A life of sirens and shelters

Living in Nahariya right now is not easy.

The coastal city in the north of Israel is just a few miles from the Lebanese border. Most of the communities north of Nahariya have been evacuated, and Nahariya is routinely targeted by Hezbollah rocket and missile attacks. Last Monday, a drone strike damaged an apartment building.

Nahariya is also the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey’s sister city. “That relationship is 21 years old,” Laura Freeman, JFNNJ’s marketing and communications director, said. “A lot of missions have gone to Nahariya.” Groups of students, teachers, and security personnel from the two areas have worked together and learned from each other. “It’s really crazy how there can be an extension of the Northern New Jersey community, so many thousands of miles away,” Ms. Freeman said.

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“The connection is amazing,” Ravit Steinmetz-Shemla added. She directs JFNNJ’s Israel office in Nahariya. “When a soldier from Nahariya is killed, a room in JFNNJ’s New Jersey offices is named in his memory. One room was named a few years ago, and, unfortunately, because of this war, we are going to have three more rooms named.

“And in Nahariya there is a park created with funds from New Jersey that has a plaque that talks about the relationship between the communities. The connection is really strong and powerful.

Dahlia Zahger Levy leads JFNNJ’s Center for Israel Engagement. We tend to “focus on how the New Jersey community helps and connects with the community over there, but I think there’s a reason why the community here wants to be so connected over there,” she said. There is so much value that the Israeli community, and Nahariya specifically, gives to the community here. It’s a sense of security, a sense of home. There’s a sense of familiarity and closeness that I think is really valuable and important.

“People know each other. When we talk about feeling like a family, I think that something was built here, and I think it’s reciprocal in that way. I think that the sense of home in a way that exists there is really important, especially these days.”

Three residents of Nahariya visited North Jersey last week to talk about what life is like in Nahariya right now. And to ask for help.

“We want people to know that Nahariya is now the front line,” Edna Ben Simhon Moalem said. She’s a psychologist in Nahariya who works with children, teens, their families, and educational teams. “All the communities north of Nahariya were evacuated, so we are the northern border with Lebanon now.

“There’s a lot of emotional stress, obviously. And a feeling like constantly living on the edge.”

She’s seen a significant increase in anxiety and depression. Requests for emotional support have risen fivefold, and suicide risk cases among adolescents have tripled.

“These are really dark times for us,” Ms. Moalem said.

To illustrate the point, she talked about what happened last Thursday, when this story was reported. She has an app on her phone that alerts her when there are missiles and sirens in Nahariya or the surrounding communities. She had woken up at 6:30 that morning in New Jersey to the sound of an alert at home. It was 1:30 in the afternoon in Nahariya. She called her 11-year-old daughter, who “told me, ‘Mom, we were all immediately lying on the floor with our hands over our heads,’ because when an alarm sounds, you have only 15 seconds to find a safe or protected space. And you cannot always find one.”

Her children’s school has a shelter “but it’s not possible for 600 to 700 kids to get there in 15 seconds, so we have a routine of best protected space. This is the first thing that you can do to protect yourself — to lie down on the floor, to cover your head with your hands, and to stay there until even the debris from the interceptors has fallen.” While her daughter and the other students were lying on the floor, they heard explosions and saw the rockets and the interceptor blow up in the air. Afterward, the principal came and told them to go down to the shelter.

“I asked her, ‘Were you afraid? How was it for you?’ and she told me, ‘No, Mom, I wasn’t afraid,’” Ms. Moalem said. “Her next sentence was a little bit heartbreaking. She told me, ‘We’re used to it.’ And she told me, ‘I wasn’t afraid, but some of my friends, they were anxious, they started crying, I was trying to help them.’ And she asked if it was okay if one of her friends, who lives farther from the school than we do, came over, because she didn’t want to walk all the way home.

“So this is our reality. And each of us has those kinds of examples of what it means to live in a war zone.

“Sometimes we forget, but it is a war zone. The beach is closed. The beautiful shore of Nahariya is a closed military area now. You can’t even take a photo, because there are army boats and everything.”

The situation has also impacted the practical aspects of Ms. Moalem’s work. “I cannot have any person with a physical disability in my clinic, because you have to run to get to a shelter,” she said. “I never thought that would be a criterion, that I would have to say that there’s a public shelter nearby, but you have to run in order to get there.” But now she emphasizes this point before taking on new patients. She tells them, “You should know that before you choose to start therapy with me.”

Some of the children she sees have autism or developmental disabilities. “So we practice, we actually practice, each and every session, the way to the shelter, and what we should do,” she said. The practice “came in very handy” when there was a siren during a session and she had to run to the shelter with a child who has autism. “He was a little bit anxious at first, but since we practiced, he knew what was about to come,” she said. “This is the way we adjust to the new reality.”

She also talked about her experience as a parent. Ms. Moalem has three children – her sons are 15 and 13. She has a neighbor who doesn’t send her kids to afterschool activities anymore. Ms. Moalem tries not to hold her children back. One day there was a siren when her kids were out, and she felt panicked. When she was able to get in touch with them, she calmed down, but she had to wake up the next morning and face the same decision — do I send my kids out or do I not send my kids out? “And this is a decision parents face every single day,” she said. “Do I live a normal life, or do I live in fear? This is just such a difficult way to live.”

