Lorraine Waldbaum-Dill walked slowly toward a giant menorah in a shallow pool and placed a flickering candle on the ground in honor of slain Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Closing her eyes for a moment, she held her hands to her chest and prayed."I feel very strongly in the work he has done - even in his death," said Waldbaum-Dill, among 1,500 people at a memorial service at the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance.
"Peace exists in every human heart and we should all rise and walk along his path of peace," she said.
As Rabin was buried in Jerusalem two days after being assassinated by a Jewish extremist, many Americans gathered to remember the man who was trying to bring peace to the Middle East.
Thousands of mourners stood shoulder to shoulder outside the Israeli consulate Monday night, candlelight dancing across a sea of somber faces. A nearby fire hydrant was decked with dripping white candles as a makeshift memorial.
In Miami Beach, Fla., visitors made their way to the Holocaust Memorial, an enormous hand several stories high clutching skyward from a snarled nest of barbed wire.
"Everybody is aghast at the killing of Rabin," Laura Reiter said. "We came here today because of this tragedy."
Sue Ann Vajda Blass went to UJA-Federation headquarters in New York to watch a TV broadcast of the funeral.
"I feel like a member of my family killed another member of my family," she said, sitting in a dimly lit ballroom with 120 other mourners. "I needed to be with fellow Jews."
A single memorial candle flickered in the back of the room, and some in the crowd wept as President Clinton called the slain leader "a martyr for peace and a victim of hate."
In Washington, Vice President Al Gore told a crowd of thousands at the city's largest conservative synagogue, Adas Israel, that "the enemies of peace will not undo the noble work of our friend, Yitzhak Rabin." Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, Attorney General Janet Reno and Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros attended.
"Violence can never defeat reason," California Gov. Pete Wilson told the crowd at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. Wilson declared a day of mourning, ordering flags on public buildings to be flown at half-staff.
At the Israeli consulate in Manhattan, more than 50 United Nations officials and ambassadors crowded into a small room to sign a condolence book. Among them was Undersecretary General Ismat Kittani, an Iraqi, who quoted Rabin's own words during the U.N.'s 50th anniversary: "Do not let the land of milk and honey turn into a land of blood and tears."
"Our very soul has been lacerated . . . the entire civilized world shares the sense of our loss," said Rabbi Alexander Schindler, a past leader of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations.