A month on from the horrific attack on Israel by Hamas, many New Yorkers who were in Israel at the time are now home ready to tell the stories of their harrowing experiences.
One such New Yorker is Rochester, N.Y., resident Marc Cohen, who booked a trip to Israel during Sukkot with his parents, seven-month pregnant wife, and his brother. The family stayed in a Tel Aviv hotel. It was the first time Cohen’s parents and wife had visited the Holy Land, while Cohen and his brother had been to Israel three times. The Cohens arrived for their two-week visit on Wednesday, October 4, three days before the bombings began.
“My parents were looking forward to seeing the country. We were going to go from Tel Aviv to the Golan Heights to Jerusalem,” Cohen, 28, told The Jewish Press. “Thursday and Friday were wonderful. Friday night we went to friends’ homes in Moadim, which is Rochester’s sister city. We went to celebrate Simchas Torah, which was beautiful and wonderful and then we went to have dinner in their sukkah, which was wonderful. Then Saturday morning, when we woke up, it was a very different scene.”
Cohen and his family had to find refuge in a safe place.
“We were in Tel Aviv. We were back and forth to the bomb shelter a number of times Saturday into Sunday, mostly Saturday night,” Cohen said. “Rockets fell just south of us. We felt and heard the vibration of the explosions all throughout the night and the entire time we heard Iron Dome intercepting rockets. We have videos of Iron Dome intercepting rockets. We also realized we were nowhere in as bad of a situation as those in Sderot and Ashkelon and so many other areas. We were safe, we were scared and of course vigilant but by no means were we experiencing the brunt of this and we are so deeply grateful to the IDF and the police and to those who gave their lives to protect ours. Our hearts go out to the families of the 1400 murdered Israelis, murdered for no other reason other than they’re Jews.”
The week of October 23 a group of 21 people from across the United States went on a trip sponsored by the Jewish Federation of North America.
The Albany-based Jewish Federation of Northeastern New York [JFNENY] sent a prominent litigator of the global law firm Greenberg Traurig, Henry “Hank” Greenberg, 61, a resident of the Albany suburb of Slingerlands. The Eshkol region is a partnership community with the JFNENY. The Eshkol region was the most impacted region in Israel.
Greenberg said he went for two reasons.
“One is bearing witness. Bearing witness is not just seeing, it’s a moral obligation to the suffering of others. I also had the gift of the opportunity to go and that was because of my association with the Federation. You couldn’t just get on a plane,” Greenberg said. The second reason I went is because I’ve been very active in raising funds for victim relief in Israel and I’ve been speaking to members of the Jewish community as much as I can. Being able to acquire as much first-hand knowledge as I could about what is happening on the ground in Israel is important.”
Speaking to an audience of approximately 150 people at an Albany area college on Tuesday, November 2, Greenberg relayed the same story to The Jewish Press in an effort to raise humanitarian aid for the war effort.
A Nation in Trauma
“On Wednesday, October 25, the second day of the trip, we went to the South, the Gaza envelope to the city of Eshkelon [the sister city of Baltimore]. While I was there on the bus, my colleagues who were part of the solidarity mission, air raid sounds went off and a security person who was a part of our group told the bus driver to stop and then directed us to move as rapidly as we could – about 30 to 40 yards – across a green space towards a fence. He told us to lie face down on the ground. We stayed there and we sort of heard the sound of the Iron Dome detonating a rocket, which was likely the rocket that triggered the air raid. The Iron Dome is an extraordinary thing but up against thousands and thousands of rockets that have been launched, many get through. In the sense that I have now experienced it, I can now tell people I saw at least one that was pointed out to me by the security guy. That might sound really alarming but that’s life for those who live in Eshkelon, even before the war. Now I’m experiencing it in the flesh.”
Greenberg and the entourage spent their first day, Tuesday, October 24, visiting a kibbutz.
“One-third of the nation from the north to the south is under constant attack, Hezbollah from the north and Hamas in the south. On the first day we were there, we went to a kibbutz, Ma’ale HaHamisha,” Greenberg said.
[Ma’ale HaHamisha is a kibbutz in central Israel. Located in the Judean hills just off the Jerusalem–Tel Aviv highway. It falls under the jurisdiction of Mateh Yehuda Regional Council. In 2021 it had a population of 845.]
“There was a hotel with anywhere from 300 to 500 evacuees from southern Israel who were removed. I learned that there were as many as 200,000 people who had previously lived in the south who were evacuated by the government, so they are refugees in their own country,” which surprised Greenberg.
The gripping moments of being on the ground were slowly sinking in for Greenberg.
“On the second day, we went to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and met with family members of the hostages. That was a heartbreaking thing to listen to, what they were going through. While we were in Eshkelon we went to Barzelai Medical Center, where we heard from four families. This was the primary triage facility for the first day of attacks. Eshkelon is roughly eight miles away from the border, so this is where they all went. On day one there were 300 casualties presented to the hospital. They showed us part of the hospital that was bombed either that day, the 7th or the 8th I don’t recall exactly.”