The constant attacks also have had a very real economic impact on the city. Amir Oppenheimer owns a restaurant. On a typical Thursday evening, he would have about 120 customers. “Today there were 12,” he said. “So you can understand the percentage. And if Edna’s talking about not letting children go to the park, I’m saying I’m thinking about whether to keep the restaurant open, because nobody is coming.” Local residents do not go out, and tourists do not visit the north. “You have to understand, many of the businesses in the north are stopped because of the war.

“This is very important. We left our families to be here, to let everybody know the situation.”

“One of the things that allows us somehow to preserve and maintain a routine is shelters,” Ms. Moalem said. There are now some small shelters in local parks. “It’s very surreal. They are concrete but there are colorful bright pictures on the outside.

“But it’s become part of our lives. If there’s no shelter nearby, I can’t take my kids to the park. I can’t wait at the bus station. If I don’t have a protected space somewhere, I probably won’t go there. I won’t send my kids to afternoon activities if I don’t check and know and practice with them how to get to the protected space. It affects our lives.

“And of course, we won’t go and sit in a café like we are now, without knowing that there is a protected space nearby.”

Shelters are the backdrop of life, she added. “Just like during covid, there were signs everywhere reminding people to wash their hands and stay six feet apart; now there are signs pointing to the closest protected space.”

Mr. Oppenheimer agreed that shelters allow the city to function. “If customers call to make a reservation, the first thing they ask is if there’s a shelter nearby.”

Ms. Levy grew up in the south of Israel and talked about one of her first experiences with a siren. She was in eighth grade when it sounded, and the students had to run down three flights of steps to get to the shelter. When they arrived, they found it locked. By the time a teacher was able to go back upstairs to get a key, the danger had passed. “Having accessible shelters is tremendously important,” she said. She can still remember “the level of how students were reacting to this, the anxiety attacks, the panic attacks.

“The feeling that there’s nothing to protect me, it’s horrible. Kids need to know they have where to go.”

Benny Meir is a lieutenant colonel in the IDF reserves and the CEO of an Israeli cybersecurity company. He also believes that shelters are crucial. “I think the problem is that people think when the war ends, it’s going to be behind us,” Mr. Meir said. “But really, we are in a new reality, an age of constant threat on Nahariya, on the borders, and in the south. This new reality is that one side wants to create a place that people don’t want to live in, and the other side wants to make sure that it’s possible to live in that place. Our ability to make sure that the kids, and the people that surround the kids, the businesses, the afterschool activities, the schools, and all the other economics in the system, are working, is what will make living here possible.

“I think that if you want to make sure that you are going to be able to win the war, you need citizens who are strong and resilient, not just physically, but mentally too. So the shelter is not just a physical thing, it’s also a mental thing. It allows you to walk; to say, okay, I have a shelter over there, it’s fine, I can walk. It allows a mom to send her kid to a friend’s house. Without the shelter on the way, she’s not going to send him. She’ll say, no, stay home. With a shelter, she’ll say, okay, go. So we can live. We can be under pressure but we can still live.”

Shelters “can take some of the steam out of the pressure cooker,” Mr. Meir said.

But Nahariya does not have enough shelters for its residents,” Ms. Freeman explained. “In the last 10 years, the population has grown, and they need 17 more shelters so that people have safe places to go.” Each shelter costs $100,000 to build.

A shelter can be in place in as little as three weeks, Ms. Levy added. “As soon as the funding is there and they are able to build, more people’s lives will be saved every single day.”

So Ms. Moalem, Mr. Oppenheimer, and Mr. Meir came to Nahariya’s sister community.

“We want people in Northern New Jersey to know that people in Nahariya need help,” Ms. Moalem said. They need help to fund trauma treatment and a first response team, but most critically, “we need $1.7 million to build the shelters that the Nahariya municipality needs right now.”

The Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey has raised $4 million for Israel since October 7, and it already has distributed more than 85% of those funds to Nahariya and other communities, Ms. Freeman said. Those distributions focused on needs that were critical at that time. In Nahariya, that included setting up an emergency response team, helping restore some sense of normalcy for children, and helping to resettle evacuees who had arrived in the city. Now that the threat from Hezbollah has increased, the need for additional shelters has become the city’s most pressing requirement.

“Nahariya is a very important city,” Mr. Meir said. “It’s the pearl of the Western Galilee. It’s the biggest city in the area, and 80,000 people live there in a very delicate situation. Nahariya is a symbol for Hezbollah — but also for us. If they succeed in making Nahariya an unlivable place, and people start to leave, they win.

“Now the city is like on the edge — how long I can survive like that? And the answer that we need to give back to Hezbollah is, as long as we need. And to give this answer, that we can stay in Nahariya as long as we need, we need help.”

To learn more about the campaign, or to donate, go to JFNNJ.org/NahariyaReliefFund.