Yom HaDin - The Jewish Standard

Rodfei Shalom on Clinton Place in Newark was the shul I didn’t go to.

Of course, the rest of our family were frequent attendees and active on the shul’s board. So every Yom Kippur I would make a cameo appearance, heading straight to the front row where the family’s men sat, kiss Zayda and Pop, my two grandfathers, and then make a graceful escape. This visit would be repeated the following year.

The family’s women were on the other side of the mechitza, whispering among themselves, never even noticing my entrances and exits.

My sister followed a similar pattern. In our Weequahic community we kids hung around outside the shuls. The interiors were for grownups until the boys our age started to have bar mitzvahs. But as a young kid, shul was not for me. Even on our holiest day.

I can chronicle my life around those Days of Atonement, part of our annual cycle known as the Days of Awe. But to be totally honest, in my youngest days I was neither atoning nor awestruck! Nonetheless, Yom Kippur was often not just an ordinary day in the sequence of my life. Sometimes things happened on Yom Kippur.

I was born on erev Yom Kippur — September 21, 1939. I learned much later that the world was in turmoil. Things would not get better for years to come. But for me, the baby and eventual little kid, all was normal. What did I know about Hitler and concentration camps? Now we can only pray that this year our prayers will receive a better answer than those of 85 years ago, when millions of our people were condemned to premature deaths. Hope springs eternal.

I spent another momentous Yom Kippur, 31 years later, in 1970, the day my son was born. I remember my Jewish doctor being frustrated that the birth was not progressing quickly enough for him to coincide with shul attendance. This was, after all, my fourth child, a boy after three girls, and the good doctor expected the baby to sail out. He didn’t, and the doctor showed some annoyance.

At around 7:30 a.m. the young man made his appearance, and the doctor dashed off to shul.

Just three years later, that little boy and his sisters lived through Yom Kippur in Jerusalem, as Israel was attacked from every direction in the shocking and unexpected Yom Kippur War. We were not long-distance observers on that terrible day. We were residents of 3 Rehov Etzel, a three-bedroom apartment on Jerusalem’s French Hill, also known as Givat Hatzarfartit.

The opening salvos were not all that dramatic. The shul across the street had just begun a break in the davening. I was home, sick with a strep throat, and the older two children were somewhere in the neighborhood playing with friends. The two little ones, still toddlers, were busy with Esther, our downstairs neighbor’s daughter, who was a constant playmate of both of our kids, falling in age right between them.

And then the phone rang!

I am not the most machmir Jew in this world. But a phone ringing on Yom Kippur is definitely either a mistake or horrible news. Without benefit of caller I.D., lucky even to have a phone at all, I panicked and answered the call. It was my sister in Ramat Gan. Did we notice that young men were being called out of shul? Something was happening, and it wasn’t good.

Moments later an air-raid siren began blasting in our neighborhood. There was no doubt as to what it was. Our building quickly evacuated to the bomb shelter beneath us. Our dog, Gringo, must have been thinking, I left America in old age for this?

Soon we heard the all-clear, so we all climbed up to the entrance lobby and convened. Someone suggested we turn on the radio. We had no idea what we were dealing with. Others said that it was Yom Kippur, and listening to the radio was forbidden. Back and forth the pilpel went, the discussion being so vehement as to even allay the fear of the unknown. Finally, one of our neighbors, in a moment of rebelliousness, simply turned on the radio. Even the most passionately opposed listened intently. There was only music. It told us enough. In the midst of our holiest day our radio was playing distinctly military music. We were at war!

Somehow daylight passed into darkness. The holy day was over. Television and radio broadcast the news. And to us innocents, how could we know that it was even worse than it seemed. And it continued to be worse than it seemed until it turned for the better and we had won a devastating war.

I was a totally inexperienced warrior. Luckily, my children didn’t starve. I assumed I had time to do food shopping, but in fact the shelves were already cleared of whatever they had to offer by our neighbors, who were far wiser than this girl from Newark. Many of them had grown up in war-torn places. They knew what to do. I did not!

Fortunately, black-market eggs were abundant. We subsisted on them, paying a large fortune but getting our protein. Even Gringo became an egg lover.

Contributing to the war effort was even more of a challenge. Luckily, we had a nice big Peugeot station wagon, with its headlights painted blue per military orders. My husband drove through the West Bank on a route from Jerusalem to Beit Shahn to transport soldiers. He wanted to be a soldier — but without training and at age 33, they didn’t want or need him.

And, remarkably, on schedule the sukkot went up! I will always remember that, in the midst of a terrible war, the sukkot went up on time! How could that be?

Now, as we approach another Yom Kippur, and our chayalim are again preparing for battle, one thing I know for sure, yet again we will pray for peace in our beloved land, and for the return of our hostages.

We know the sukkot will go up on time!

Rosanne Skopp of West Orange is a wife, mother of four, grandmother of 14, and great-grandmother of eight. She is a graduate of Rutgers University and a dual citizen of the United States and Israel. She is a lifelong blogger, writing blogs before anyone knew what a blog was! She welcomes email at rosanne.skopp@gmail.com

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