Letter from Israel

In January 2020, I began planning a party in Riverdale, N.Y., for my mother’s 90th birthday in June. After numerous calls and emails, I had a space rented and a caterer booked; my husband, Steve, and I had airline tickets; and I’d even bought “benchers,” Grace After Meals booklets, to put on the tables.

And then the world came to a screeching halt in March. By the end of May, with the pandemic upending our lives, it was clear that the party would be canceled. I put the benchers in a drawer and organized a virtual birthday party on Zoom for family and friends across the world.

In January 2025, I began planning a party for my mother’s 95th birthday in June. After numerous calls and emails, I had a space rented and a caterer booked; my husband and I had airline tickets; and I’d even bought stickers with the new date to put on the benchers that had sat in a drawer for five years.

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Three nights before our flight, Israel kicked some Iranian nuclear butt. As Iran started bombarding civilian areas across Israel in response, the airport shut down, and we understood that we wouldn’t get to the party.

My husband joked with my mother that for her 100th birthday he will buy a ticket on the Titanic. She laughed, because my amazing mother is perennially upbeat even when desperately disappointed.

Unlike five years ago, the party will (God willing) go on without us, thanks to the efforts of my two brothers and sisters-in-law in the United States. Our son in America will share the birthday speeches that my Israeli brother and I cannot deliver in person.

You know that old Yiddish saying, “Man plans, God laughs?” Sometimes things simply aren’t meant to be, and you just have to put the benchers back in the drawer.

Israelis have been rushing to bomb shelters like this one.

Our little travel drama is trivial compared to that of tens of thousands of Israelis who can’t get home from overseas, and thousands of overseas tourists who can’t get home from Israel.

And all of that is trivial in comparison to the thousands of exhausted reserve soldiers obligated once again to leave their spouses and children, their jobs and studies, to risk their lives for the rest of us. It’s trivial compared to the hostages still languishing in the hell of Gaza, and compared to Houthi and Iranian missiles terrorizing and killing Jewish and Arab Israelis of all ages.

SInce October 7, 2023, we in Ma’aleh Adumim had virtually no air-raid sirens because we aren’t in the path of missiles from Gaza, to our west, or from Lebanon, in the north. Now it’s a different story.

At about midnight or 1 in the morning last Friday, June 13, I heard the roar of planes overhead and I thought to myself, “We must be going to attack Iran.” A couple of hours later, the pre-siren warning on my phone began buzzing and flashing.

The Home Front Command sends out targeted “Extreme Alert” messages that give us about 15 minutes’ warning before the actual red-alert siren is sounded, 90 seconds ahead of the missile’s expected arrival from faraway Iran or Yemen. It’s boom or bust — we may hear booms as the missile is intercepted, or we may hear nothing because it gets shot down or goes astray far from our area.

Our apartment has a built-in protected room — a “mamad” — as do the houses of our son and daughter in Israel. It’s no biggie for us to saunter into the mamad, which in everyday life is a combination office for Steve  and playroom for visiting grandkids.

While it’s a major production for our children and their spouses to bring their kids to the mamad quickly, especially in the middle of the night, they can put the younger ones to bed in the mamad to begin with, so they won’t have to be moved and frightened.

But millions of Israelis do not have a mamad. They have to shepherd their little kids to the communal bomb shelter — the “miklat” — in their apartment building or in a nearby public building. If they’re lucky, they have time to throw on a bathrobe.

“It’s a big challenge in the middle of the night,” one of my nieces messaged me this morning, along with a photo of her 9-year-old and 6-year-old daughters and 2-year-old twin sons sitting on a mattress in her building’s miklat. One twin was sleepily sucking a pacifier.

“We took the boys straight out of their cribs; we had already woken the girls when we got the warning siren. My older daughter was in such a deep sleep, she was like, ‘What do you want from me?’ But I can’t complain. We are all in this together.”

Her sister, a mother of six with a disposition very much like my mother’s, sent this message to our extended family WhatsApp group: “I think there’s no better achdus [unity] than sitting together with all your neighbors in pajamas in a small stuffy miklat in the middle of the night and singing together ‘Eliyahu HaNavi.’”

Israeli schools and preschools, which are closed this week, have wisely taught children to spend their time in the miklat singing, dancing, and playing games to lessen fear and build resilience. Teachers are true frontline heroes.

I was interrupted in the middle of writing this by another Extreme Alert. I grabbed my Kindle and a glass of water and met Steve in the mamad.

“Does this count as a date?” he asked me. Yeah, I think it does.

Mama, we wish you a happy birthday from afar, until we can hug you in person.

Abigail Klein Leichman, a  longtime Jewish Standard correspondent, lived in Teaneck for 20 years. She and her husband made aliyah in 2007 and live in Ma’aleh Adumim.

Abigail Klein Leichman, a longtime Jewish Standard correspondent, lived in Teaneck for 20 years. She and her husband made aliyah in 2007 and live in Ma’aleh Adumim.