From Safe Rooms to Cruise Evacuation, a Cantor Recalls Past Few Days in Israel

Last Thursday night in Tel Aviv, Josh Goldberg was partying on a rooftop bar, celebrating his friend turning 31-years-old at midnight.

But around 3 a.m. on Friday morning, the celebration came to abrupt halt.

“We got a red alert while on the rooftop,” Goldberg said.

After finding shelter in the bunker of a nearby corporate office building, Goldberg and his friends furiously scanned their phones to figure out what was happening. The headlines explained Israel had struck Iran and was expecting Iran to retaliate.

The days that followed saw Goldberg, a former Angeleno and current cantor at a Reform congregation in Tennessee, hurrying in and out of safe rooms in Tel Aviv as a barrage of missiles rained down on Israel, which he was visiting as part of a Birthright Israel Volunteer program.

The experience culminated with an unexpected departure out of Israel on June 17.

In what’s being described as a “remarkable and unprecedented emergency operation,” Birthright Israel chartered a luxury Israeli cruise ship that evacuated more than 1,500 program participants, including Goldberg, from Israel to Cyprus, on Tuesday.

The ship, operated by Mano Maritime, a Haifa-based company that offers holiday cruises, departed from Israel’s Ashdod port in Israel and set sail to Larnaca, Cyprus—an approximately 13-hour voyage that was “conducted under the close protection of the Israeli Navy, which escorted the vessel across the Mediterranean to ensure the participants’ safety amid ongoing regional tensions,” according to a Birthright Israel statement.

Birthright Israel secured the cruise ship as part of a “strategic effort to begin repatriating nearly 2,800 international participants—the majority of whom are young adults from the United States—who have been stranded in Israel due to the escalating conflict with Iran,” the organization said.

Priority was given to those who were nearing the end of their 10-day Birthright trip.

Upon arrival in Cyprus, the participants were being flown to Tampa, Florida on four wide-body planes chartered by the State of Florida in an effort being led by Florida Governor Ron Desantis.

From there, the participants will continue to their respective hometowns, Birthright’s statement said.

Birthright fully covered all transportation costs, including sea and air travel.

Goldberg, a cantor at Congregation Micah in Nashville, Tennessee, was among those onboard the ship. At the time of Israel’s attack on Iran, the Jewish musician was in Israel for a Birthright Israel Volunteer program held in partnership with tour provider Israel Outdoors.

He spoke with me via email as he prepared to board the cruise ship that would begin his journey back to Nashville.

Goldberg described the several preceding days as both harrowing and unforgettable, an experience that affirmed his support for Israel in the face of neighbors that would like to see the world’s only Jewish state eradicated.

“We came to Israel to volunteer, little did we know we were volunteering to witness an historic turning point in the war,” Goldberg said. “Despite how terrifying it was to be under attack from hundreds of rockets, drones, and ballistic missiles from both Iran and Yemen during what we expected to be a routine trip, nobody in our cohort was upset or remorseful about coming—rather we are all filled with pride for our homeland having the courage to stand up to the Iranian regime.”

At the time of Israel’s attack on Iran, Goldberg was staying at a youth hostel in Tel Aviv while spending his days volunteering at sites in Israel’s south, including at an agriculture center in Netivot, an Israeli village just a short drive from Gaza. There, he and his fellow volunteers spent hours “cutting twine used to grow cucumbers,” Goldberg explains on an online blog published on his synagogue’s website, which documents his time in Israel.

Goldberg’s group also toured sites attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7, including Sderot, Kibbutz Re’im and the Nova music festival site.

Following Israel’s attack on Iran, Goldberg and his friends spent a lot of their waking hours in bomb shelters. On Friday night, after a Kabbalat Shabbat service in their Tel Aviv youth hostel, an alert from Israel’s Home Front Command sent Goldberg and the 200 other hostel guests hurrying to the hostel’s safe rooms. More missile barrages occurred throughout the night.

Saturday, he said, was a relatively quiet day.

On Sunday, Birthright moved all its trip participants to the Royal Hotel in Ein Bokek, a seaside resort on the Dead Sea. The thinking was this was a more secure location for the trip participants, Goldberg said.

“Birthright felt this would be a safer and more remote location to keep us all together,” he said. “We still had rocket alerts while we were there, but significantly less firepower was directed to the area than in Tel Aviv where many rockets sadly made contact.”

Born and raised in Dallas, Goldberg moved to Los Angeles to study music at USC before completing a Master of Sacred Music and receiving cantor ordination from Academy of Jewish Religion, CA. While in Los Angeles, he served as a cantorial intern at Temple Akiba and Stephen Wise Temple. At Congregation Micah, a Reform community in Nashville, he teaches religious school and bar and bat mitzvah students, among other duties. He’s released four full-length albums of Jewish music.