Yesterday I got a telephone call from the mayor of Kiryat Bialik who asked me if I could make visits to the public shelters to give people spiritual support. And that was my task today in the morning. Together with the director of the Education Department we went over some of these shelters (miklatim tziburim). They are made to give shelter to people who don’t have a shelter in their house or in their apartment building, especially in the old neighborhoods where the houses were built without these kinds of shelters. People who inhabit these shelters, you may remember, are located in central places (squares), in general decide to move in, live and sleep there with all their family. This deeply disarranges life and people suffer crisis due to the fact they have to live in an unknown place.
I want to share with you two situations I had to handle today and that show how war affects all aspects of life:
In one of the shelters a young man approached me to ask something about work, and, in the middle of the conversation he told me he was to marry next Sunday, he had everything ready, the reception room, the invited people, the rabbi and because of the situation they were obliged to suspend everything. He told me this with tears in his eyes but also with hope, tears because of what he had lost and hope for the end of the war in brief so he could get married.
In the same shelter, a man approached me to ask for my assistance, and he told me he lives in Sderot and that he came to Bialik because his brother died and he was in the last day of Shivah and he asked me to get for him chairs and tables for the seuda and access to the mikveh (ritual bath) since after the shivah he wants to make tevilah. With both men I talked about the situation and the unexpected changes in their lives.
When I left the shelter with both different sensations and situations in my mind, a postponed wedding and shivah in the public shelter, I thought life goes on and even in the shelter everyone needs to adapt oneself to the situation to go on with life.
It’s not easy, yesterday we heard 6 sirens, today up to now (I hope there won’t be any more) ; we run to the shelter with every one of them to look for a protected place. Between every siren we stay constantly alert and every sound we hear it looks as if we should run again.
