Yesterday both my mobile and the cordless phone went dead. Nothing terminal, their batteries ran out of juice because we have been talking so much. They haven’t enough ‘rest time’ to charge up properly.
I am still trying to keep in touch with the various members of our congregation still in town but as the war continues I am getting through to more and more answering machines. I can only assume that people have moved to safety in the center of Israel.
On Monday I phoned a gentleman in his eighties to check if he was still receiving food from the Naharia municipality. His wife had traveled to family in the center of Israel and was desperate to convince him to join her. Meanwhile she was terrified that he was dodging katuyshas on the street in the search for food.
He was quite cheerful when I spoke to him but bored. I asked how long he’d lived in Israel and he told me how he came the first time in 1939 and joined the Haganah. Then in WWII he joined the British army and was one of Montgomery’s Desert Rats, dashing round on a motorcycle delivering messages. Exciting Stories, especially for a history enthusiast like me.
Next day it seems he had had enough of the boredom and finally let his wife convince him to join her.
I seem to spend a lot of my day on the phone checking up on people and try to break the boredom with a little chat. I don’t really like talking on the phone: that ring-ring is so preemptory and demanding and if I talk for long I get earache. But at present we really have no other alternative for people not reliably connected to the Internet.
My friend from the congregation phones me every couple of days. We are still trying to do some of our volunteer work: keeping up to date with members of our congregation, informing our ‘twin’ congregations in the USA about our situation and doing some fund raising so we can rebuild our congregation once this mayhem is over. We also chat and exchange personal news. It is a pleasant break in my day.
Afterwards we pass the phones to our daughters who chitchat away on their own matters. My daughter enjoys having an outlet for her ‘frontline’ stories, a female companion to discuss things with instead of her brother.
And then of course there are phone calls to my parents. We normally see them several times a week. Now we can’t visit so much but they phone at least once a day to inquire after the children and me.
They can’t take a day out because of their menagerie of animals (4 dogs and 15+ cats) and my mother is getting a little worn down by it all. My Dad is less bothered. He has lived through several Israeli wars and spent twenty years on a kibbutz near Kiryat Shmona, much of the time with Syria on the Golan Heights taking potshots at Israeli farmers whenever they felt like it. He was even security chief (Or Sheriff as they called him) for a while.
My mother always struggles in the heat of an Israeli summer so she tries to spend a month or so in England each year. Her plane ticket was already booked but she was unsure whether she should go and felt she was abandoning us.
We had a long chat and I explained that it would be easier knowing she was in England. While she is here I feel a certain responsibility that I should be around to help, especially as she understands so little Hebrew, and that restricts my own options.
Although I am concerned for Dad, being under fire is not new to him and I know he would be able to cope if we went away for a couple of days.
They also had the problem of how to get to the airport. There is almost no public transport this side of Haifa. My mother had to be at Ben Gurion airport by 2am and I didn’t really fancy having my Dad make a four-hour round trip in the middle of the night. A quick call to my car-crazy, totally fantastic husband solved the problem – he would drive them.
ES
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