The Federation faction heard from Hezi Levy, director general of the Ministry of Health, whose primary responsibility is for the health system subject to the policies of the government and the minister of health.
“He’s well familiar with battlefield wounds. He’s never seen anything like these injuries, mutilations. He described a pregnant woman’s stomach ripped open,” Greenberg recalled. “The wounds were just unbelievable. They actually had a position called a grievance officer. Her job was to tell a family member that a relative had died. It was just the most heart-breaking thing.”
The group also met with the mayor of Eshkelon, Tomer Glam.
“He described what that city had endured. Because of the bombing, 6,000 homes have been destroyed. In the Gaza envelope, the estimate is that as many as 9,000 homes will be destroyed. These families who are evacuees are losing everything,” Greenberg recalled Glam saying.
On their final day, the group had dinner with Ret. Major General Noam Tibon, who spent his military career specializing in counter-terrorism and homeland security. Tibon is calling on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to resign immediately.
He told the group of 21, “There is no question Israel will win. We will ultimately prevail. Hamas will be destroyed. It’s going to take some time and it’s going to be very challenging and difficult days,” Greenberg said was Tibon’s message.
They also visited the Israel Trauma Coalition.
“One of the floors was supplies for the military,” Greenberg said. “They called up 360,000 reserves. They don’t have enough equipment or uniforms for 360,000 reserves. It makes sense if you think about it. You go from a standing army to the largest call-up of reservists any time since the Yom Kippur War. These war rooms sprung up around the country.”
They also paid a visit to Magen David Adom [MDA], which is not a government agency. MDA is Israel’s official representative to the International Red Cross. Its role precludes it from accepting governmental support for its general operations.
“It is the principal ambulance service of Israel and also a blood bank. A tremendous need, obviously. We heard really extraordinary stories,” Greenberg said. “We also went to the Amigour facility, which supplies subsidized housing in Israel, sponsored by the Jewish Agency.”
Greenberg compared Hamas to Hitler.
“This is life in Israel today. If Hamas had access to ovens, they would have thrown bodies into them. The medieval barbarity of it all. We’ve seen this before. This is not news for the Jewish people. This is a high-tech pogrom and we’ve experienced it countless times. That’s what was so traumatic for the Israeli population. The sense of security has been shattered. Their safety. They’ve inured themselves to a lot.”
Greenberg said he has no regrets going into the line of fire.
“It was one of the most intense and gripping experiences of my life. It was absolutely worth going,” Greenberg said. “Every time I met with someone, the Israelis would thank us, they would hug us for being there. Their gratitude was incredibly heartening and now I have the opportunity, after collecting all this information, to speak to people, speak to the media and I have done that.”
Cohen, from Rochester, New York, said, like Greenberg, he will return to Israel when they are ready to have tourists again and he will bring his son, who will be born in two months. Cohen and his family are congregants at Temple Beth Kodesh in Rochester.
“Let the military and the IDF focus not on another family from America being there but rather on eliminating Hamas and keeping Israelis in the Jewish homeland safe. We will absolutely all go back but it was the worst experience I think in any of our lives,” Cohen said. “The massacre of Jews for being Jews, not military target to military target, not a targeted operation in retaliation for something. The absolute massacre of a people, the worst day of Jewish death since the Holocaust.”
Peter Rosenfeld, a businessman from the Saratoga County town of Clifton Park, N.Y., said for the past 20 years he has visited Israel four times a year to see his son living in the Holy Land. Rosenfeld and his family visited Israel for Sukkos on Thursday, October 5. After the war broke out two days later, it was two weeks before he was able to get out of Israel with his wife, son, daughter-in-law and four grandchildren from the Bergenfield-Teaneck, N.J., area. He finally departed on Tuesday, October 17 on an El Al flight to New York.
“While waiting for our El Al flight we could here pings going off near the airport. The Iron Dome interceptors looked like the funniest lightning storm I’ve ever seen. It was almost like an unreal, nervous experience,” Rosenfeld, 77, told The Jewish Press. “As the news reports came in about how bad the atrocities were, we were scared and very, very angry. Human beings don’t do this to other human beings, what they did. I’m still angry and I don’t know if I’ll never not be angry. Israel must protect its people. We will never forget the Holocaust. We will never forget this. Never, ever, ever will this be forgotten, in my opinion. The day United Airlines starts flying to Israel, I’ll be on the first plane.”
Greenberg sums up his experience as “Israel right now is broken, fractured, yet steely determined to do everything possible to prevail and they will. Having seen these things, it gives me the ability to communicate with the Jewish community. My family was very supportive of me going to Israel but I wasn’t telling them about the rocket strikes while I was over there. There’s no point in getting them worried.” The Greenbergs are members of Congregation Beth Emeth in Albany.
Greenberg is modest, saying, “I didn’t experience anything like what Israelis are experiencing every day. There’s nothing out of the norm. It wasn’t like I got a dose of something that was different or exceptional. I’m not nearly as brave as the people who go to work every day in Tel Aviv.”
Now the fundraising begins for Greenberg to bundle money for Israeli defenses and humanitarian aid. To donate, go to jewishfedny.givingfuel.com/israelfund23.
