The month of September is usually a time when the Jewish people celebrate many of their festivals. They begin with the Jewish New Year followed by the Day of Atonement, when according to Jewish law God judges each person and decides if he will live or die in the coming year. These serious days are followed by the light and joyous festival of Succot when we build temporary structures where we usually eat and sometimes sleep, to commemorate our years in the wilderness when we had no permanent abode.
The eighth day of this festival is called Simhat Torah when we celebrate the gift of our Torah which contains the five books of Moses, full of our history and laws. It was on this happiest of all days that tragedy struck the house of Israel and all its inhabitants.
My husband and I had been invited to spend the festival with our son and his wife and his four children. On Saturday morning at about 6.30 a.m., my son entered our bedroom and told us that there had been a terrorist attack in the south of the country. How bad he could never have imagined. Sleep now evaded us and we waited to hear what was going to happen next.
Our son is 47 years old and has been a career soldier all his life. At 10.00 a.m., he received a call from the army that he was to report for duty in the south immediately. We were all rather nervous but at this moment had no inkling of the enormity of what was happening. The day crawled by. Each minute seemed like an hour and as we are orthodox Jews, we don’t answer the phone or use social media on Saturday, our sabbath or on festivals, so we didn’t know how events were unfolding until 7.00 p.m. that evening.
As soon as Shabbat finished, our daughter who lives with her family in the Ashkelon area was on the phone. Her husband, who has worked in the Israeli police all his life, had been called up to the North of the country. Harder than that, their 19-year-old son who is in the Givati Brigade, a combat unit just finished his training last week. In spite of being so inexperienced, he had been sent to the South near Gaza where everything was happening. We were and are so frightened. A day later our second son-in–law was called up also, to the South. Both our sons-in-law are not young men, being 51 and 47 years old respectively. Neither of them hesitated for a moment before leaving their families and homes. Their duty is and always has been to serve their country.
The Hamas are cruelty incarnate. Some call them animals but that is an insult to the animal species. They are savages whose evilness knows no bounds. They have slaughtered innocent people, raped women and decapitated forty babies that we know about. Do these people deserve being called human beings? They separated women from their tiny babies and took over 100 people hostage, including a Holocaust survivor who’s eighty years old. We still don’t know the exact number of hostages. Nor does there appear to be any light at the end of the tunnel regarding their whereabouts and safety.
That night in honor of the joyous holiday of Simhat Torah, many youngsters in the South applied for and received police permission to have a party. There were 3000 people celebrating. Suddenly out of the blue and for no apparent reason other than their all-consuming hatred of Jews, Hamas operatives arrived and began shooting. Two hundred and forty of them are now dead. Why? The cream of our people. Our Youth. Our hope for the future. I personally know of two young girls who were murdered. A friend of mine phoned to tell me that her granddaughter was at this party with two of her friends. Her friends were shot dead in front of her eyes. It is unclear even to her how she survived. She will no doubt be scarred for life, traumatised forever.
In addition to all this, our cities, towns and villages are bombarded with rockets, day after day, night after night. Of course this is not new. It has happened many times before. New apartment buildings and houses have what is called a safe room which can protect their inhabitants from injury and death. However, there are many more older apartment buildings and houses which don’t have this protective room. When the siren sounds, one is supposed to run downstairs in the middle of the night. Now imagine this. It is four o’clock in the morning.
Suddenly the alarm goes. You are more than half asleep. You are over seventy years old. You have to jump out of bed and run down several flights of stairs to the bomb shelter. Can you manage to do that? Can you manage to do that in time? Last time the Hamas attacked, people were killed on their way down to the shelter.
We are living in very dangerous and frightening times. We have to pray that we will come through this with the minimum of casualties to a brighter future.
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