BANGOR – William and Jane Litwack pay attention to what’s happening in Israel. Like many other American Jews, they care deeply about the crisis there and are concerned about the daily reports of violence.

But they also have a more personal reason to worry.

Their 18-year-old daughter, Emily, is studying in Jerusalem. The Bangor High School senior went to Israel in February and will return home next month after her classmates graduate. She’ll spend the summer with her parents, who are both teachers, and younger brothers before heading back to Israel in August for another year of study.

Emily Litwack has not spent her time merely hitting the books. She and other students at Midreshet Harovah organized a nationwide rally of foreign students studying in Israel that drew 500 young people to the Old City in Jerusalem on Friday.

Israeli Housing Minister Natan Sharansky, an immigrant from Russia, attended the rally held at Heichal Shlomo, near the Great Synagogue.

The purpose of the “solidarity rally,” Emily Litwack wrote in an e-mail to the Bangor Daily News in early May, was to show support for the government’s current course of action in its dispute with Palestinians.

She added that the number of students studying in Israel has decreased significantly since the violence escalated earlier this year.

“An estimated 600 students who have spent the past year in various yeshivot [Hebrew schools], seminaries and other year-long programs who are about to leave Israel for their home communities in the Diaspora want to leave behind a message,” reads the news release sent to the NEWS and other media outlets last week. “Deeds speak louder than words, and they have stayed to learn in Israel during these difficult times, in some instances with parental and family pressure to return [home], and have proved what Israel means to them.”

Emily Litwack said the rally exceeded her expectations. In a telephone interview Sunday while on a camping trip in the Golan Heights with other students, she said the most moving part of the event was the candle lighting ceremony that concluded the rally.

“It was really intense,” she said. “One student from each school lit a candle for each month and said how many people had died that month since the intifada began. It was so scary – September 2001, five. December 2001, 30. January 2002, 58. March 2002, 125. It’s so powerful, you just can’t believe it.”

The Litwack family belongs to Beth Abraham Synagogue, the only Orthodox synagogue in northern Maine. Jane Litwack said Sunday that her daughter was one of the few observant Jewish students at Bangor High School and felt quite isolated there. Since she was in the fifth grade, Emily Litwack has traveled to Boston to take part in activities with other Orthodox young people. It was on a trip to Israel through a summer camp in New Hampshire that Emily Litwack decided she wanted to study in Israel before she went to college.

“Going to Bangor High and being observant is pretty hard,” said Jane Litwack. “She came back [from Israel] feeling very connected and impressed. She’s always been a good student, smart, socially aware and a little bit causey. We thought that maybe she could go there early. So, she wrote a proposal to leave Bangor High and finish up her credits in Israel. It was accepted.”

Emily Litwack’s first cause, according to her mother, was opposing changing the name of Garland Street Middle School to the William S. Cohen School when she was an eighth-grader. She spoke against the name change at a Bangor School Committee meeting. The school has an identity, she pointed out at the time, asking, “What if, when you turned 40, someone decided to change your first name?”

At the yeshiva she attends in the Old City section of Jerusalem, Emily Litwack is one of 82 young women. About half are from the United States and Canada, she said, while the rest are from Europe, South Africa and Australia.

“This is the most Jews I’ve ever been with in my entire life,” she said Sunday. “It’s such an amazing feeling for a Jewish person to be here coming from a place like Bangor. In Israel, everything is Jewish and I don’t have to struggle for that.”

She said the school has strict rules about security and that students sometimes are not allowed to leave the section of the city where the school is located. She said she avoids using public transportation as much as possible and, for the most part, stays close to the school.

She also calls home whenever “anything big happens” to let her parents know she is OK.

“Safety has definitely been a concern,” said Jane Litwack. “The school has been very responsible about that and sends us an e-mail twice a week to tell us exactly what happened and where our children were when it happened. I don’t think I would have been able to sleep nights if we hadn’t had that kind of communication.”

Emily Litwack said that her plans for college are up in the air, even though she’s been accepted by Brandeis University in Massachusetts and the University of Maryland and is on the waiting list for Barnard College in New York. She said she may want to continue her education in Israel and she definitely wants her parents, who have never been there, to come visit while she is there.

“What’s going on here is that our enemies are trying to take away the way that we live our life,” she said. “As students and young people, we are the new blood of Israel and we must show the world that Jewish people everywhere are not giving up. We must go home and let people know that what Israel is doing is fighting for its life.”