Generational Echoes

The heavy metal shutters attached to the bulky oversized window have been bolted shut since the 7^th of October, 2023. The safe room is dark, except for the small digital electric clock on the night table next to the bed on the right. Instead of a night table, a chair is positioned next to the bed on the left. If the room temperature is too high, a click on the air conditioner remote control will cool the room. Freshly washed and ironed linens cover the open studio beds, and two soft matching towels are rolled up on the edge of each bed. To the right of the heavy metal door, an Ikea closet and an upholstered leather footstool are propped against the wall.

Hebrew and English books fill a narrow bookcase. A bottle of water, plastic cups, and a box of crackers and cookies occupy the top of the bookcase next to a Shabbat lamp. My mother’s picturesque olive tree, gifted to her for her 102^nd birthday, hangs above the bookcase; an original work of art with the names of hundreds of offspring in micro calligraphy that overlay generational branches of the tree. The countless olives illustrate the fifth generation of Mom’s offspring, many of them living and growing bearing a sixth generation in Israel.

I never expected “the safe room” to function as anything other than a guest room. I laughed when my children insisted that I be the guest in my own guest room, a room that never existed in the seven apartments where we lived throughout 64 years and 10 wars in Israel. Yet there I was, sleeping in the safe room quite a few nights during this year-long war, mainly because I cannot hear a siren, or the red alert, (the 21rst century version of the siren,) during the night.

Our first three apartments in Jerusalem didn’t have safe rooms or shelters. Israel wasn’t concerned about missiles, chemical warfare, or UAV drones attacking the home front in the early years of the State. In 1960, the year we made aliya, “pagazim” (shell fire) and direct gunfire seemed to be the method of warfare that pockmarked many buildings, but it wasn’t as threatening as present-day missiles and drones launched from thousands of miles away, destroying homes, killing and maiming civilians and soldiers who do not reach the safe room in one-and-a-half-minutes.

Raised in the United States, both my husband and I never encountered real war. The Six-Day-War was our first wartime experience, and June 5^th 1967, was one of the most traumatic days of my life.

The fourth apartment in Jerusalem that we rented in 1966 was a fairly new building with a shelter beneath it. A low chicken wire fence divided the back of our building with the Valley of the Cross located at the western end of Rechavia. Our apartment was two flights above the roofed garden and shelter. Our balcony held an unobstructed magnificent view of the valley that stretched across to the relatively new Israel Museum and the Knesset.

Three weeks before the war, an artillery platoon of soldiers camped in the valley with their long-necked canons camouflaged until ready to fire explosive shells from behind our shelter, shooting directly above our building toward the Old City of Jerusalem.

Siren alerts have a habit of catching me unaware and often leave me with my heart pounding, perhaps because of that first experience, the siren on June 5^th, which caught me at home with one young child and another child in a kindergarten a few blocks away. The fear I encountered in the shelter was agonizing. How will I return my daughter from kindergarten? What if I never saw my husband again? Would the Jordanian Legionnaires only a few blocks away overrun our shelter? What if women and children were taken captive? What will they do to us? I wasn’t afraid of dying, I was terrified of being dragged into captivity and tortured.

Three days later we sang and danced with our two children following General Motta Gur’s famous historic five p.m. radio announcement, “Har Habayit B’yadeinu!” The Temple Mount is in our hands.

The miraculous victory filled us with an overwhelming euphoric sense of joy, a feeling that the Messiah was ready and waiting at the entrance to Jerusalem.

A building boom followed, and Israel was launched into the contemporary world, shedding her image as a poor, underdeveloped, backward country. Israel appeared as Samson, a militarily powerful country rising rapidly, considered part of the western world, a country to be reckoned with.

And then the tide turned …once again, a horrific war… preempted by the Egyptian army! The sudden emergence of the so called “Palestinian People,” intifadas, and more wars every five to ten years that included additional short military campaigns, and more young men killed in battle. Seeking peace, the Oslo Accords proposed by the Rabin Peres government in the 1990s failed. Our so called “peace partners” remained murderous enemies. New generations of hate filled “shahids,” with unlimited supplies of weapons, continue their murderous ideology to this day. Miracles for which we thank G-d daily are common, yet the countless murders of our best young men is heartbreaking.

A year into this horrendous war, late October 2024, I unlocked the bolted metal shutters, opened the cumbersome window in the safe room, changed the linens, and washed the floor. I prepared the room for guests who were expected for Shabbat. After the room was completely aired I returned to bolt the shutters. I stood at the open window and stared in disbelief at the pigeon that found a place “to rest her foot” atop the open shutter.

Unlike the dove that returned to Noah’s ark, this pigeon did not bear “a plucked olive leaf in her bill.” I anxiously await a second pigeon perched atop the open shutter echoing a generational message of peace.