19 Days and 50 Years: the Yom Kippur War

Apocalyptic recollections of the life and death meaning of Yom Kippur, when Egypt and Syria invaded Israel.

(updated note: Published, then deleted; pondered over, struggled with, cursed myself about: "...why the HELL are you again publicly airing dirty family laundry and practically begging family, friends, and strangers to 'love me; love my angst', and poke holes in an essay that cuts very close - too close to, in fact, the bone" - and then republished (thanks to the urging of a trusted journo pal).

(Because recognizing and coping with PTSD is a good enough reason to come out of the shadows, as a journalist, a husband and a father - and, primarily - as a retired reporter who for years has often vocally yearned for personal honesty and professional integrity in news gathering and reporting from others. And, in turn, can only but demand the same from myself.

(Your comments are welcome. I think.)

Images I've shot or shared over the years of the IDF, reserve duty maneuvers, and the view from the decommissioned army lookout atop Mt. Bental, along the Syrian border.

Fifty years after the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War I am still haunted by memories of neighbors’ frantic reserve military call-ups, the sudden appearance of blackout curtains over our apartment windows, and high school student volunteers hurriedly daubing dark blue slits on car headlights to lessen the accuracy of feared Egyptian or Syrian bombers targeting the capital.

Back in May of the same year, I attended the impressive 25th Yom Ha'atzmaut Independence Day parade in Jerusalem with my dad, with a perfect viewing spot across from the Office of the Chief Rabbinate, along the central King George Avenue.

IDF tanks and halftracks chewed up the pavement, as rank upon rank of infantry soldiers marched by. Above, I froze and ducked from the sky-ripping roar of Air Force Phantom jets as they screamed over our heads at what I took to be near-rooftop altitude.

Five years after the epic ‘67 War triumph, the government and generals were fairly drunk with hubris, and it was matched by the thrilled crowds, with my dad and I among them.

“I could not forget that these men and women guarded me as long as I lived in Israel; they guarded and protected the Jewish state and all of its people,” as former JPost columnist and colleague, Sybil Kaplan observed.

“On Sunday, the sun was shining warmly and the roads were closed. Planes flew overhead in fancy formations. It was questioned whether the parade was a representative way to show 25 years of statehood. The Israelis on the street had no question in their minds. They wanted glory, victory, strength and power to show the world and themselves.”

Oh, how the nation reveled in the day, that shining moment in the sun, where the presumed bowed ghetto Jew of the past was replaced by the tanned, scruffy, impetuous and daring Sabra.

Or so we thought, until the “New Jew,” brimming with fierce vigor and swagger, was abruptly slammed, bloodied and broken, to the edge of national destruction, and a horrifying potential retreat back to a former, stateless, status of loathed victim.

The chaotic outbreak of the war caught me during a hot, dusty afternoon at my junior-high agricultural boarding school; then a secular teen unfamiliar with the sanctity of the - day let alone synagogue and fasting - my dad rushed up to collect me, and we hurried back to our modest apartment in Jerusalem to hunker down until - well, at the outset we didn't know just how traumatic an experience awaited a stunned Israel - and my dad and me.

Watching in the dark, on a blurry black and white television, Israel news presenter, Dahlia Mazor, read the grimly rising casualty reports against a backdrop of maps showing IDF and enemy troop movement in contrasting arrows in both the Golan and Sinai. Among them, many of our school teachers and staff who disappeared to the fronts - some never to return, others never to recover. It was such a profoundly devastating period as an entire nation realized it was a hairsbreadth away from annihilation.

The palpable sense of dread over "HaMatzav" - the sitrep - was, at the outset, so dire according to apparently accurate foreign reports, that - at one point - then-PM Golda Meir instructed the IDF to openly wheel out some of Israel's purported nuclear arsenal onto an Air Force base's tarmac for overhead American and Russian spy cameras to witness, "live-streamed" as it were, Israel's readiness to go nuclear if need be in order to thwart the two-border Arab onslaught.

This, just to make sure the superpowers clearly got the message coursing through round-the-clock government deliberations, which included then defense minister Moshe Dayan's fearful statement: "The Third Temple is falling," but that, God forbid it did - well, the Jewish State wasn't going down alone.

While the IDF senior command and much of the government scrambled furiously to save the country, the brunt of the fighting and awful losses fell to the lower-level troops, who - despite militarily and psychologically impossible opening odds - fought their way, tooth and nail, to the outskirts of Damascus and Cairo.

