Israelis yesterday mourned the death of Col Ilan Ramon, who gave his weary countrymen a precious, if fleeting, escape from their daily bloody conflict with the Palestinians, when he became the first Israeli into space, aboard the shuttle, Columbia.
Students at schools cut out pictures of Col Ramon from the daily newspapers, pinned them to notice boards and lit memorial candles. Flags were lowered to half-mast, and at its weekly meeting yesterday the cabinet hailed the country's first astronaut as a national hero.
Newspapers carried banner headlines on the crash; the daily Ma'ariv declared: "Dream in Tatters." Plans were being made to rename a school and a street after Col Ramon.
The news that the shuttle had broken up in the skies over Texas jerked Israelis out of the momentary escapism that Ramon's space adventure had afforded them, hitting with an even greater force, it seems, than the periodic Palestinian suicide bombings to which they have become chillingly accustomed.
"We've known so many losses throughout this period, loss of life through terror and fighting, as well as loss of hope, and suddenly Ilan Ramon comes forward as a new hope for Israel, a symbol of the capability that we could feel again," a clinical psychologist, Mr Yael Magal-David, said yesterday.
Others, however, wondered whether the Columbia tragedy was a sign, as one Israeli put it, that their country was "jinxed". As an officer in the air force, Col Ramon was for many a symbol in an increasingly divided society of one of the last untarnished elites.
To his people, he was also something of a hero in his own time In 1981 he flew one of the M16s that travelled undetected to Iraq and bombed the nuclear reactor Saddam Hussein was building at Osiraq. The pilots flew in very tight formation to give off a radar signal that would make the Arab states over which they flew believe a commercial airliner was flying overhead.
Col Ramon, who began his space preparations in 1997, as a payload specialist, declared in an interview before take-off that he was not concerned about his safety. "In NASA, safety takes precedence over everything else. The shuttle has backup upon backup upon backup," he said.
For many Israelis, Col Ramon was also a symbol of Jewish resurrection in the wake of the Holocaust as the son of a woman who had survived the Nazi death camps and who had become a fighter pilot.
While Col Ramon was a secular Jew, he nevertheless chose to eat only kosher food in space, and his shuttle baggage included a credit-card-sized microfiche of the Bible.