Dan Alon, one of the five Israeli athletes to escape during the Munich Olympics massacre, spoke of his experiences Friday and Saturday at the Syracuse University Chabad House. For 34 years following the attacks, Alon never spoke publicly of his experiences, but felt he should take advantage of the opportunity following the release of Steven Spielberg’s film Munich.

“It was very hard for me to talk,” Alon said. “I had to stop many times. My words were stuck in my throat.”

He emphasized he is not a speaker from the beginning and said he would be telling his story, but not giving a speech. At times, the soft-spoken Alon stopped, seemingly choked up by the emotion of the subject. He said there were more things he wanted to discuss, but he simply could not go into detail.

Ben Barnhart, a freshman computer art major, said Alon was able to convey his emotions effectively in the speech.

“I’ve never heard a personal story like that before,” Barnhart said.

The details of Alon’s escape involve the failure of the Palestinian hostage takers to enter the second of five apartments housing the Israeli athletes. Awakened by gunfire in the first apartment, Alon says he didn’t know what was happening when the attack began.

The first shots woke Alon up, but he did not know exactly what was going on. The terrorists moved down the hall, skipping room number two. They would pass his entrance twice that night, but they never came in.

“Why they didn’t come into number two in the beginning, nobody knows,” he said.

Alon and the other athlete raced to the balcony, where they saw a terrorist outside. He was wearing a white hat and was holding a machine gun in one hand and a hand grenade in the other. The terrorist yelled to the German police that they had killed two Israelis and were holding hostages and wanted to make demands to the Israeli government.

“That’s when we knew we were in for some problems,” Alon said.

Alon’s first thought was to fight back. He was a fencing athlete but he was staying with others who were in the shooting competition. They could try to kill the terrorists before they themselves were killed.

“After a few minutes or more calculating the situation, we decided to escape because we didn’t know how many terrorists there were,” he said. “It was too risky for us, and it was too risky for the hostages.”

Alpha Epsilon Phi will partner with Hillel and the Chabad Jewish Student Center at the State University of New York at New Paltz for a bone marrow drive this Wednesday and Thursday. The drive will be open to any student, but the focus is to get Jewish students specifically to register in the bone marrow database.

It is the goal of Gift of Life, the foundation that is coordinating and underwriting this campaign, to fill in the Jewish sample base as densely as possible.

To register for the database participants must take a cheek swab. If the marrow matches someone in need, the donor will be called.

The Gift of Life foundation will be contributing more than $10,000 to sponsor the first 125 people to register.

The drive will be held at 8 p.m. Wednesday in the Crispell Dorm and from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Thursday on the campus concourse at the college, 75 S. Manheim Blvd.

Students for Israel at Northwestern University held the Israel IndepenDANCE Party last Thursday at Tommy Nevin’s Pub near campus. The event, which was co-sponsored by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, featured Israeli DJ Adorno playing various trance and techno tunes as well as Israeli songs. Adorno attends the University of Illinois, but he has “deejayed in popular clubs all over the world, from Tel Aviv to New York.”

Mitchell Bekritsky, a Weinberg junior and IndepenDANCE party organizer, said he is proud that the event appealed to a wide crowd of people.

“It was really fun last year,” Bekritsky said. “It has a broad appeal. People you would never guess were Jewish and maybe weren’t even Jewish were there having a great time.”

He said one of the reasons that the event is so popular is that it focuses on a different aspect of Israel.

“I think it gets a message across that is not just political,” he said. “(Israel is) a place that has a vibrant culture and instead of focusing on politics like usual, we celebrate the culture.”

Although attendance was not carefully measured during this year’s party, organizers said they planned for about 300 guests.

The party came after events throughout the week, including a screening of the Academy Award winning The Long Way Home documentary on the Holocaust, and a publicity campaign for a speech on May 10 by Alan Dershowitz.

Just Jerusalem is the name given to the competition, launched by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict by focusing on issues that divide the holy city of Jerusalem. As incentive, the university is offering five $50,000 fellowships to the best idea in four categories, with the fifth going the best overall second place idea. The four categories are physical, economic as well as civic and symbolic infrastructure. Proposals must be submitted by December 31 of this year.

The competition seeks suggestions to make Jerusalem “a peaceful, just, humane, livable, sustainable city,” said Diane Davis, the director of Jerusalem 2050.

The group, comprised of MIT faculty members, is organizing the competition, which hopes that suggestions for Jerusalem will translate to compromise in the Middle East.

“There’s a direct connection between the conflicts in the city… and the wider regional conflict,” Davis said.

The contest is specifically targeted toward academic teams of students and faculty, non-governmental organizations, think tanks and “anybody who has a good idea,” she said.

“We want to cast a wide net,” she added.

The program is not without its critics:

Still, some Middle East experts are not as optimistic about the project’s ability to come up with useful solutions.

“It’s a good idea, if you believe imagination is what lacks in this conflict,” said Meyrav Wurmser, director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Middle East Policy: “I don’t think imagination lacks at all.”

“It’s not a wrong approach; it’s a naive approach,” she said. “The problem is too serious, and it’s much too deep.”

On Sunday, May 6, the University of Cincinnati’s Center for Jewish Education will be hosting a seminar entitled “Facing the Future: Jewish Education and Cincinnati in the 21st Century.” The site for the event is Mayerson Hall in the Hebrew Union College at 3101 Clifton Ave.

“Facing the Future” is set to feature a lecture by Sharon Feirman-Nemser, professor of Jewish education and founding director of the Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish education at Brandeis University in Boston.

A new partnership between UC, Brandeis University and the Hebrew Union College set up the event.

The UC Center for Jewish Education was created last fall by a $100,000 two-year grant from the Jewish Foundation of Cincinnati.

After the seminar, a teachers’ forum is scheduled for 2 p.m., followed by a kosher reception at 3:30 p.m. and a public forum from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m.

All events are free and open to the public.