For the past month, those of us who have been going regularly to protective shelters have formed new friendships and gathered unexpected stories. There is reportedly even a matchmaking app for singles in shelters. Stories are being shared on social media, and one Hebrew daily even runs a column called “Shelter Chatter.”
What’s beautiful about this sharing is the upbeat tone and even the sense of humor that usually accompany it. What a resilient people we are, turning the experience of avoiding catastrophe into a genre.
One person recently posted about a matza bake in her shelter, another about a grocery store that opened in hers. A young woman told me that although she grew up in the neighborhood where she now joins her parents in their shelter, because it’s nicer than her own, she really didn’t know any of the interesting neighbors until now.
When the siren sounds, our shelter, 52 steps down and up, serves the three families in our building and occasional strangers who happen to be visiting or walking up our street in the Katamon neighborhood of Jerusalem. Usually, everyone is busy balancing work and family life. Here, we get rare quality time.
An educational stay in a bomb shelter
SOMETIMES, EVEN a short stay in a shelter can be educational and inspirational. Here’s an example:
My granddaughter Eliana, 17, is a high school senior in Modi’in. At 4 p.m., she had just finished meeting a friend at a café and was headed home. The dissonant bells tolled on her phone, a warning that there might be a missile flying her way. Eliana checked Waze. Her family home, with its reinforced protective room, was a 15-minute drive away. Too far. She couldn’t make it on time.
The closest town, she saw, was Kfar Ruth, a village of some 400 residents between the cities of Modi’in and Modi’in Illit. There had to be a public shelter there, she reasoned.
Indeed, near the entrance to town was the public shelter.
She quickly parked her car and hurried inside, exhaling with relief. The undulating air raid siren began to sound.
Inside the shelter was an older gentleman whom, oddly, she recognized as someone she had seen before when she sought refuge in a shelter in Kfar Hashmonaim. Next, to her surprise, came a bride in a long white gown, followed by an entire family entourage, including a baby in a stroller, all dressed up for a pre-wedding photo session, along with their photographer. Next came twin bar mitzvah boys.
For those of us who make use of shelters or reinforced safe rooms, we wait to hear the booms, likely our blessed layered defensive weapons intercepting missiles that are meant to kill us. Then comes the hard part. We all know that an “end of event” message will come soon, saying we can leave the shelter. But dangerous debris from the missile collision is apt to fall. Debris as large as a school bus.
Impatient Israelis that we are, it’s hard to wait for the all-clear announcements. Even in our building shelter, there are those who make their own calculations and leave early.
And so it was in the Kfar Ruth shelter.
The older gentleman tried, without success, to convince the bride and family, as well as the 13-year-olds, to stay put a little longer.
But only Eliana remained behind with him.
“Let me tell you why I tried to stop them,” he confided to her with a sigh of resignation. “You see, no one knows what it’s like to be under explosions until they’ve experienced it. Someone who hasn’t felt the power of katyusha rockets can’t understand the expression pachad mavet [“scared to death”].
“When I was a young man,” he continued, “I was a soldier in the infantry, the Golani Brigade. On Yom Kippur, 1973, we were stationed on the Golan Heights and Mount Hermon. There weren’t many of us. A lot of soldiers were home on leave. Like everyone in the IDF, the Syrian attack surprised us, the way we were surprised on Oct. 7. Two Syrian infantry battalions attacked, and we were outnumbered. Bodies were strewn everywhere. Eventually, reinforcements came, and we forced them back.
“My soldiers and I were on the first line of the fighting. At one point, one of my soldiers left the armored vehicle and went outside. He stood there unprotected. He was obviously suffering from battle fatigue and trauma. He told me he didn’t want to wait to be killed. He said it was better to die now.
“We never leave a soldier behind. I got out of the armored vehicle. He warned me not to approach him.
“What to do? Suddenly, I got a strange idea. We’d been eating field rations for days. ‘Would you like me to make you scrambled eggs?’ I asked him. I don’t know why I said it. He turned his head to look at me. I saw he was interested. Just like that, he followed me back to safety. Not a minute later, a katyusha fell and exploded exactly where he had been standing.
“My grandfather was a synagogue sexton in Casablanca. He always told me that God doesn’t want us to unnecessarily endanger ourselves. That’s why I try to tell people to be careful, not to leave shelters too early,” he explained.
ELIANA’S PHONE rang. The Home Front Command message announced that the event was over. She could leave the shelter.
The older gentleman went to his car and returned with a Golani Brigade flag, yellow and green, with an olive tree. Its colors represent the brigade’s connection to the land, the olive tree’s deep roots symbolizing its covenant with the State of Israel.
“I just want to show you that everything I told you is true,” he said.
Eliana told him that her father served in the Golani Brigade, too.
She drove home.
“I was incredibly moved,” she said afterward. “I was stunned by what just happened. I had never heard a firsthand story like that. It’s amazing – you never know that the person standing next to you in an Israeli bomb shelter might be a great hero.”
The writer is the Israel director of public relations at Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. Her latest book is A Daughter of Many Mothers, co-written with Holocaust survivor and premier English-language witness Rena Quint.