Sunday, January 19, 2003   By Solly Ganor  I don’t think there
was a person in Israel who didn't watch the Shuttle Columbia
blasting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida,
yesterday.  We watched with trepidation and anxiety, but above
all pride as the graceful white shuttle lifted off into the blue
Florida sky, trailing a white plume behind it. For us Israelis,
it was a special flight, because our own astronaut, colonel Ilan
Ramon was among the crew, the first Israeli to enter space.  For
a short while we allowed ourselves to forget our problems, our
differences, even the coming elections, and were united in
hailing colonel Illan Ramon as our hero.  But for me, there was
another hero: someone that was hardly mentioned in the Israeli
media. If it weren’t for an American TV station, which briefly
stated that colonel Illan Ramon’s mother was an Auschwitz
survivor, I too would have been ignorant of the fact.  To most
us the fact that his mother was a Holocaust survivor from
Auschwitz, would be baffling why