When the Sirens Were New
Journal, March 2, 2026
I stepped off the plane in August knowing I would make aliyah. Bleary-eyed, yet overflowing with excitement, I gazed out the bus window at the tan mountains and red and white striped curb lining the streets. ‘I live here now,’ I remember thinking. ‘I never have to leave.’ Before this, I had never spent more than two weeks at a time in Israel. When I crossed off three weeks, I waited for the homesickness to hit me but it never did. Now, I have finally compiled all of my documents and my aliyah date is next month. It is almost unbelievable.
On Friday my seminary friends and I loaded the bus and headed down to Merchav Am, a yishuv in the desert, below Be’er Sheva and Yerucham. In the backs of our minds we knew the war could start, that a siren might wail and we’d have to run to a safe room, just like all of our Israeli cousins and friends had, last year and the year before that. We had a lovely Friday night with singing, divrei Torah, and the Lindenbaum annual grammen-off. We slept in a yurt. The next morning at eight o’clock, the wavering siren pierced the air and we ran outside to the shelter.
In the afternoon between card games we talked about how our parents must be feeling, thousands of miles away. For a lot of us planning on staying in Israel for the rest of our lives, we began to fathom the distance between us and our families in America. For the first time, the gap felt greater, darker, more unknown.
There was a pre-Purim party scheduled after Shabbos, but nobody felt like celebrating. We all powered on our phones to read the headlines we’d missed. It was different from checking the news last year. Back in the US, before havdalah we would gather around the computer, my father’s coat still on from maariv, checking the new reports and stories. We would gasp, shake our heads, and worry deeply, but my heart would never pound inside my chest like it did in that moment. I am here, and it is happening here, I am still slowly realizing.
Soon we loaded the bus and headed to Jerusalem, practicing the protocol in the case of a siren in our minds over and over. Looking out the window, at the silent mountains and the eerie darkness, I forgot why I decided I wanted to live here. I spotted a rocket scraping the black sky, and held my breath as another small light intercepted it. Then there was a siren and the bus fell quiet. The driver pulled to the side of the road and we all filed out, climbed the divider, covered the back of our heads and pressed our foreheads to the ground. It wasn’t so cold out, but my body shivered, my teeth chattered.
Today, there were four sirens, yesterday there were five. (I know this because we keep a tally on the whiteboard in the saferoom.) I tell my madricha that I will never get used to the horrifying cry of the siren. She says I will. My roommates and I contemplate whether to go to sleep or to wait for the next siren. I think about all of the children throughout the country darting to the shelters, how traumatized they must be. I think about the elderly woman in the neighborhood, my Tuesday scrabble partner, and my stomach drops at the thought of her hobbling to the shelter a couple of flights down.
Today, my friends and I try to place this weird feeling, to somehow organize it in our minds. ‘It’s like covid,’ someone says, their knees to their chest, their back against the shelter’s popcorn wall. And it is, it’s the complete unknown, the constant wondering, ‘What can I do? What’s next? Will I be able to go home for Pesach?’ There is a lot of asking ‘Why me?’ ‘Why not me?’ and everything seems apocalyptic. My brother tells me the best thing to do is to carry on as usual so today I learned with my chavruta and then we baked some bagels. I’m learning to check the news more sparingly. How to muffle the constant thumping of my heart through paper airplane contests and charades, by laughing with friends and performing Purim shpiels.
This is all new. The constant pounding of my chest, the shock of sirens breaking my sleep, the fear, the mourning. The sudden question that Israel seems to be asking me. ‘Do you really want to live here?’ And for a reason I cannot yet comprehend, I answer ‘yes’.
