[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 25 (Wednesday, February 8, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E298-E300]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                         TRIBUTE TO ORNA SIEGEL

                                 ______


                          HON. ELIOT L. ENGEL

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                       Wednesday, February 8, 1995
  Mr. ENGEL. Mr. Speaker, I would like to take this opportunity to 
recognize the efforts of Orna Siegel, a woman whom I admire greatly.
  Orna currently serves as the Outreach Chair of the Los Angeles 
chapter of AIPAC, however her community activities do not start and end 
with that organization. Orna is deeply committed to the security of the 
State of Israel but she is equally committed to making a difference in 
her community and in the lives of individuals.
  For years, Orna has been actively involved in Yad B'Yad (``hand in 
hand''), an organization that takes critically ill people from Israel 
to any place in the world where they can get the medical care they 
need--be it transplants, surgeries, or emergency treatment. She has 
also been an active fundraiser for many other worthy causes in her 
community.
  Although Orna's public service technically began in 1967, when she 
began a 3-year stint in the Israeli Defense Forces, her personal 
turning point came in 1990, years after she had married and moved to 
the United States. Orna witnessed the molestation of a 5-year-old boy 
in the darkness of a movie theater and followed the criminal out of the 
building until the police responded to her calls for assistance. She 
later testified against the culprit, who turned out to be a registered 
sex offender.
  I would like to submit into the Record a magazine article detailing 
Orna Siegel's courageous act. Her story demonstrates that ordinary 
citizens can affect the lives of their neighbors in a positive way if 
they only take the time to get involved.
  Essentially, that is the story of Orna Siegel's life; she is a person 
who has chosen to become involved. Her actions have literally saved the 
lives of people in desperate need of help. It is a story worthy of 
commendation by this House, and a lesson worth sharing with the 
American people.
  The article follows:
               [From the Moxie magazine, September 1990]

            Just a Housewife, Until She Had To Be a Heroine

                         (By Mary Ellen Strote)

