On Nov. 4, 1995, Israel was changed forever. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was struck by an assassin’s bullets after addressing more than 100,000 Israelis at a peace rally in Tel Aviv.
Rabin was a leader of the movement to work with, not against, Palestinians, and in 1993 had signed the Oslo Accords, a series of agreements aimed at establishing a two-state solution. He paid for that decision with his life; his shooter was a right-wing Israeli extremist.
On Nov. 10, Baltimore Jewish Times presented the reactions of Baltimoreans to the news.
“The world might think we’ve lost a diplomat, but Israel has lost the real builder of peace,” said Ben Cardin, who was then a U.S. representative but is best known today for representing Maryland in the U.S. Senate from 2007 to 2025. Cardin went to Israel for Rabin’s funeral. “It’s hard to describe the people lined up along the route where the casket was to be carried, the people holding vigils, the people camped out at the Knesset — just thousands and thousands of people in mourning,” he said.
A Palestinian Baltimore resident named Mary Barrouk said that the assassination was a “shock” and a “disaster.”
“I hope the peace process won’t stop,” Barrouk said. “We need it.”
However, not everyone was distraught when the news hit. Avraham Sonenthal, who led the Baltimore chapter of Kahane Chai, an organization whose purpose was to advocate for expelling all Arabs from Israel, said that Rabin was “not such a nice guy.”
“I’m not condoning what happened, but I can understand how it happened,” Sonenthal said.
The then-president of the UMBC Jewish Student Union predicted that the killing of Rabin would have a lasting effect on Jews who were alive to experience it. “This is the Kennedy assassination for this generation of Jewish people,” he said.
A Krieger Schechter Day School teacher also likened the killing to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
“[The United States’] character changed, its moral fiber changed … so drastically,” she said.
As Israel enters what is hopefully a new era of peace and diplomacy, Rabin’s legacy still stands tall in Israel and across the world. He understood that making peace is a process that needs to be worked at from multiple angles.
“We must fight terrorism as if there’s no peace process, and work to achieve peace as if there’s no terror,” the late prime minister said.
