The Yom Kippur War: A Story of Love and Friendship

In early October 1973, my wife, Betty, was living at Kibbutz Amir in the Upper Galilee’s Hula Valley, where she worked half days in the orchards and studied at an ulpan during the other half.

On Friday, Oct. 5, 1973 she took the four-hour ride from the closest city with a bus station, Kiryat Shmona, in order to spend Yom Kippur with her relatives in Tel Aviv. By early Saturday afternoon, Oct. 6, they’d been fasting for 18 hours when, shockingly, they heard noises: tires screeching, cars pulling out of driveways.

Sabche, Betty’s aunt, was worried. “She said something ‘serious’ was happening,” Betty recalled. “Nobody drives in Israel on Yom Kippur.” Minutes later, an alarm sounded.

The Yom Kippur War had started.

Betty’s thoughts were with her friends at Amir: those at the ulpan (a school for the intensive study of Hebrew) as well as kibbutz members, including her Hebrew teacher, who’d become a surrogate father to her. She knew most men in the kibbutz would be mobilized. By the third day away from the kibbutz, Betty felt she had to go back.

“It’s crazy,” Sabche told her. “You’ll be in a war zone.” Betty reasoned that if there was a bus going to Kiryat Shmona, it meant things were OK up north. She went to Tel Aviv’s Central Bus Station, where she felt comforted by the crowds, a sign of normalcy. Buses were leaving, so she caught one that was half-full to Kiryat Shmona.

As the bus got closer to Kiryat Shmona, people got off, leaving fewer and fewer passengers. It got dark outside and what had at first seemed safe became terrifying. When the bus arrived, there was only one other passenger — and he lived in Kiryat Shmona.

She got off the bus and looked around. “Every window in Kiryat Shmona was blacked out,” she recalled. “It was scary but I had no way of returning to Tel Aviv.”

There was a war going on, and she was alone. Shakily, she walked toward Amir. “I don’t remember how I got to Amir, but I got there. I probably hitchhiked. It was a 10-minute ride. At Amir, there were no lights. It was hard to walk around. I made my way by memory to the dining room and went inside. They’d blacked out all the windows, but inside, there was light.

“When I went in, they looked at me like I was an apparition. ‘How did you make it here? What the hell are you doing here?’ I said I felt it was better to come back and do whatever’s needed instead of being back in Tel Aviv doing nothing.

“At Amir, the windows were blacked out, explosions on the mountains, fires, planes flying low. There were alarms and we had to run to shelters, where the children slept. It was a different feeling from Tel Aviv. I wasn’t scared, but it felt like a war zone.

“One day, I was walking with my ulpan teacher. We saw two soldiers at the kibbutz gate and he said, ‘What’s going on?’ I asked him what he was afraid of. He said he doesn’t like to see soldiers coming into the kibbutz in time of war; it means they’re bringing bad news — maybe a kibbutz member has been killed.

“I remember getting together with some soldiers who’d been on the front lines in the Golan and they’d been given two days off. The soldiers looked tired, wasted. I had the feeling the situation was bad. I remember a young woman, a kibbutz member, toasted them with ‘L’chayim aruchim,’ to a long life …. It was very poignant in that situation, in the middle of a war, with these soldiers on temporary leave, not knowing if they were going to survive.”

Betty and I had met in Argentina in 1971. As a couple, we wandered Latin America and Europe with little money. In February 1973, eight months before the Yom Kippur War, we landed in Israel with $20 in our wallets, and became volunteers at Kibbutz Netiv Helamed Hei in the Valley of Elah.

Our closest friends there were Shumach and Yael, members of the kibbutz, a married couple with no children. Everyone, including Yael, called him Shumach, his last name. We spent a lot of time with them, and the four of us traveled together throughout Israel. Once, when Shumach pointed out for the umpteenth time the historical importance of a place we visited, I said, “Does every spot in Israel have a biblical connection?”

“Small country,” Shumach said. “Big book.”

By June 1973, we’d been at Netiv Helamed Hei for four months. We liked it but didn’t want to feel that staying there was our only option. I had received a small tax refund and decided to use it to travel overland to an Asian port where, as a professional deckhand, I could get work on an American merchant ship. Meanwhile, Betty was set on going to a kibbutz with an ulpan so she could refresh the Hebrew she had learned as a student.

Betty recalled that “the night before we left Netiv Helamed Hei, Shumach and another kibbutz member came to our volunteer shack. We were in bed already; it was late. I remember they saw us in bed and stood in the doorway and pleaded with us to return to the kibbutz and become members, l’hishtoresh, get rooted there.” We were deeply touched by that.

During the next few months, while Betty lived at Amir, I worked as an able seaman in the Persian Gulf. After the Yom Kippur War started, those days in October after she returned to Amir from Tel Aviv, the ship I worked on happened to be in Dammam, Saudi Arabia.

While war was raging, Betty was in Israel, near the Golan, and I was in Saudi Arabia.

I read Time and Newsweek magazines, but all mention of Israel had been blacked out, pages torn out. I contacted my parents, who lived in Baltimore, and they communicated with Amir. Betty and I relayed our messages via my parents and assured each other we were OK. We also made plans on how and where to get back together.

Fast forward to July 1974, seven months later. Betty and I are in New York; she’s pregnant with our first child. We aren’t sure what our next move will be. Should we remain in the U.S.? Go back to Argentina? What about Israel?

We contacted Netiv Helamed Hei and received tragic news: On Yom Kippur, Shumach, our dear friend, was on reserve duty in the Sinai and was killed during the first hour of the war, which lasted Oct. 6-25, 1973.

We remembered that thoroughly human, loving moment when Shumach barged in while we were in bed, how he stood in the doorway and pleaded with us to come back and establish roots. How could we refuse him now — now that he had given his life for Israel? We owed it to him, owed it to that moment when he stood in the doorway and asked us to come back.

And yes, we did go back. We became members of Netiv Helamed Hei, lived and worked there for two years, and our older son, Rafi, was born while we were there.

After we left the kibbutz, we lived for more than five years in Jerusalem before moving to Los Angeles.