       The 11-year-old boy sitting next to Orna Siegel in the 
     movie theater just wouldn't sit still. He kicked, he jostled, 
     he wriggled. Annoyed, she glanced sideways and saw that the 
     blond, blue-eyed youngster was grimacing. Then she looked 
     down and gasped. The boy's companion, a man in his middle 
     sixties, had his hand inside the boy's shorts.
       Orna had brought her children to last summer's opening of 
     Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. The theater was crowded, but she 
     had found a couple of seats five rows from the front. Holding 
     Jonathan, 7, in her lap, and with daughter Shana, 10, on the 
     seat to her left, she had looked forward to the comedy. But 
     the minute the movie had begun, the boy had started with his 
     wriggling. Now she left her children and sought out the 
     manager, ``I told him, `Please call the police. A child is 
     being molested in Row 5,''' Orna remembers. ``He promised to 
     call.'' Orna bought a cup of soda so her kids wouldn't 
     suspect anything, went back to her seat, and took her son in 
     her lap again.
       Then she waited for the police. And waited. And waited. All 
     the while the boy kept kicking her. ``I watched him, not the 
     movie,'' Orna says. ``the man was molesting him the whole 
     time. And I watched what that son of a bitch was doing.
       ``Maybe I was in shock,'' she goes on. ``It was a funny 
     movie and everyone was laughing. It was so noisy and Jonathan 
     was heavy on my lap and we were too close to the screen and 
     the lights were changing so fast. I got such a big headache. 
     I was very nervous, not knowing what to do, just waiting for 
     a policeman to come with a flashlight, for someone to get me 
     out of this ordeal.''
       But suddenly the movie was over. ``The crowds were 
     leaving,'' she says. ``I hadn't made up my mind to follow 
     them, but I knew at that moment: If I don't make a move now, 
     it's all over. I told my kids, `Please be quiet,' and I 
     grabbed their hands and held tight, looking with my eyes 
     straight after the guy. I would let him out of my sight. On 
     the way out the door, I saw the manger. He looked at me and 
     shrugged, as if to say, `No one showed up * * *.'''
       Until that day, Orna, 41, would have described herself as a 
     housewife. More likely, she would have used the words just a 
     housewife. She cooked. She lunched with her friends. She 
     waited for her kids to come home from school. She dressed up 
     to go out with her husband, a successful businessman.
       She was such a relentlessly traditional wife and mother 
     that except for the fact that she had been born Orna Tieb in 
     Tunisia, the seventh of eight children in a family that 
     [[Page E299]] moved to a small town in Israel when she was 
     just four * * * and the fact that she'd joined the Israeli 
     army in 1967, right after the Six Day War, when she was 18 * 
     * * except for that history, she could have passed for June 
     Cleaver.
       A pretty, perfectly coiffed redhead with an manicure to 
     match her meticulous makeup, and color-coordinated down to 
     her very toes, Orna at first glance seems too perfect to be 
     real. Indeed, she has lived a Cinderella life: The poverty 
     and hardship of her childhood vanished virtually overnight 
     when she met tall, blond American Saul Siegel. She was 22, a 
     student at a university in Tel Aviv. He asked her to marry 
     him the day they met, and a couple of days later she was on a 
     plane to America.
       Today she keeps house in an airy French Normandy-style home 
     that would be called a mansion almost anywhere in the world, 
     although in the guard-gated, upper-class neighborhood in Los 
     Angeles' San Fernando Valley where she lives, it seems almost 
     average. She receives a guest with the gracious ritual that 
     is common in her homeland: cake on the table and an offer of 
     tea. A few minutes sitting at the table in her immaculate 
     kitchen, listening as she fields phone calls from her 
     husband's clients in her rapid-fire Israeli-accented speech, 
     however, less even a casual observer see the rock-hard 
     substance beneath her polished, feminine exterior.
       But until that day at the theatre, Orna herself had no idea 
     of her own strength. ``I thought I would go after the 
     molester, follow him to his car, get his license number,'' 
     she remembers, ``but instead, the man took the boy next door 
     to the magic store. Now, this happens to be a wonderful 
     store, and my children love it. So we went inside, and I told 
     them to go wander around by themselves.''
       Orna approached the store manager and asked to use the 
     phone. ``I need to call the police,'' she whispered. ``That 
     child was abused,'' and she nodded toward the boy.
       But the manager refused. ``I didn't see it happen,'' she 
     told Orna.
       ``What is the matter with you people in America?'' Orna 
     asked in despair, and she started crying. ``Why won't you get 
     involved? I saw it happen! Look at that man! That's not a 
     father-son hug.''
       And it wasn't. The man was buying presents for the boy and 
     kept his arm around the child all the time. ``The manager 
     realized that if I was going to be that upset, she didn't 
     want the trouble, so she told me to go into her office and 
     use the phone there,'' says Orna.
       She called 911, and the operator seemed to ask a hundred 
     questions. What does he look like? What color are his eyes? 
     Orna covered her mouth and the receiver with her hand: ``He's 
     only 10 feet away; I can't talk loud.''
       By the time Orna got off the phone, even the manager had 
     noticed that the man was behaving oddly. He was about to buy 
     an Indiana Jones hat and whip for the boy, so Orna suggested 
     to the manager that she try to get a name when he paid.
       The manager asked, ``May I have your name and phone 
     number?'' Before the man could stop him, the boy gave a 
     name--Richard--and a number.
       ``What do you want that for?'' the man asked suspiciously.
       The manager was very clever. ``You are buying a whip,'' she 
     replied. ``It's like a weapon, so we need a name and number 
     for our records.''
       Now Orna felt some relief; at least she had a name and a 
     phone number. When the pair left the store, she suggested 
     that the manager follow and get a car license number too, 
     which the woman did. Then Orna went into the back office and 
     called the number the boy had given her.
       A woman answered. ``I was very emotional,'' Orna says. ``My 
     hands
      were trembling. I was crying. I didn't want to scare her; I 
     didn't want her to misunderstand and think her son was 
     dead or something, so I said, `I'm, sorry, but I was at 
     the movies. Do you have a son named Richard?'--I gave the 
     name the boy had said.''
       The woman replied no, that her son was named ----. Orna was 
     confused--whose name had the boy given?--but she went on: ``I 
     was at the movies, and your son was molested throughout the 
     movie.''
       The woman became very upset and asked Orna a string of 
     questions: ``Where is he now? Can I see you? Can I talk to 
     you?''
       Orna just repeated, ``I wanted you to know that I was there 
     and I saw it.''
