May 27, 2024

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-05-26

Hi. I'm Joseph Zitt. I moved from the US to Israel in 2017. This is my newsletter about more-or-less daily life in my city in the shadow of war. You can select these links to subscribe or unsubscribe. There are more links at the bottom. You can also read this email online here. Here we go...

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This must be what "hits close to home" means. Shrapnel from the latest terrorist attack has wrecked an elderly woman's apartment and injured her caregiver -- six blocks from where I live, three blocks from the House of a Hundred Grandmothers.

We hear the sirens exactly at 2 PM, right as, I'm told, kids are walking home from school. I'm a little confused.

My phone usually sounds the alarm just before we hear them from outdoors. It hasn't this time. I realize, after a moment, that I had gotten this phone since the last rocket attacks, four months ago. I had installed the Home Front Command app, but hadn't connected it to Location Services. The app doesn't know where I am.

The other men in my office and I are headed toward the hallway for the afternoon prayers. It's hard to tell whether the word that people start calling out is tillim, "rockets" or t'hillim, "psalms."

We all clomp into the stairwell. We start to hear booms, closer and louder than we have in the past. The loudspeaker blurts a couple of announcements, but none of us can tell what it's saying.

We head back out sooner than we should. Some people are eager to get the afternoon prayers happening on time. I wait a bit, but then leave the stairwell when my boss does.

The staff at the House, as usual, has everything under control. They make sure that everyone is in the reinforced spaces and hallways, then let them know when it is safe to go back.

One branch of my family, living near the beach, tells us that they haven't had enough time to get to their shelter. They've hunkered down in their living room, as far as possible from the outer walls and windows of their house.

News flies back and forth on WhatsApp. The news sources have different information.

Walla News¹ tells us that two women in our town have been slightly injured while running for their shelters.

The Jerusalem Post says² that shrapnel hit a parked car in our city, and that one person here was slightly injured by shrapnel.

The Times of Israel reports,³ linking to video in a tweet from the national Kan broadcasters,⁴ that a home in our city was damaged when shrapnel crashed into a bedroom. My family discovers just how close it is: six blocks from me, three blocks from them.

A later article from Ynet⁵ ties the information together. It has more video and images from the damaged house. An 85-year-old woman lives there. She was unhurt.

When she and her caregiver heard the alarms, they had stood between two walls, in one of the safer places in their home, until the sirens ended. We're always told to wait in ta safe place for ten minutes, because shrapnel can take that long to fall. They didn't. They went to sit down on a couch two minutes later.

The resident got to the couch OK, but the shrapnel hit their roof before the caregiver got there. Much of the ceiling collapsed into a bedroom. The caregiver was thrown to the ground and crawled outside. Fortunately, people there were able to help, and EMS took her to the hospital.

It's a good thing, relatively speaking, that the attack wasn't at night. The shrapnel had come through the ceiling right above the caregiver's bed.

The rockets came from a city at the south end of the fighting. Bureaucrats thousands of miles away are officially demanding that our troops just walk away from the terrorists who are attacking us. The terrorists themselves appear, for once, to have a clearer view of things. The Ynet report says that they're trying to use up the rockets that they have left before we find and disable them.

By the time that I leave work, five hours later, there's no sign that anything has happened. No one is acting any differently. Acting differently wouldn't do much good. We just keep going and stay alert. Last summer, most of us didn't know where the bomb shelters near where we walk are. Now we do.

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Here’s an archive of past newsletters.

You can find me via email, Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, and, just out of inertia, X/Twitter. There's more about me and my books, music, and films at josephzitt.com.

The newsletter’s official mailing address is 304 S. Jones Blvd #3567, Las Vegas NV 89107. (I’m in Israel, but if physical mail comes to me at that Las Vegas address, it’ll get scanned and emailed. I don’t expect that to happen much. If you want to send me physical mail, ask me for a real address.)

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L'hitraot.