria killing nine  people including Marla Bennett of San Diego.  Sarit and Marla had grown up together.  They were members of the same youth group at Temple Emanu-El, had gone to Camp Swig together, were in the same dance classes, and served in the Associated Students organization at Patrick Henry High School together.  Marla's parents, Linda and Michael Bennett, and Shlomo and Leslie routinely telephoned each other after news of a suicide bombing to apprise each other of what they had heard.  

On July 30, 2002, the day before Marla was killed, the Caspis had sat in the same cafeteria with Sarit. It was later learned that the suicide bomber had attempted to set off the bomb unsuccessfully the very same day they were there.  In addition to Marla, other friends of Sarit were wounded in July 31 explosion, and Leslie can still recall news photos of those girls with blood running down their faces. The Caspis, after talking  with the Bennetts by telephone, went to the airport to see Marla's casket loaded onto a plane home.

"When I saw that coffin, that shipping crate, with Marla's name on it, except for the fact that I was holding onto my daughter, it could have been her," Leslie shuddered.  "And this was something that all the Israelis were going through."

When she returned to San Diego, Leslie said she was angered and frustrated to hear fellow Jews talk about " the poor Palestinians."

"I thought, 'I am sorry, when you have these Palestinian mothers of suicide bombers saying how proud they are of their children and wish all their children would be suicide bombers,' I couldn't handle that anymore. I thought I've got to do something— I need to get involved in something that supports Israel. 

"We went to this AIPAC brunch chaired by Dan Schwimmer, and there were 200 people there and it was a good thing, and we ended up going to this summit in Phoenix... It was amazing to finally be in a room that everyone felt the way that I did.  So the next year Shlomo and I chaired the brunch and we had 600, then we chaired it again and we had 750, and this year we didn't chair it but I was involved and it was over 800....." (see story on brunch)

As a student, Caspi was involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement, participating in major marches calling on the U.S. to get out of Vietnam. As an American citizen, she said, it was her right to criticize the United States. On the other hand, she said, she does not believe that non-Israeli Jews should criticize the Israeli government, especially those Jews who are less than knowledgeable about the situation in the Middle East.

"American Jews tend to be extremely 'liberal'— I hate that word—but they believe in the 'underdog,' and now they see the Palestinians as the underdog, which I don't at  this point.  I feel bad that some of them are living in poverty, sure, but they teach hate.  How many Jews do you know of who are suicide bombers?"

She said Americans and people throughout the world need to be made aware that "Israel has to do a lot to defend itself. You don't like checkpoints, I am sorry, but when you have these people who are putting bombs under sick people in ambulances, or having pregnant women carrying suicide strap belts, how is Israel supposed to defend that.?"

Further, she said, "what is going on with Islamic fundamentalists is affecting the entire world, and I don't think people get it yet. Whether it is in the Philippines, whether it is in Paris, whether it is in Spain, or New York City—people don't get it; they don't understand the threat. They (Islamic fundamentalists) are trying to take over the whole world. Hamas doesn't just want its own state , they want the entire thing.  They are not going to be happy with a two-state solution, that is not what their goals are. their goal is to get rid of all the Jews, all the Israelis. It is not only what they are teaching, it is their whole philosophy. People don't get it..."

As AIPAC chair, Leslie says that she and Shlomo, who will serve on the steering committee with her, plan to organize parlor meetings to take Israel's story to the grass roots.  She said she and fellow AIPACers will  seek to unite all the movements of the organized Jewish community in pro-Israel advocacy, and to reach out to non-Jewish communities such as Evangelical Christians, Latinos, and African-Americans to tell Israel's story.  She said the organization will continue to provide information and background to candidates for Congress and to potential candidates.