Dear Michael,
So, you want to hear what it’s like living in Jerusalem now? Well, it may be hard to hear and even harder to believe, but I will try.
In the last two weeks our world has been shattered. We have had waves of terror before, but not like this. This is even more random than the events of twenty years ago during which every bus ride was a potentially life-threatening experience. We are afraid to go out. No place feels safe.
I go out of my house in the afternoon, the street is deserted. That’s right, my little dead-end street in my ultra-Orthodox neighborhood which usually teems with boys on bikes, girls skipping rope, babies in carriages and teens strolling back and forth. Now, in early fall (which feels like mid-summer) there are only a few kids outside playing. Even the children that venture outside stay right in front of their homes. The park is still, bicycles stay locked on their fences, mothers shmooz on the phone while their children play with blocks inside the house. It wasn’t this quiet during the Gulf War.
A close friend made a wedding last week; I stayed home. I wasn’t afraid someone would attack me at the wedding venue, a quiet kibbutz far from any Arab villages, but I was afraid: afraid to drive home, a disabled woman alone in her car; afraid to arrive home alone to my deserted street late at night, afraid of stones, guns and knives.
The next day I had to go shopping. The supermarket where I shop is located in a tiny shopping mall with guarded underground parking – the stores cater to a religious population and an Arab youth would stick out like a fireman at a chassidsche tisch. I was okay with where I was going, what I was doing. But, on my drive out of my neighborhood past the local Arab village, Beit Chanina, I realized that I was so busy scanning the sides of the road and hills above for teenage boys with rocks or weapons that I was barely paying attention to the road in front of me.
On the one hand, we are trying to live a normal life, not to let “them” win; on the other hand, terror is exactly that – we are terrified and terrorized.
Hope to share better news soon,
Love,
Leah
Dear Laurie,
Wow. It sounds like you are reacting to the recent events in an extreme way. All I keep seeing on the news and the headlines are reports of Arab youths being shot or beaten by Jews. I guess there have been a few stabbings but don’t you think the Arabs are carrying knives because they are afraid? I saw one report on NBC News that showed an Arab boy being brutally attacked outside of the Old City. The reporter on the scene said that although other networks reported him carrying a knife, he himself hadn’t seen one.
What is really going on there? Don’t you people want peace?
Love you as always, your brother,
Mike
Michael,
What can I say? Possibly the biggest heartbreak for us is the skewed reporting. Don’t accept everything you read, at least not at face value. If a headline claims, “Arab youth shot dead by Israeli soldier,” or something of that sort, at least take the time to read the whole article. The fact that the Arab youth was shot following his rampage with a kitchen knife, killing two and wounding six or seven is probably buried somewhere in the second or third paragraph.
Also, Michael, while you may not have embraced our Jewish background as I did, we come from the same source. Have you ever seen or heard Jews preach or condone violence? Just look at some of the Hamas videos. What do their children learn in kindergarten? When are they first given knives and guns to play with? Instead of singing about the months of the year, holidays, or I love Momma, they are singing “G-d is Great – Death to the Jews!!”
Please Michael, it is not “my people,” it is our people! Look what is happening in France, England, Belgium – all Jews are in danger, all Jews are hated. At least can we please hold together?
Love to Kathy and the kids,
I love you,
Leah
Dear Laurie,
Sorry it took me a few days to answer. I try to get to my emails every night, but honestly I was doing the “homework” you gave me.
I did a lot of reading and now I think I am just confused.
Remember when I came to Israel on a teen tour the summer I was 16? You were already in college and had started getting religious, so I thought I’d check it out – you know, for you.
We hung out a lot in the Arab Market (souk?) and all put keffiyas around our heads as a joke. The Israeli kids were normal, if a little square, like kids from the ‘50s and everyone thought the religious people in Meah Shearim were just freaks.
I guess I never thought about Israel as a country, not seriously anyway.
Thanks for the food for thought,
Love to Nekemia and the kids (if you still remember all their names),
Mikey
Michael my brother,
I cannot formulate the words to even write to you. We are in shock, in mourning. A rabbi in his 60s was murdered in cold blood, hacked to death. His uncle, a famous singer, over eighty years old, tried to defend himself from the attacker and is now fighting for his life. A beautiful young boy just two months from his bar mitzvah is fighting for his life. His crime? He went to buy candy across the street from his house when he was attacked by a 14-year-old Arab.
Eleven people wounded and two murdered while waiting for their buses.
There is more, so much more….
Michael, I know that you don’t pray, but they say, “There are no atheists in a foxhole.” We are in a battlefield, at home, at school, at work. Please little brother, pray for us in any words you know!
Much love,
Leah, Nechemia, Yossi, Shani, Yitzy & Shoshi (the twins), Moishie, Chaya, Baruh, Levi and Sarale
Dearest Leah,
I am sorry I made the crack about the kids’ names. It was in poor taste and very poor timing. I tried to talk to Jason and Jasmine the other night at supper about their cousins and what living in Israel is like – now and all the time.
Who would have thought that kids just 12 and 16 would have had their minds made up already, so anti! Jason said there is a lot of Jewish hate at his high school, but he said only his close friends know that he even is Jewish. (Don’t start now about Kathy’s conversion, okay?) And Israel, whoa, I could barely get a word in edgewise with them. I was shocked, but I guess I shouldn’t have been; just a couple of weeks ago I really didn’t get it at all.
Maybe we should finally take you up on your 25-year-old invitation to visit. My kids think that going to Mom and Dad’s for a Chanukah party and the Passover Seder is what being Jewish is, I’d like them to see what being Jewish really is, and meet people living Jewish lives in a Jewish country in person!
I keep reading about the situation in Israel, and what you are all up against there. I have to ask myself: just who in our family was brainwashed?
Thank you for opening my eyes.
Your little brother,
Michael