At 9:30 PM on November 4, 1995, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin descended the steps of Tel Aviv’s city hall, where moments earlier he had stood before a crowd of 100,000 Israelis who’d gathered to support his vision for peace.

Then came four gunshots. Ninety minutes later, Rabin was pronounced dead.

Three decades on, we are still haunted by the question: What if…?

What if the man who won the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize for forging historic agreements with the Palestinians, Jordanians and Egyptians had lived to defeat Benjamin Netanyahu in the following year’s election?

What if the assassination had not dealt a fatal blow to Israel’s fragile peace process and irrevocably shifted the course of its politics and diplomacy?

On the 30th anniversary of that fateful night, the Zionist Enterprises Dept. and Temple Emanu-El honor the memory of the military commander who led Israel to victory in the Six-Day War, and who later dared to shake Yasser Arafat’s hand. We invite you to an evening reflecting on Yitzhak Rabin as a warrior turned peacemaker, and on what his assassination has meant for Israel, the Middle East and the American Jewish community.

The evening will mark the official launch of Class of ’95, a powerful anthology of Israeli poetry on the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, newly translated into English and released to mark the 30th anniversary of his assassination.

With:

Yonatan Ben Artzi, grandson of Yitzhak Rabin

Yehuda Kurtzer, President of the Shalom Hartman Institute

Dan Shapiro, former US Ambassador to Israel

Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs

Musical performances by Tamar Eisenman and Yuli Beeri and the Tzofim Band