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Friday May 30, 1997

From a bomb shelter, Jerusalem was a simpler place

JOSEPH BERKOFSKY
Bulletin Staff

It began with the echo of hammering.

Staccato bursts ricocheted outside as my first-grade classroom suddenly filled with screaming, crying schoolmates and frantic teachers.

I was 7 years old and mystified. I wondered why the construction of the new Henrietta Szold school wing in Jerusalem's Rehavia neighborhood was stirring such hysteria.

Parents began appearing and whisking my friends away without explanation.

My father arrived. In an unusually calm voice, he said: "Don't be afraid. We're going to run to the car and duck down."

When I asked why, he replied, "There's a war going on. There are bullets flying over us."

I looked up, and sure enough the sky was filled with black streaks -- the gunfire of Israeli soldiers firing at the Jordanian front one quarter of a mile away.

The Six-Day War had broken out.

It was less than a five-minute drive home. But instead of heading into the apartment where my family was living in 1966-67, we ran straight into the building's ground-floor bomb shelter.

A thick steel door shut behind us, and we were in a dank, dark room that became our home for the next six days.

The days and nights blended one into the other, punctuated by the sounds of war: machine-gun fire, exploding shells. The adults spoke in hushed tones and kept their ears glued to shortwave transistor radios.

They were hoping to learn whether Israel would live, or if we would all die.

At one point, I envisioned marauding Arab armies bursting into our shelter and doing God-knows-what to us.

I asked my father whether the Arabs could break through the shelter's cement walls or steel door.

"Don't worry," he said. "We're safe here."

Years later he admitted he was as scared as I.

The war was not exactly a shock. That spring, Arab rhetoric was filled with violence: Promises to liberate Palestine and drive the Jews into the sea came daily. As Egypt, Jordan and Syria coordinated their buildup to war, we in Israel prepared.

It was exciting. I grabbed a shovel and helped fill sandbags. I played war games with friends, brandishing a wooden Uzi that shot rubber bands. We Israelis, of course, were the good guys.

After we survived a few days, even the war seemed exhilarating. At night we would open the shelter door and watch bullet tracers streak a sky lit by flares.

More daring sheltermates, tired of the musty room, relaxed in our first-floor apartment -- until a deafening roar jolted the building and they came running to join us.

A Jordanian shell had struck in front of our house, blasting a huge crater in the road. Our Volvo station wagon was hit -- its roof torn open by shrapnel like a tin can.

Then it was over. We walked downtown, to the streets that had once ended in walls where they met Jordanian East Jerusalem. I had wondered what lay on the other side.

Now there were only rubble and barbed wire -- and Arabs on the other side. We stared, they stared back.

Then we and thousands of others streamed into the Old City to see the Wailing Wall. I remember hot dust burning my throat, and people dancing the hora.

We were swept up in euphoria. The world marveled at the underdog Jewish state's stunning military -- and what was largely seen as a moral victory.

I posed for a photo with an Israeli paratrooper at the Wall. To me the soldiers were God-like, and I wanted to be one.

Buoyed by that heady sabbatical year in Jerusalem, my family made aliyah in 1974. Yet never again has Israel seemed so simple as it did during those six days in June.

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