The siren went off at 8:45 last Friday morning. I had just gotten back from a 4-mile jog around Haifa’s Mercaz HaCarmel and was drenched in sweat. The sustained wail sounded strangely muted, as if it were piped through an old computer laptop speaker.
Was this for real? Any uncertainty was dispelled as soon as my eyes locked with those of my 12-year-old daughter. Our separate suspicions melded within a nanosecond into grim certainty. We were about to be hit.
Haifa — the largest city in northern Israel — was now in Hezbollah’s crosshairs. Since thousands of Hamas fighters invaded southern Israel on Oct. 7, the Lebanon-based terrorist organization has launched more than 8,000 rockets at the northern part of the country.
We had 60 seconds to make it from our second-floor apartment to the communal bomb shelter 58 steps below us. Me and my four children made tracks and reached the bunker just before the first explosion. The earth shook underneath our feet. After we entered the bomb shelter we heard six more explosions.
There were 15 people in the bunker. Sitting on a plastic chair was a woman in her mid-30s with close-cropped brown hair and some sort of tribal tattoo on her right arm. She was speaking in hushed tones to another woman who was sitting next to her. Both ladies were holding baby girls.
“Sleeping through a Hezbollah bombing. Very impressive,” I chirped in Hebrew to the mother of the sleeping child. “We just moved here,” she replied with a thick Russian accent. “We speak English.”
Only after we had returned to our apartments did it occur to me that the woman had hunkered down inside the bunker with virtual strangers wearing only her panties. In Haifa, the approximate time between a siren going off and impact is a minute at most. There isn’t always enough time to throw your pants on. In other parts of Israel, in places that are smack against the border with Lebanon, residents have only 30 seconds to dress for incoming rocket fire.
Around minute five of our time together, the heavy silence was broken when “Iran, Don’t Shoot,” a novelty song sung by model, business mogul and one-time Knesset member Pnina Rosenblum, started blaring from the mobile device being held by an elderly lady wearing dark sunglasses who was sitting at the head of an ancient wooden table.
The blast of irreverence set to music was a social lubricant. Snippets of conversation broke out in Hebrew and Russian. The hipster dude with the beard who lives directly across from us cracked wise about how Hezbollah’s aim isn’t what it used to be. The old timer with the Gucci shades pointed to our four children and asked if they are two sets of twins. Our two daughters, used to this slander, forced a smile through gritted teeth.
In the midst of this fleeting revelry, my 10-year-old little girl stood stiffly, her eyes bugging out of her head. I put my arm on her shoulder. “What’s going on with Sheldon?” I asked. Since schools in the northern part of the country were ordered shut by Home Front Command — forcing kids to learn remotely — my daughter had taken to binge-watching “Young Sheldon” in between online classes.
“Sheldon wants to become a Jew because Albert Einstein and all his other heroes are Jewish,” she said. The tension melted from my daughter’s face as she summarized the episode she had been watching when the siren began. “He’s talking to a rabbi in his neighborhood about it,” she added.
After waiting the mandatory 10 minutes and wishing one another a bomb-free rest of the day and Shabbat Shalom, we quietly shuffled back to our respective abodes.
As I watched the rest of that “Young Sheldon” episode with my daughter in our living room, my wife texted me: “Back from the shuk. Driver stopped the bus when the siren went off. We’re moving now. Gonna pick up some candles at the supermarket.”
I was flooded with WhatsApp messages while we were in the bomb shelter. My phone pinged again. It was from my brother.
He had recently started teaching English Literature at a private Catholic high school near Pasadena and wanted to let me know he had asked a couple of nuns to pray for us. Was I alright with that? I grinned, picked up my device and texted back that by all means ask nuns, rabbis, swamis, imams and anyone else he runs into to put in a good word for us.
On that note, we took a collective deep breath, exhaled, and went about our day. After all, we had a birthday to celebrate. That Friday afternoon friends and relatives from as far north as Nahariya and as far south as Tel Aviv made our twin eight-year-old boys feel eight-feet tall.
Our guests included my wife’s cousin who was about to embark on his third tour of duty since Hamas invaded Israel. Also in attendance was a good friend of mine, who bought the boys a couple of first-rate secondhand bicycles.
“Awesome gifts. Where did you get them?” I pulled my buddy aside while the twins marveled at their birthday haul. “Jaffa D. neighborhood,” he answered. “Jaffa D.? Never heard of it,” I said. “Me neither. That’s why I asked my wife to call the police if she didn’t hear back from me.”
And so it goes.
Gidon Ben-Zvi, a former soldier in the Israel Defense Forces, lives in Haifa with his wife and their four children.