Tel Aviv, Yom Kippur 1973

Right before my first Yom Kippur in Israel everyone told me that it was going to be a very special day. No radio, no television, no cars on the streets, absolutely no stores open, nothing. It turned out even more special than we had bargained for.

Some friends and I were relaxing in my little ground floor apartment on Arba Aratsot St in north Tel Aviv when a sound pierced the silence. We looked at each other in almost disbelieving shock. It took us a few moments to realize that it was a siren. We all ran out into the street.

Engraved in my memory is the sight of a man who lived next door sort of running/hopping in his underwear trying to get his army pants on while racing to get to his unit as fast as he could. Within minutes all of the men in the area were outside running, many of them barefoot, buttoning shirts, carrying socks and boots and rifles. The sirens were going off and the radios were blasting from each apartment terrace repeating and repeating strange and disconnected words that meant nothing to me but were code names for units that were being called up.

Within half an hour, other than the radio and the sirens, it was eerily quiet. The street was filled with women, children and old men who were whispering to one another, everyone asking for news. Goodbye Yom Kippur.

By evening, when cars started driving in Tel Aviv, high school kids appeared on every corner with buckets of blue paint. They stopped each car and smeared the paint on all of the headlights and brake lights so the lights couldn't be seen from the sky. They did it very quickly, not very quietly, and their excitement was almost palpable.

That night there was a total blackout. It was announced by loud speakers throughout the city (and, I assume, the entire country). I heard people outside shouting, but didn't understand what they were saying. Turned out they were shouting at me! I had no idea about the blackout. Finally, there was loud knocking on my door. When I opened the door, several people started yelling at me in highly colloquial (and what sounded like very angry) Hebrew. I didn't understand a word they were saying so they plowed into my apartment and started turning off my lights. Then I understood. I didn't know then about blackout paper and that you could cover your windows with it and no light would shine through. For the entire three week blackout I sat in the dark every night...well...I did have one small candle and I placed it under the sink in my bathroom (the only room where the window was very small). I shaded it so it couldn't be seen (I was scared of my neighbors) and, sitting on the bathroom floor, wrote in my journal for hours.

On several nights during the war the sirens went off at about 4am. We all had to go down to the bomb shelter in the basement as Tel Aviv was under missile attack from Jordan. One night we found that the whole basement was flooded by the heavy October rains. There were several mothers with babies and small children and I thought the mood would be very tense, but in typical Israeli fashion, there was tremendous camaraderie and the talk combined black humor and uneasy bravado. Lucky for us all, the bombs always overshot and landed in the Mediterranean a few blocks away.

Unable to sleep much, I walked for miles and miles every night all over Tel Aviv. For the entire three weeks of the blackout there was also no moon (actually, this may have been a good thing as the Jordanians kept shelling us occasionally), so the nights were very dark. They were also sad and poignant and very special, unlike anything I have every known.

Spoleto-Colorado-New York-Tel Aviv

Just before I arrived in Israel for the first time (on January 8, 1973), I had been touring in Colorado with Dean William A. Owens of Columbia University. We were doing a show called "The Frontier in Song and Story". He was the story and I was the song. We were performing for the National Humanities Series (of the the National Endowment for the Humanities) in Colorado. Denver was buried under several feet of glorious white snow and Grand Junction, where we spent several days, had snowdrifts so high, they belonged in a winter museum.

I got back home (to a tiny apartment in the East Village) after the tour. New York City was very depressing at the end of December, 1972. The city was going bankrupt, garbage was everywhere (swimming in partially melted black slush), homeless people (including those turned out of mental hospitals that were closing their doors for lack of funding) were sleeping on many of the subway grates for the little bit of warmth that rose up from below. The city felt almost unlivable.

At the time, in addition to touring with the National Humanities Series, I was also a young actress/singer with the La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, one of the great off-off Broadway theatres that began in the 1960s. Ellen Stewart, (then as now), was the iconic head of La Mama. We were good friends (more about Ellen and La Mama soon) and I went to her and begged her to send me back to Europe where I felt I then belonged.

I'd been in La Mama since 1971, performing wonderful modern theatre on East Fourth St in New York City. Every summer we'd go to Europe and perform in many of the great festivals, including the Berlin Festwochen, the Vienna Festival, the Dubrovnik (then Yugoslavia) Festival, and of course, the Spoleto Festival in Spoleto, Italy. During the summer of 1972, while performing in Spoleto, I went to a pre-performance reception on the top floor of composer Gian Carlo Menotti's palazzo and fell down an entire staircase. The steps were like glass. There is a painting of the palazzo in the Spoleto Duomo Square in the Vatican Museum that dates back more than 1000 years. People had been climbing those steps for a long, long time and had worn smooth, deep grooves in the middle of them. I ended up in Spoleto Hospital with a broken nose and bad concussion and had to stay in Italy for several months. So I studied Italian at the Universita Per Stranieri (literally, University for Strangers) in Perugia and fell totally in love with Italy and with all of Europe, as only a young American (experiencing it for the first time) can.

Ellen Stewart's amazing loft was on top of the La Mama building and it was filled with wonderful items from her travels all over the world. She called the Paris branch of La Mama (where I had taught voice the year before...another story...) every night at 2AM but didn't reach the group (turned out they were performing in Avignon). After a few nights of this, Ellen said to me "You're Jewish, you've never been to Israel" and called Rina Yerushalmi in Tel Aviv. Rina, a superb director, was the head of the Tel Aviv branch of La Mama (which performed in a public bomb shelter) and within a week I landed in Tel Aviv with a small backpack, my guitar, Appalachian dulcimer and Irish Minstrel harp.

Oh yes, by way of introduction, my name (now) is Sandra Bendor. I was born Sandra Lee Yasney, in Paterson, NJ, on April 7, 1948. I was called Sandy as a child. I have also been called Sandra Frimerman (my first husband's name) and Sandra Johnson (this is how I was known professionally in Israel...long story).