Thursday, June 12, 2025, was a big night in the Jerusalem Pais Arena. Our city’s beloved Hapoel Bank Yahav Jerusalem basketball team faced arch-rivals Maccabi Playtika Tel Aviv at home. Some 11,000 keyed-up fans arrived in Jerusalem’s color red or Maccabi yellow for the sold-out competition. Jerusalem had lost the first in a three-game championship by three points. There were hard feelings about critical referee calls. 

Among the cheering Jerusalem fans were my husband, one of our sons, and one of our granddaughters. 

At the same time, a colleague was at the Shlomo Artzi concert in Mevaseret Zion with between 1,000 and 2,000 fans. One of our daughters was at a full house at the Museum for Islamic Art for a program of Jewish liturgical poems. Even with the Israel-Hamas war going on and concern for soldiers and hostages, the month of June brought a plethora of graduations and end-of-year ceremonies. This is how we build resilience. 

I stayed home, listening to the basketball game on the radio.  

I wanted to cook. I was looking forward to a Shabbat dinner at our home in Old Katamon, hosting Hadassah leaders who were flying in from Los Angeles, Boston, Miami, and Zurich to plan a new oncology center for our city. 

Even in my kitchen with the chicken soup simmering, my heart was pumping as I listened to the game. With one second to go, Hapoel Jerusalem evened the score. In overtime, they won 77-74, which meant they’d have a chance at the championship. The final game was scheduled for the following Sunday. 

The jubilant, exuberant fans returned home, ate a celebratory snack, and went to bed after midnight. 

Three hours later, we learned that we were engaged in an existential war. 

 

Our pilots, we learned, were flying 2,000 km. Toward Iran. Missiles and drones from Iran and proxies would be fired at us.  

My phone rang at 3:30 a.m. Our exuberant basketball fan son, a spine surgeon, wanted us to know he was on the way to Hadassah Ein Kerem. The senior staff had been summoned. 

No one knew what would happen.  

Did we have water put away? Were our phones charged? 

We are still uncertain of the outcome of Operation Rising Lion, our New Jersey-sized country pitted against twice-Texas-sized Iran and its proxies. 

We literally swept the cobwebs from our bomb shelter. 

Growing up in Connecticut during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, we had drills where we had to practice crouching under our wooden desks – a doubtful means of protection now that I think of it. I’m a grandmother, and I still remember how scary those drills were. 

I was a single, naïve newcomer to Israel the first time I went into a bomb shelter. I thought the siren in the midday break of Yom Kippur services in Jerusalem was an electrical malfunction, just as I would think 50 years later on October 7, 2023.  

In 1973, Israel was experiencing an economic boom. Defense minister Moshe Dayan had predicted a decade of peace.  

When the siren sounded again, I heard footsteps. My upstairs neighbor was running down to unlock the bomb shelter. We might need it, he said. Though devout, he told me to turn on my radio. Back then, in addition to teaching high school English in the morning and going to graduate school at night, I had an afternoon job in the Murray Greenfield agency, selling appliances with new immigrant discounts to my fellow olim.  

Every month, I bought an appliance myself. That meant I owned a black-and-white TV. Friends carrying flashlights because of the blackout came to my basement apartment to watch the news. I had no idea that the news was censored. Even the letters I sent were censored. And there was no phone in the apartment I was renting. 

“By the time you get this,” I wrote my parents in Connecticut on a blue aerogram, “I’m sure this conflict will have blown over.”  

On Shabbat, sirens sounded again. I went into a shelter with my friend, anticipating enemy aircraft over Jerusalem. 

By January 1991, when the Gulf War started, I was married with five children. The Israeli government no longer believed in underground bomb shelters because we were expecting a chemical weapons attack by Saddam Hussein. We were issued gas masks. When one of our daughters celebrated her seventh birthday, each first-grader classmate arrived at our home with two boxes: one a birthday present, and the other a gas mask. 

In those days, we taped the windows of our rooms that had the least exposure. We tried to make the safe room fun with games and a huge box of chocolate they could reach into with their eyes closed. 

Alarms always seem to go off during Shabbat dinner. “Try to eat your soup fast before the sirens,” we’d say. 

So, when the sirens sounded last Friday night while we were having dinner, I thought with some nostalgia of that convenient “safe room” just steps away from our dinner table as my husband and I hustled down 50 steps to the old-fashioned shelter we share with the two other families in our building.  

We’re the seniors now, as they carry their sleeping toddlers in their arms. We’re careful to filter our speech, not to say anything scary. I am the bearer of bug repellent – mosquitoes are ready for us when we arrive.  

There are always the mysterious booming sounds as our defensive warfare confronts the missiles and drones. When the sky quiets, the impatient teenagers leave first. The rest of us linger until we get official notification that it’s safe to leave. 

Of course, my Friday evening, American-based Shabbat guests never came to dinner.  

The Swiss guest arrived in Israel but stayed in Tel Aviv.  

The El Al plane from Los Angeles turned around mid-air and headed back to the City of Angels. The El Al plane from Boston never took off. The El Al plane from Miami got as far as Milan.  

I informed the local guests that the dinner party was canceled. I couldn’t take responsibility for them descending and ascending our steps under pressure. The food I had prepared was delivered to our Jerusalem children and grandchildren. At least I could provide chicken soup, the ultimate healer. 

I never had to hide under my desk in real time growing up in Connecticut.  

Like all Israelis, I prayed at our children’s births that they’d never have to experience war, neither on the battlefield nor on the home front.  

Still, they all have that Israeli blend of reverence and irreverence that makes up the unique Israeli character, and they share our pride in our country’s toughness and spirit. 

May we all be safe. May our blessed soldiers be victorious. May the hostages return home. 

My place of work is Hadassah Medical Organization with its hospitals in Ein Kerem and Mount Scopus. On both campuses, the neonates have been moved to underground floors.  

Even before the Gandel Rehabilitation Center opened in January 2024, to provide healing for wounded soldiers, the lower level of the Mount Scopus parking lot had been converted into an emergency hospital – two weeks after October 7 – a theoretical 130-bed hospital including dialysis and intensive care.  

Until recently, whenever I took people for tours there, I said it was built “God forbid” if the hospitals in the North of Israel were attacked and neutralized, “God forbid” Jerusalem could be targeted by enemy fire, “God forbid, God forbid, God forbid, God forbid.” The underground facility got a nickname, “the God forbid hospital.” 

Thankfully, as of this writing, Jerusalem hasn’t been hit with the hypersonic Shahid ground-to-ground ballistic missiles with their fearsome multiple warheads.  

Nonetheless, the “God forbid hospital,” renamed the “Thank God hospital,” is providing safety for otherwise vulnerable patients, from two months to 97 years old.  

I’m grateful to say that there’s intensive care and dialysis underground.  

The transfer began at 3:30 a.m. on Thursday and was completed before noon with the first 90 patients. Israel at its best.