Valley Family Survives Attack, Tells of Mayhem

When the sky rained blood in Jerusalem on Wednesday, Alice and Leo Howard fumbled for their two grandsons.

A miracle. Except for a piece of glass embedded in the leg of 15-year-old Yoni Howard, the children, who had been walking with them in the Old City’s Mahane Yehuda market, were OK.

Then they saw Itamar and Tzvika Szymonowicz, the two boys who were acting as their unofficial guides, the children of close family friends who had visited the Howards at their home in Encino earlier this month.

“I saw fire and everything just shoot up, and everyone started running,” said Alice Howard, who was walking with her husband just a few paces behind the four youngsters.

“Our two friends’ sons were just covered with blood. There were big holes in one child’s arm and a big hole in the other child’s chest.”

Alice grabbed Tzvika, who was running madly with a hole in his arm, and directed him away from the blast.

Yoni spotted 10-year-old Itamar, bleeding from the chest. He picked him up and ran.

“People were running all over the place,” Alice said in a telephone interview from the King David Hotel, where the family was staying. “There were bodies all over the place.”

Finally, help arrived. It seemed like forever, she said, but the efficient Israeli emergency forces moved in, preceded by photographers grimly snapping remembrances of another act of terror in the Middle East.

By then, the family was separated. Adam Blitz, the Howards’ other grandson, couldn’t find anyone in the maelstrom. Somebody told him to take a taxi, but he hadn’t any money.

Yoni and Alice Howard, meanwhile, stumbled into a pediatrician, who told them to place the injured boys on the ground. The doctor, a woman, knelt beside Itamar and pulled the torn pieces of his chest together with her hands.

She stayed beside him until they reached a nearby hospital’s emergency room.

Both Israeli boys remain hospitalized, and Itamar was placed in intensive care.

Back in Los Angeles, Alan Howard fumbled for the phone just after 5 a.m. There’d been a bombing, his parents told him from Israel. Yoni--Alan’s son--and Adam, his sister Jane’s boy, were shook up but safe.

His parents were fine except for a ringing in his father’s ears--from the two explosions--that the doctors hoped would go away in a couple of days.

Alan called his brother and sister.

“I didn’t understand what he was saying,” said Scott Howard, who works with his father in the Encino accounting practice of Howard & Howard. “I thought it was a nightmare, that I wasn’t really up.”

Later in the day, he talked to his mother and father. Alice kept breaking down. Leo was more stoic.

“It sounds like they were pretty beat up mentally,” said Scott Howard. Adam and Yoni, his nephews, described the blood and the commotion.

His parents said they planned to come home in a few days, after they see how the Szymonowicz boys recover.

For the Howard family, the trip to Israel was a special culmination of an old family tradition. Every summer, Alice and Leo take their granddaughters on one outing and their grandsons on another.

The girls, including Scott Howard’s 6-year-old daughter, went to Seattle and Vancouver, Canada, last month. The boys, both 15, were old enough for a world tour: They would visit Israel, London and Paris.

They were particularly excited, said Scott, because they would be spending time in Israel with Itamar and Tzvika.

The Szymonowicz boys, whose father attended dental school in Israel with Alan Howard 20 years ago, had just been to Los Angeles. The Howard family took them to Disneyland and Universal Studios, among other places. In Israel, the boys were all set to return the favor.

On Wednesday morning, the Howards and the two Szymonowicz boys visited Masada, the ancient Jewish fortress in Israel’s Judean desert.

They came to Jerusalem for lunch in the historic Mahane Yehuda market. They bought falafel and cookies and were walking in ragged procession to a table when the explosions rocked the noontime bustle.

“I’m one of these nuts that likes to go to action films,” Alice sighed as the family tried to settle into sleep early today. “I don’t think I’ll ever go to an action film again. I mean, it was real.”