On Friday morning at 3:00 a.m. when the missile siren sounded in Jerusalem, my wife and I threw on our robes and headed for the miklat. We had done this many times before, first in October, November and December of 2023 when Hamas began its current war against Israel. Then in the last few months as the Houthis became more aggressive and fired missiles toward Israel, more trips to the miklat were required. But the siren at 3:00 a.m. last Friday was not to tell us we were under attack again. It was to tell us that Israel had attacked Iran, that a war that would probably affect us all was occurring and that we should be aware of that.
I understood why the government felt it needed to tell us that at 3:00 a.m. The government did not want people to wake up in the morning and not know that the world had changed. The government wanted Israelis to know the long-expected direct confrontation with Iran had begun.
Our little apartment building has only nine apartments. It is in the Kiryat Moshe neighborhood of Jerusalem, only one block from Mercaz HaRav, the Rav Kook yeshiva. We have lived here since our aliyah in 2021 and have friendly encounters with all of our neighbors. They are a calm, mature group of middle-aged and older people who primarily speak Hebrew, although like many educated Israelis, some of them also speak English. One couple is from France. One, besides us, has parents from the U.S. and have been here since they were children, so they can speak a fluent, unaccented Israeli Hebrew as well as fluent English. The rest of the neighbors are Hebrew-speakers.
For buildings like ours, built in the early 1970s, there are no mamad, no individual reinforced ‘safe rooms’ in each apartment. There is instead a communal bomb shelter in the back of the building on the first floor, a miklat, a place of refuge. It is a room about 20 by 25 feet with bare concrete walls and floor, a simple undecorated light fixture of two bulbs, about twenty plastic stackable chairs and in some corners residents store things. The boards which constitute the walls of my sukkah are there. We had been in that room with our neighbors many times before 3:00 a.m. Friday morning, usually in the daytime, and only occasionally in the evening. Because these people are unassuming Israelis, no one minds being seen amongst their neighbors in their pajamas and robes or in the case of some of the men, in T-shirts and sweatpants.
There are about five copies of Tehillim in the miklat. I don’t know who put them there. We do not feel a great deal of immediate danger because nothing has landed even close to us. Still, it is quite common for the ladies to recite Tehillim. Most of them clearly know the Psalms they are saying by memory. The men usually bring something to learn with them. Each trip to the miklat will ordinarily be at least 25 minutes from the siren to the “all clear.” Between this last erev Shabbos and Shabbos morning the siren sounded four times. Each time we and the neighbors dutifully walked down the stairs to the miklat, although there is an elevator. Even Mrs. T, who lives on our floor and is at least in her mid-80s, shunned the elevator on Shabbos.
We did not move to Jerusalem to be in the miklat or subject to the missiles of Jew-hating Hamas and Hezbollah, to feel the malice of Iran or the savagery of the Houthis. But we did move to Jerusalem to live in the Jewish world, on the Jewish calendar, in Jewish time, surrounded by Jewish people who also have Jewish lives. And although the experience of the simple and bare miklat, where men bring their books and women recite Tehillim, is not what we had in mind for our aliyah, it is still an experience of the Jewish world that we value. It is as genuinely Jewish an experience as davening in the finest shul or hearing a shiur from the most famous of rabbis. Despite the difficulties and frustrations of the moment we are home in Jerusalem even in the miklat. We feel the presence of Hashem even there.