       The mother protested, ``But that man is his Uncle 
     Richard.'' (Aha, Orna realized, the boy had given the man's 
     name.* * *) He took my son to the movies for his eleventh 
     birthday.* * *''
       Just then, at long last, the police walked into the magic 
     store. Orna was finally able to make her report, and the 
     police told her the man would be apprehended when he took the 
     boy home.
       ``I was still so upset,'' she remembers. I couldn't breathe 
     properly, I couldn't take a regular breath. I was in the army 
     for three years, but nothing had ever been this hard for me. 
     Oh, it was a terrible thing to see,'' she says, closing her 
     eyes at the memory.
       But now it was over. She had gone as far as she could go. 
     She had told the police. She had told the mother, Now no one 
     could say it wasn't true.
       ``Then I took my two babies and went to my car,'' she says. 
     ``I couldn't wait to get there. I just wanted to sit in my 
     car with them for a while.'' Her children were frightened; 
     they had thought she was crying because their car had been 
     stolen. ``I had to tell them what had happened,'' says Orna. 
     ``They wouldn't let go of me until I did, I reminded them of 
     what they'd been told at school: that no one else was 
     supposed to touch their privates. Then I told them what the 
     man had done.''
       The children were shocked. Her daughter asked what would 
     happen to the man.
       ``He will probably go to jail,'' Orna said.
       ``Isn't that sad?'' asked Shana.
       ``No,'' Orna reassured her, ``they will help him there.''
       When Orna returned home, there was a message from the 
     police on her answering machine. The message was very short. 
     It went: ``Thanks to your efforts, you've saved the life of a
      little boy. The man has been arrested.''
       Orna remembers feeling very high, but also scared. ``It 
     wasn't that I had done all that and nothing came of it--the 
     man had been arrested. But I started having flashbacks, and 
     in my mind I saw my own son having that happen to him.''
       She agreed to testify against ``Uncle'' Richard, a 
     registered sex offender, now charged with nine new counts of 
     child molestation. In court, she met the boy's parents and 
     learned that Richard had been a trusted family friend who 
     helped with carpools and babysitting. He had been molesting 
     the boy and his older brother for about three years. She was 
     told that the boys had been placed in therapy immediately. 
     She also learned that the movie theater manager never had 
     called the police. ``The manager had a theater full of 
     customers,'' say Orna, still angry at the thought. ``He 
     didn't want a scene.'' (The theater management later sent her 
     some complimentary tickets, but she returned them.)
       The boy's mother invited Orna to come home for lunch during 
     the court's noon break. Once there, the woman called to her 
     younger son, ``Come meet the lady who saved your life * * 
     *.''
       ``The whole family was very open about it,'' says Orna. ``I 
     admired them; they were so honest. They appreciated what I 
     did * * *. Instead of just sending me a bouquet of flowers, 
     the mother wanted to be close. We still call each other.''
       So. What started out as a horror story had a true happy 
     ending. But for Orna, this story provided not just an ending, 
     but a beginning.
       Aside from five years as a part time volunteer at a local 
     hospital, Orna had never done anything outside her home. Even 
     after 18 years in America, she didn't feel comfortable 
     expressing herself in English her second language. ``I never 
     worked since I married my prince; I never got myself out of 
     this package deal I got myself into,'' she says.
       Needless to say, she never did public speaking. Whenever 
     she even thought about speaking in front of people she didn't 
     know, she blushed so red she glowed.
       But now, suddenly, this quiet little housewife was famous. 
     A heroine! The police department honored her with a citizen's 
     recognition award. This led to publicity, newspaper articles, 
     and an invitation to address the Julia Ann Singer Center, a 
     community treatment center for children and families in Los 
     Angeles.
       ``There I was,'' says Orna, talking in front of all the 
     therapists and Ph.D.s.'' She was terrified. ``Who the hell am 
     I?'' she wondered. ``I'm nobody with the authority to speak. 
     But I just told them what happened, and they gave me a 
     standing ovation.''
       The talk at the Singer Center was important, but it was the 
     day that Orna received the award from the chief of police 
     that permanently changed her view of herself. ``All of a 
     sudden I wasn't just a wife, a mother, a friend,'' she says. 
     ``I had done something that outsiders noticed. I was 
     recognized! I felt taller, bigger, stronger than I thought I 
     ever could be.
       ``People called, they sent notes. I have been thanked by 
     everybody: the police, the county supervisors, the city 
     council, the state assembly, the district attorney, the 
     district this, the district that. . . .''
       She pulls the awards down from the shelves in her den--the 
     plaques, certificates, framed letters, and laminated 
     newspaper clippings, all adorned with brass and seals and 
     calligraphy and fancy signatures, and lines them up on a 
     seven-foot sofa until they cover the cushions.
       What the awards said to her, Siegel realizes now, was: You 
     are capable. You can do something. You can save a life. ``I 
     grabbed these awards,'' she says with a smile. ``I said thank 
     you, and I just grabbed them.''
       Then she went out and started doing things; the awards had 
     triggered more than feelings, they had triggered action. She 
     helps with fund raising for the charity Yad Byad (``hand in 
     hand''), an organization that takes sick people from Israel 
     to wherever in the world they can get the medical care they 
     need--transplants, surgeries, emergency treatment. ``With 24 
     hours' notice, we can organize a dinner, a luncheon, an 
     auction * * * whatever it takes to get the money to handle 
     the emergency,'' she says proudly.
       Her other new activities also revolve around charitable 
     fund raising, and they all require that she speak up and 
     speak out.
       It is so easy to make a difference in the lives of others, 
     Orna says in amazement. She often wonders why she had never 
     done anything like this before. ``I was not involved,'' she 
     says. ``I was nothing. I was blah. Now I'm someone who 
     changes things for the better. Sure, the changes are tiny in 
     the larger scheme of things, but it feels so good.''
       At a recent Yad Byad fundraiser dinner for which Orna was a 
     primary organizer, an 11- 
     [[Page E300]] year-old boy made a speech. He told how a bone 
     marrow transplant paid for by Yad Byad had cured his 
     leukemia. ``He got up in front of the 350 guests,'' Siegel 
     recalls, ``and we were all crying. And he said. * * *'' 
     Siegel stops and looks away in an attempt to compose herself, 
     but her eyes fill with tears anyway. ``And he said to us, 
     `You saved my life'''
     

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