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.