This will be the second time Israel is at war during the solemn day of Yom Kippur – but this time won’t be a surprise. (Not sure if that’s a good thing or not.)
The first time, back in 1973, I was at Kibbutz Kfar Blum, some eight kilometers south of Kiryat Shmona. It’s sobering to consider that the kibbutz I was living on, attending boarding school, is now a ghost town, as its population, along with so much of the north, has been evacuated due to the constant shelling.
My classmates and I were sitting quietly in our dorm room, chatting, waiting for our fast to be over.
And then the entire building began to shake.
We ran outside just in time to see two Syrian MiGs being chased by an F14 Phantom. They were low enough and loud enough that we all ducked. One of my friends actually hit the ground face first.
The ground continued to shake.
We had no idea what was going on and went in search of someone who could tell us. We reached a small group of kibbutzniks who were were huddled around a radio.
A radio? Radio silence is the rule during Yom Kippur, when everything – TV, radio, traffic, airports – are all shut down.
The radio was pronouncing sismaot – code words – calling up reserve units. From the interminable round of sismaot, it seemed like they were telling every reserve soldier in the country to get to their assigned bases.
Just as we were being told what was happening – Syria and Egypt had attacked the country and the army had been taken unawares – the air raid sirens started blaring.
Picture it. I’m 15, unable to speak much of the language, separated from my parents for the first time in my life – and I had no idea what to do or even where the bomb shelter was located. Of course, in many ways, my youth probably protected me, seeing I was in that invulnerable stage of adolescence.
One of the instructors found us and led us to the bomb shelter that would be our home for the next few weeks. It was intended for younger children and there was no way to lie down comfortably in the cots. Food – which we had forgotten about entirely – was brought to us.
And then, that night, we were allowed to go back to the dorms to pick up a few things. At my first glimpse at Mount Hermon, ablaze with fires, I felt my first twinge of fear. We were returning to the bomb shelter when the air raid siren went off again. The lights throughout the kibbutz had been doused and it was pitch dark. I was wearing flip flops and couldn’t keep up with my classmates. I kicked them off and ran barefoot. I remember how one of our counselors scolded me fiercely for showing up so late and for being barefoot. It would only be when I was older that I realized that her scolding was born out of fear.
In class, we’d been reading World War I war poems. Our teacher was smart enough to realize we were experiencing enough real-life war and moved on to another unit. In the very early hours of each day, we were sent out into the apple orchard to pick fruit. Lest you think this was some kind of child labor, working on the kibbutz had always been part of the school curriculum. But now it served a genuine purpose, as so many of the kibbutzniks were back in their units, defending the country.
Again, because I was 15, after the first couple of frightening nights I felt like nothing bad could in fact happen to us. My parents, down south in Be’er Sheva, offered to bring me home. As homesick as I’d been up until that point, I was infused with a newfound spirit of patriotism and refused to go.
It would only be many, many years later, during the 50th anniversary of the war, when I watched the Israeli three-part series, Who By Fire, that I realized just how close the country came to losing the Yom Kippur War and the sacrifices made to avoid that.
Remembering that now, during this second Yom Kippur that Israel will spend defending itself against incessant attacks, is devastating. So it may seem glib to close this with the old joke: “They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat.” But that’s where I sincerely hope all my Israeli family and friends will be at the end of this year’s fast.
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