Life Between Sirens: Finding Humanity in Wartime Israel
By Lesley Simpson
A version of this essay was first published on June 26 on the Substack newsletter On Being Jewish Now. https://onbeingjewishnow.substack.com
My husband and I arrived at Ben Gurion Airport with exquisite timing on Thursday, June 12. The airport was closed the next day. We had landed in Israel just before the war.
That Friday, we were invited by our friends Orna and Baruch Epel for Shabbat dinner in Herzliya. Orna is an emeritus professor of public health at the University of Haifa, and Baruch is a retired biologist. Just after dessert, six phones started wailing. All of us had downloaded the Home Front Command app, which issues sirens and alerts to save lives. It sounds a warning first and then sometimes, though not always, a siren. Depending on the day and location, folks have between 30 to 90 seconds to get into a shelter. Our friend Daniel refers to the warning (without the siren) as the “hors d’oeuvres.”
Baruch and Orna have a shelter in their laundry room, complete with thick cement walls. The shelter includes pipes to protect against a poison gas attack, and a large bottle of water. So one moment you’re enjoying Shabbat dinner, and moments later you make your way into the shelter, close the door tight, and you’re in another world. For Israelis, life is biforcated daily; there are the ordinary routines, and there’s the time spent in shelters.
That evening, Baruch and Orna had invited a young German couple to join us. As we squeezed six plastic chairs into the laundry room, the two young men were pale as sheets. They had never been in a bomb shelter before. The vibration from the booms (the sound of the Iron Dome intercepting the Iranian missiles) sounded as close as Baruch and Orna’s backyard, the yard where grapefruit trees yield fruit and lemon verbena grow fragrant in the ground.
When you are in a bomb shelter, there are many things you can’t do, but you can talk.
In Baruch and Orna’s shelter, lives had intersected. One of the German men had come from Berlin to Israel years ago to volunteer for a year with German-speaking Holocaust survivors living in Haifa. The German man met our Israeli hosts while conducting research on Orna’s late mother, who had been saved by the Kindertransport as a child. This German man, who wasn’t Jewish, had completed a PhD in Jewish history. He fell in love with Israel. Now he works for a foundation in Berlin. His partner works for the German government.
Baruch is 86 years old. He had come for a visit to Israel as a 20-year-old emerging scientist from Detroit in 1961. He said the culture had changed since then. I asked how. He explained by telling us this story: One day, he got on a bus in Rehovot. He told the bus driver he was looking for a modest hotel for a night.
“Who needs a hotel?” asked the driver. “You can sleep at my mother’s house.” The driver took this young American to his mother’s house. The mother insisted on giving up her bed. She slept on a cot. The bus driver’s mother insisted on feeding him dinner. Things are different now, Baruch lamented.
And yet, I witnessed this hospitality again and again in the short time we were in Israel. When we landed and could not access the parking garage, a stranger approached our car, and leaned over the gate to release a latch. The garage door opened. Another stranger saw us lost in the maze of hallways and led us to where our apartment was tucked away. These gestures may seem like minor niceties but in Israel opening a garage door, or helping you find your temporary apartment can be life-altering because they mean you are closer to potential shelter should you require it .
Shoppers at the grocery store offered translation when my rudimentary Hebrew faltered.
For my husband and I, being in a bomb shelter was not a completely new experience because we lived in Tel Aviv for three months in 2012. We had agreed that in our 18 years of marriage, this time in Israel was highlight for us. We had huddled in a shelter when missiles were launched from Gaza. Back then, the missiles were different. The ones coming down now can shatter a hospital and fracture an apartment building.
Our Israeli family and friends checked on us with Whatsapp. My cousin, who lives in Jerusalem, provided helpful instructions while looking after her young grandchildren, elderly parents, as well as her own kids. She told us to go out for air whenever possible. When you go for groceries, she said, ask the staff to point out the location of the closest shelter. If you see that store lineups are crazy, abandon the mission and head back home. Buy some bread or crackers and peanut butter for the mamad. For the record, she also recommended gin and tonic.
Our friend Rifka kept us apprised about any new guidelines. Running shoes were now recommended instead of sandals to protect feet from explosions. Because she lived close by and received the same notifications, Rifka checked in on us nightly.
“OK?” she would write at 3 am on WhatsApp.
“OK!” we responded.
When we invited Rifka and her husband to our apartment for lunch, she taught me how to make an iced coffee from the Nespresso machine-ice: pour milk over ice cubes and then coffee, and you can see liquids separated with milk on the bottom and hot coffee floating on the top. This concoction became my Rifka coffee. That was my drink every morning.
We were lucky because our bedroom was the bomb shelter. Israelis without a mamad have to race down flights of stairs in the middle of the night. Those without a mamad in their apartment building have to race out of their home in the darkness of night and find a public shelter, often holding crying children and barking dogs.
In Toronto, where I live most of the year, we teach kids not to connect with strangers. Here, the injunction from the Torah, “Be kind to the stranger,” applies everywhere. Baruch told me about a large children’s park in an area called Green Kfar Saba. All of the children know that if they hear an alert, they must race into the neighbouring apartments. People keep their doors open. A friend in Beit Shemesh recounted that her husband saw people getting off at a bus stop near their home. A siren had sounded, and they didn’t know where to go. He invited them into his home. They looked skeptical but accepted his offer. Eight strangers, a Haredi couple, a woman in shorts and others huddled together in their tiny mamad for about 10 minutes. Then they left to continue their day.
This is what it means to welcome the stranger.
And these are acts of pikuach nefesh—saving lives.
May God bless the people of this extraordinary place.
Lesley Simpson is the founder of L’chaim: The Jewish Letters Project. L’chaim: The Jewish Letters Project features Jewish wisdom letters from around the world. Just click on the link below to subscribe for a fee: jewishlettersproject.substack.com
