The Making of a Murderous Fanatic

By Richard Lacayo

Everyone who knew him growing up agrees that Benjamin Goldstein -- Benjy, as they called him -- was a religious boy. In Bensonhurst, his middle-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, the piety of his Orthodox Jewish family set them apart from more secular Jewish neighbors. Though his father worked for the New York City Board of Education, the young Goldstein, with his side curls and yarmulke, attended school at a yeshiva. His faith seemed to draw him apart from others into an otherworldly solitude. If there was a tongue of flame in his heart, so much as a flicker of anything like bloodlust or fanaticism, no one noticed it then.

It took time for the quiet yeshiva boy to become first the militant follower of the extremist, hate-mongering Rabbi Meir Kahane; then the Israeli doctor who so detested Arabs he called them Nazis; and finally the killer who fired round after round into a terrified crowd of people at prayer. As he lived among the most vitriolic fringe elements of the Israeli settlers in the West Bank -- many of whom began their lives, like him, as Americans -- Goldstein's religion became indistinguishable from his rage. This was not a sweet and generous doctor who suddenly snapped, but a man so full of hate he repeatedly ^ threatened to do precisely what he did that Friday morning: kill as many Arabs as possible to settle "his people's" scores.

Some who knew him say Goldstein experienced an emotional crisis in December, when two of his friends were ambushed by Arab attackers near Kiryat Arba, the West Bank settlement just outside the Palestinian city of Hebron that has long been a magnet for the most aggressive Jewish ultranationalists. As head of the local emergency medical team, Goldstein was called, and Mordechai Lapid and his 19-year-old son died in his arms. "After a number of friends and neighbors died, he considered the Arabs to be Nazis," says Kiryat Arba resident David Ramati.

Long before then, Goldstein had been consumed by a love of Israel deeply tainted by a thirst for vengeance. At Yeshiva University in New York City, he was a first-rate student, graduating in 1977 with highest honors and a special prize from his classmates for his character, personality and service. At the same time he was already a devoted adherent of Kahane, whose Jewish Defense League advocated violence against anyone it perceived as a threat to Jews. In a 1981 letter to the editor of the New York Times, Goldstein echoed the rabbi's call for the forcible expulsion of Arabs from Israel and the West Bank. "The harsh reality is: if Israel is to avert facing the kinds of problems found in Northern Ireland today, it must act decisively to remove the Arab minority from within its borders," he wrote.

After earning a medical degree at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, he emigrated to Israel in 1983. He met and married a fellow Kahane supporter; Kahane himself performed the wedding ceremony. Goldstein changed his first name to Baruch and eventually settled in Kiryat Arba. In time his parents, as well as his brother and sister, followed him to the West Bank.

Rabbi Kahane had moved to Israel in 1972, and he established the extremist Kach Party two years later. When Kahane ran successfully for the Israeli parliament in 1984, Goldstein worked on his campaign. On the Kiryat Arba town council, Goldstein was considered the Kach representative, although he had not been elected officially on the party's ticket.

As an army doctor and in his work at the Kiryat Arba clinic, Goldstein was a paradox: a devoted physician, but not for Arabs. "He would say, 'He's an enemy of my people. I didn't come here to treat enemies,' " recalls Barbara Ginsberg, an American official of Kach who knew Goldstein. Says Michael Guzofsky, the associate director of Kahane Chai, a splinter of the Kach Party: "In his mind, there was no such thing as an innocent Arab." Among the Palestinians of Hebron, he developed a reputation as a fierce bully who harassed Muslim worshippers at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, a spot sacred in both Judaism and Islam where adherents of the two faiths pray at separate hours. "Sometimes he hit worshippers," says Mohammad Suleiman Abu Sarah, one of the unarmed Palestinian guards at the tomb. "And sometimes he refused to leave when it was time for the Jews to finish their prayers."

After Kahane was shot to death in 1990 by an Arab assassin in New York City, Goldstein's anger appeared to deepen. In remarks at the dedication of a new Torah scroll at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, he vowed that someday a Jew would rise up and kill many Arabs in revenge for Kahane's death. Last fall Goldstein quit the Kiryat Arba council. Some neighbors say it was because the council had rejected his demand to bar new immigrants to Israel, many of them from Russia, from moving to Kiryat Arba. He felt they were not sufficiently devout.

"He was considered highly cultured and a very gifted doctor," says a Kiryat Arba resident. "But the moment any conversation turned to politics, the guy was batty. He was considered radical even by Kahane standards." In November, after another Jewish settler was attacked, Goldstein told a radio interviewer what he had in mind for the Arabs of the West Bank. "With God's help we will create the state of Judea," he promised. "And then we will know how to handle them ourselves." As it turned out, he couldn't wait that long.

With reporting by Lisa Beyer/Hebron, Massimo Calabresi/New York and Eric Silver/Jerusalem