A Vancouver woman has recently returned from Israel after being caught up in its violent and deadly conflict with Hamas.
Jean Gerber and a friend spent days in bomb shelters and ended up scrambling to get a flight home.
She told Global News she spent last Friday afternoon shopping, and after eating dinner, the two read some books and went to bed, “assuming that in the morning, we would wake up to a Jerusalem that is still quiet because everything is closed.” Friday sunset to Saturday sunrise is a period of rest called Shabbat in Judaism.
But at 6:30 a.m., Gerber said they heard the first sirens going off.
“I knew that was a bad sign.”
They spent the next two days going in and out of the apartment building’s refuge room every time a siren went off.
Then they started hearing planes and missiles and were glued to TV news coverage.
“By Monday, our kids had phoned and said, ‘You have to come out. You have to come home,’” Gerber said.
“Even though I feel like we kind of abandoned (the Israelis) to their fate, there was no denying. So as soon as the airport opened, we started finding flights out.”
Five Canadians are known to have died when Hamas militants breached the Gaza boundary with explosives and carried out mass killings on Oct. 7. Two are still missing.
Gerber said the first thing they felt was shock and horror at what was happening.
“It’s like you can’t take it into your brain at first,” she said. “After a day or so, and as the pictures kept coming out, some taken by the terrorists themselves, others from the festival, and then people in the cities that were still being attacked, it began to sink in.”
But Gerber said it didn’t fully register for her until she was back on Canadian soil.
“It was last Saturday morning when I was back here. I went to synagogue with my family and they recited a prayer I have never heard. It is a prayer for the release of captives … that prayer was created for the Middle Ages when Jews were being kidnapped by pirates or taken hostage by competing forces, and they would hold them for ransom because they knew that one of the commandments is to ransom captives. You don’t leave them in captivity. You bring them home, whatever it costs.
“And that’s when I think I kind of lost it, because who could imagine that prayer being said in the 21st century for Jews who’ve been captured, in effect, by pirates, I don’t know, by terrorists, and their fate totally unknown? So that’s when I really lost it.”
As Israelis mourn their 1,400 dead and debate how best to deal with Hamas, they are also deeply worried about the estimated 200 whom the militant group took prisoner during the incursion.
Foreign nationals, including two Canadians, Vivian Silver, 74, and Judith Einstein Haggai, 70, are among those believed to have been taken to Gaza.
Gerber said she knows she was lucky to fly back to Canada with the help of her son-in-law who is a travel agent.
“That massacre was unbelievable,” she said. “Unbelievable. And as a woman, I don’t need to tell you the fear that I have for people who were taken.”
But she said she would go back in a heartbeat.
“I have no intention of abandoning my love for Israel or my desire to go back and, you know, support it and see more of it,” she said.
“It’s an infinitely amazing little country. It’s smaller than Vancouver Island, and you can drive it in less than a day. And to fly across it takes one minute in a jet plane — one minute and you’re across or up and down, depending on which way you go. And I would never, never consider not doing that. But perhaps my children won’t want to hear that. But I fully intend to go back as often as I can, given my age.”
– with files from Stewart Bell
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