‘Thank God, the kids are very resilient’

When the sirens go off, the family just has to go to his 17-year-old daughter’s bedroom, Rabbi Ely Allen said.

That’s the family’s mamad — its safe room — in Ramat Beit Shemesh.

“That can be scary,” Rabbi Allen said; he didn’t mean the sirens, but the 17-year-old girl-ness of the room. “Fortunately, I work with young people, so I remember what it’s like.”

Seriously, though, he and his family do feel safe at home, but “we have relatives who live in Haifa and Bat Yam Rishon. They live just a few blocks away from where a missile fell.” That weapon flew all the way from Iran to kill six Israelis, injure seven more, and demolish the apartment building where they’d lived. “That is really scary,” Rabbi Allen said.

His family is doing well, given the situation, Rabbi Allen said. Three of his four children live at home; the oldest, a 25-year-old daughter, lives in Tel Aviv. “It’s hard for parents with young children, but our youngest is 14, and she’s fine,” he added.

“After October 7, and after being bombed, the situation now, where we finally are attacking the head of the snake, which has been the source of all of this, there is a sense that we have that, yeah, we finally are doing this. That’s a positive sense.

“And thank God, the kids are very resilient.

“Growing up in Englewood, I couldn’t have imagined having to run for a bomb shelter several times a week. That was so foreign that how do you even imagine it? But that’s how it is for the kids, and they’re cool with it.

The Allens are in their mamad, which is also their 17-year-old daughter’s bedroom.

“My 17-year-old daughter is drafting — she’s going to a mechina, a preparatory army program — and she says that she can’t wait to be able to be involved. To be able to do something. After October 7, everyone wants to give something. To do something about the situation. Different people channel that feeling in different ways.”

The town where he and his family live, a suburb of Beit Shemesh, “has a lot of Americans, and a little of everyone, including some chiloni,” Rabbi Allen said. Some secular Jews. “We all live in peace, and we are happy with that,” he said. He likes the variety, and the sense of reality that comes with it.

The next suburb over, Ramat Beit Shemesh Bet, is “all charedi, and tends to be somewhat radical.”

Rabbi Allen grew up in Englewood and lived in Bergenfield until he and his family made aliyah “almost exactly 10 years ago,” he said. “It will be 10 years in August.” Back in New Jersey, he was the Hillel director at the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey for 14 years, overseeing the four local campus Hillels. Since then, he said, Rutgers Hillel took over that job.

Now Rabbi Allen teaches at two yeshivot. Yeshivat Lev HaTorah is a hesder yeshiva — a school that teaches young men, just out of high school, not only the texts that inform their lives as observant Orthodox Jews, but also a deep love of the land and people of Israel. Hesder yeshivot are unusual in that they stress both components, and their students typically go to the IDF. It’s close to where the Allens live.

Yeshivat Lev HaTorah’s students are Anglo, generally not Israeli (or not yet Israeli), and plan to join the IDF as lone soldiers.

Rabbi Allen’s other job is in Tel Aviv, at a school called Torah Tech. “It’s a learning and internship program, and a gap-year program for Americans,” he said. “They have internships three days a week in high-tech companies.”

The two schools are very different, but the students are not; at times young men will spend one year at one school and a second year at the other. “My job is similar at both,” Rabbi Allen said.

“We develop strong bonds,” he continued. “We spend a year learning together.” And that’s because his job involves not only teaching but also “because I have the job of being a mashgiach.” Usually that word is understood to mean someone who oversees kashrut, but it also describes a teacher who is responsible for yeshiva students’ general well-being. “I meet with the guys and give them personal guidance, psychological counseling, just plain encouragement,” he said. “Whatever they need, whether it’s physical or spiritual guidance.”

That’s why he’s particularly close to his students. So on Friday night, “a group of five soldiers stopped by my house, when we were having our soup. My students told us that there will be sirens in a minute, so we should all get ready. So we went upstairs, into our safe room, and I brought up a bottle so we could have a l’chaim.

“A number of these guys are from Teaneck.”

He told the story of a former student, to whom he was very close, who was seriously injured fighting on the northern border last year. It happened on the fast day of the 17th of Tammuz, Rabbi Allen said; that was just about a year ago, on July 23, 2023. “He was really incapacitated,” Rabbi Allen said. “It was really scary. He was hit by shrapnel that went through his eyebrow and got lodged in his brain. For a long time, he wasn’t able to move at all. He wasn’t able to do anything.

“He wasn’t just a guy who came to class. I was very close to him.

“He was in Rambam, in Haifa, for a few months, in bed, and then was transferred. Now, thank God, I just visited him last week. He’s out of the rehabilitation center and just now he’s able to walk on his own. And mentally he’s all there.”

His family and friends were extraordinary too, Rabbi Allen said. “I don’t know anybody who had so many people praying for him and doing things for him. He is someone very special, and his parents and family exerted superhuman effort in being positive, always saying that he’s going to make it. Often, I couldn’t believe it. They said that he would be okay, and I thought that he does not look okay.

“But they powered through.” He will be okay, and “it is unbelievable,” Rabbi Allen said.

“That gave me tremendous hope.”

Hope is just one of the emotions that Rabbi Allen feels. “It is tough,” he said. “At any given moment 100 students or alumni of the yeshiva are on the front lines, in Lebanon or Syria or Judea and Samaria or Gaza.

“And then the students who went back and are on campuses in America and Canada. I’m just as scared for those guys. They send me pictures and videos of what’s going on here, and I’m like, ‘That’s crazy.’

“My job is to best prepare them for whatever they will face when they get out of yeshiva. And given that the world is constantly changing, that becomes very challenging.”

There is something striking going on in Israel now, he said. “It’s what happens when people are under pressure and threat. That’s when the people of Israel come together, for better or worse. It really is a kind of sad thing, but that’s what happens when we’re under pressure. When people try to kill us. Then we say, ‘let’s put aside our differences.’ That’s where people are right now.

“People are trying to go about their lives. Obviously, it’s easier for people who can work remotely. A lot of things are closed. We are in kind of a nationwide state of emergency.”

But he thinks the situation might resolve itself fairly soon. “Iran might be running out of missiles,” he said. “They haven’t been firing as many as they were at the beginning, and we have been getting them either before or as they launch. We have air supremacy.

“We are eliminating the source, so we won’t have the same fear,” he said.