Smash hit

On the back of the poll’s findings, a newly created organisation, the Council for Democracy, distributed 150,000 free copies of a video aimed at keeping up the pressure to get Amir out of jail. It focused on emotional contributions by Trimbobler and Amir’s formidable mother, Geula. As the camera lingered on an image of him in army uniform, each spoke reverently about his high ideals and devout patriotism, while gruesome news footage reminded viewers of Palestinian suicide bombings and showed Rabin shaking hands with Yasser Arafat at the White House. Those behind the campaign included some unsavoury right-wing activists with convictions for violence against Arabs; a wealthy American Jew who shares their extreme views is believed to have financed the video.

“I’m not particularly happy that such people are involved, but the fact is that our interests coincided,” Trimbobler said warily. “You must understand that for years our government has brainwashed the country about the assassination, feeding us lies and distortion.”

She launches into a complicated account of one of the plethora of conspiracy theories that have sprung up around Rabin’s death. This one seemed to hinge on evidence, supposedly suppressed for the past decade, that shows Amir may not have fired the fatal shots. So why did he say from the moment he was arrested at the scene that he’d acted alone? “Some things are so hard to explain,” Trimbobler murmured, “that you can’t completely ignore them.”

Growing up in Moscow under communism, Trimbobler says her parents were not particularly religious people. “But by the time I reached my teens, I’d decided that my future lay in Israel, though at that time Jews were still forbidden to leave the USSR.” The anti-semitism she experienced was mostly low-level, but it generated an unsettling feeling of being different from “real” Russians. “There was always this sense that life was not going to be enjoyable.”

At 15, she began to study Hebrew in classes run clandestinely by some of the Orthodox Jews in Moscow. There she met Binyamin Vinikov, the Jewish boy who would become her first husband.

“We were brought together by our interest in discovering more about Judaism. It wasn’t easy, because the Soviet authorities were still very hostile to Israel, and the official media followed suit.” It was not until President Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost (openness) began to take hold that the ban on Jewish emigration was relaxed.

In 1989, now married to Vinikov, Trimbobler finally received permission to leave for Israel with her husband and their young daughter.

“I cried tears of joy. My plans for the future were simple: have more kids, study for a doctorate and enjoy the life of an Orthodox Jewish woman.”

For the next few years she did just that, raising three more children and completing her doctoral thesis on Jewish and Arab medieval philosophy. She said she had no particular interest in Israel’s turbulent politics. The Palestinian intifada (uprising) raging in the West Bank and Gaza also seemed a long way from Ramot.

The turning point in Trimbobler’s serene existence arrived in March 1996, when Yigal Amir was convicted after a sensational two-month trial. Like virtually everyone in Israel, she had followed the court proceedings closely: but while most of the country regarded Rabin’s assassin with horror and loathing, she sent him a greetings card to mark Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year. “It was an instinctive act of compassion for a serious and sincere young man who was being portrayed as a monster for obeying his own conscience. My motives were humanistic, not religious. At the time, I certainly had no intention of visiting Yigal, let alone becoming emotionally involved with him.”

Although Amir was already receiving sackloads of letters from sympathisers (including numerous proposals of marriage), he responded eagerly to Trimbobler’s approach. They exchanged views on everything from philosophy and religion to literature and current affairs. Amir was initially forbidden to receive books, so Trimbobler would photocopy extracts from her favourite authors, such as Dostoevsky, Proust, Milan Kundera, and paste them laboriously into her letters. “I also sent Yigal my photograph.”

The friendship deepened after Amir was allowed to make telephone calls from his cell and began ringing Trimbobler almost daily. “Yigal was still being held in complete isolation 24 hours a day. I felt I was providing him with a lifeline to cling to.” In 2001, after almost five years of arm’s-length contact, she applied successfully for permission to visit Amir in jail. When the news leaked out, she was set upon by the Israeli media; the reaction of some of the public was so hostile she feared for her children’s safety.

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