An Indelible Paint-can in Jerusalem

“Bear me to that chamber; there I’ll lie: in that Jerusalem shall (I) die.”

-Henry IV, Part 2, IV,5, William Shakespeare (1597)

It was the cusp of the 70s. I was on the cusp of adulthood. So was Israel, still celebrating the Six-Day War, blissfully unaware of the Yom Kippur War to follow.

I was celebrating my first airplane ride, my first visit to Israel, my first footsteps in Jerusalem, appropriately enough, on Erev Shabbat.

I was trembling with excitement.

I was staying with Rochel Richter, not my mother’s friend or relative, but her fellow Survivor, a far more indelible relationship.

I was meeting her and her husband, Reuven, at their store, Café Nava, a thriving establishment on Jaffa Street. Erev Shabbat, it was so crowded, I had to squeeze around the sides to get in. Doing so, I inadvertently kicked two paint-cans on the floor. I stained my sneaker with some gold paint from the open one.

Trying to make myself useful, I brought them to Rochel at the counter.

She asked if they belonged to anyone. No response. The open one was 1/3 full of gold paint. The other, lid-on, was half-full of apparently red paint. She asked me to pour the paint into the sewer and dispose of the cans in the garbage outside.

I took a knife from the counter, wedged it securely inside the lid, was about to press down to open it. Before I could however, a very old, obviously addled gentleman, sitting next to me at the counter, nursing his cappuccino, sharply reprimanded me in Hebrew: “It’s forbidden!”

Everyone seemed to know him and were fondly amused by him. Rochel smilingly whispered to me: “He lives here.”

Not wanting to be disrespectful, I played along: “Why is it forbidden?”

“Because it could be a bomb!”

Thank God for my Yeshiva Soloveichik, Camp Massad fluency in Hebrew.

I quickly removed the knife. Living in New York City in the 70s, I didn’t know from bombs, but I still knew enough to be scared of them.

Apparently, no one else was. They joked: “You see bombs in your sleep!”

Rochel suggested, to placate him, I open it outside instead.

He persisted: “You can’t open it, inside or outside! You have to call the police! That’s the law!”

They indulged him, calling the police. When the officer finally arrived, he too was amused, shaking the closed can, joking it must be a liquid bomb.

He started to open it, but the old-timer rebuked him as well: “You can’t do that in a room full of people! That’s the law!”

Laughing, circling his finger to his temple, referring to his critic, he took the closed can under his arm, bidding us Shabbat shalom.

90 seconds later, I was knocked to the ground by the explosion a block away on Ben Yehuda Street.

Staggering outside, I saw three stories of windows had been shattered. Apparently, as his partner drove their open-air Jeep up the street, he pried open the lid facing outward.

Both of them, and several pedestrians, were injured, but miraculously, none fatally. Had I pressed down in that packed enclosed space, innumerable people would have died (and I would have likely been decapitated.)

Rochel found me, hugged me interminably, crying: “What would I have told your mother!” (Both my parents had lost children in the Holocaust.)

We returned to the now empty café. I searched for the old man, but he was no longer there. Thanks to him, I was.

I was still trembling, no longer in excitement.

I sat down at the counter next to the can with the gold paint, gazing at the gold on my sneaker. My hands were shaking.

I started singing quietly to myself a lyric from the then popular song:

“I can never forget thee, Jerusalem, for you are completely gold.”