Hamas victim 'was searching for her roots'

Marla Bennett knew all about the risks. Her friends nagged her; her family constantly asked her to come home. She had even got into the habit of ringing them immediately after every bombing or attack to let them know she was all right. Yet despite all the danger, Israel was the place she felt she had to be.

"My friends and family are right when they call me and ask to come home – it is dangerous here," she wrote in a column last May for the Jewish Press-Heritage, published in her home city of San Diego, California. "I appreciate their concern. But there is nowhere else I would rather be right now. I have a front-row seat for the history of the Jewish people. I am part of the struggle for Israel's survival."

On Wednesday, when a Hamas bomb exploded in the canteen of Jerusalem's Hebrew University, Ms Bennett did not call home. When the bomb exploded, the 24-year-old had been eating lunch in the canteen with two friends before heading off to take a final exam. Ms Bennett and her friend Benjamin Blutstein, 25, from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, were killed – two of five Americans who died in the explosion. The third friend, Jaime Harris-Gershon, suffered severe injuries. In all seven people were killed and more than 80 injured.

That afternoon, at their home in the Del Cerro district of San Diego, Ms Bennett's parents, Michael and Linda, became increasingly worried as the minutes passed and there was still no call from their daughter, who was completing her second year at Hebrew University. After a while they were able to get through to some of her friends at the university, who said they believed Ms Bennett was alive but might have been injured.

But at around 2.30pm local time, the Bennetts received a phone call from the State Department asking how they could get hold of Marla's dental records. Frantic for more information, Norman Greene, a close family friend and publisher of the Press-Heritage, spoke to an Israeli diplomatic contact who was then able to speak directly to the forensic experts in Jerusalem. At 10.30 that evening Mr Greene had the task of telling the Bennetts and around 50 friends and family at the house that their daughter was dead.

"It was pretty grim. Hysteria," Mr Greene told The Independent on Sunday. "The 94-year-old grandmother was saying she no longer wanted to live without Marla. The father broke down into inconsolable tears. The mother was saying 'I knew it. She would have called me'. A sister was in total denial, saying 'I cannot believe it. I won't believe it'."

Friends of Ms Bennett have described a vivacious young woman who was desperate to learn more about her Jewish heritage. As she had got older her commitment to Judaism had grown stronger – stronger, perhaps, than that of her parents. Like thousands of other young Jewish Americans, the former University of California student felt drawn to Jerusalem.

"She wouldn't let anything or anyone get in the way of her desire to help her people," Todd Kierman, who had dated Ms Bennett, told the San Diego Union-Tribune. "She was very well aware that she could get that education in the US but the best place for her, the most meaningful, was Israel. That couldn't be replaced in any way."

Carla Luna, a professor who had taught Ms Bennett, said: "She was interested in her Jewish heritage, the history and politics of the Middle East. She was a very fine student." With no small measure of dark irony, Ms Bennett had been due to leave Jerusalem on Thursday to return to California for a family bar mitzvah and holiday with her boyfriend, Michael Simon.

Instead, this weekend, Mr Simon is accompanying Ms Bennett's remains back home to her family in San Diego. She is due to be buried tomorrow.