As Daniel Greenfield writes,

”On the hill of Tel Saki, 60 paratroopers and 45 tanks held off 11,000 Syrian soldiers and 900 tanks. On Petroleum Road, a 21-year-old Lieutenant Tzvika Greengold hitchhiked to a base, took command of two damaged tanks and managed to hold off hundreds of enemy tanks and destroyed at least twenty of them. Heroism held the line and turned the tide, but it did little to excuse the disastrous failures that nearly ended the lives of millions and the State of Israel.”

I recently watched the 2023 film, Golda, which brought back the 19 harrowing days of fighting before a US-brokered cease-fire was reached (and, for my money, actress Helen Mirren could read pages from an old telephone book and have me on the edge of my seat).

From the Israel Foreign Ministry:

"The Egyptians and the Syrians made some significant initial gains: the former crossed the Suez Canal and established themselves along its entire length on the east bank; the latter overran the Golan Heights and came within sight of the Sea of Galilee. However, the wheel turned very quickly. Counterattacking swiftly, sometimes even foolhardily, within a few days the IDF was on the west bank of the Suez Canal, at a distance of 100 kms from the Egyptian capital, Cairo, and within artillery range of the airfields around the Syrian capital, Damascus.

"Egypt, which at first had refused a cease-fire, now accepted it avidly, as did Syria. Considering the adverse initial circumstances, the speed and the thoroughness with which the IDF had been able to reverse its fortunes was remarkable. Yet the Yom Kippur War went down in Israel's history as a qualified failure. The surprise rankled; and the cost was heavy: 2,688 soldiers fell.

"Intelligence was faulted for failing to sound the alarm in time - the Chief of Staff, David (Dado) Elazar and his Chief of Intelligence had to resign. Too many airplanes were lost to Russian-made SAM missiles. Some experts reached the sweeping conclusion that the tank had seen its day, in view of its vulnerability to Sagger missiles and infantry-operated RPGs. Of 265 Israeli tanks in the first echelon, only 100 survived."

There was, after "Hamilchama Ha Hee" - "'THAT' war" as it was sorrowfully recalled, an entire strata of Israelis who - darkly foreseeing an imminent or lingering end to the "Third Jewish Commonwealth," moved abroad seeking solace and succor on foreign soil.

And, when international flights to and from Israel resumed a few weeks later, after a cease-fire went into effect, we joined the exodus with a despairing return to the States at the war's ragged conclusion, both nationally and personally: our nascent aliyah dreams of rebuilding a father-son bond in an old-new land lay shattered, and as much a cause for our later estrangement as well as my grudging appreciation for his attempt to make things right between us, and give replanting our lives and souls in Israel a bold, but conflicted try.

While the annihilationist fronts against the Jewish State have changed, the lessons of 1973 have not: "Never underestimate your enemy," as the truism goes, especially now, when the overt, bellicose calls by Iran & Co. at the General Assembly of the United Nations for our collective destruction - within Israel and without - are announced daily, and, increasingly stridently, to applause by much of the world, silence by some, and obsequious kowtowing, confusion and, yes, even cowardice by others - some of them our own leaders, here and abroad.

As Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu noted, at a memorial service for the fallen, held on Sept. 26th, 2023, at Mt. Herzl:

"Fifty years have passed but the flickering pictures are clearly before our eyes: The hasty mobilization, the heavy shelling, the human trail that was stretched on the line of outposts, our forces' distress calls on the radio and within a few days – the radio calls by our forces as they stormed their way toward the Arab capitals. But above all, the countless displays of devotion, fighting spirit, the brotherhood of soldiers fighting shoulder-to-shoulder, thanks to whom our homes were saved. This is the glue that bound unit to unit, person to person – our uncompromising commitment to our land and our state.

“…But the turnaround they brought was achieved at the terrible price of thousands of fallen and wounded. The lesson that we learned from the Yom Kippur War is always before our eyes: We must not make light of the threats before us. We will thwart those who rise up to kill and destroy us.”

A tumultuous decade later, I returned to Israel for good, and, since, have raised a family, devoted over two decades to an oft-time precarious journalism career, served almost as long in IDF conscription and reserve duty, and - at least I'd like to think - "gone native" and, after a three-year reporting sojourn in the States over a decade ago, let my US passport expire.

But despite moving on, the events of that October 1973 still left an indelible, traumatic mark on me, and, annually, overshadows my ability to focus on the sacred elements of Yom Kippur.

I guess I'm not alone in struggling to cope - often unsuccessfully - with the profound mental and psychological complexity of that moving, heartbreaking, and passionately experienced period. I suppose it’s a long-term effect of non-diagnosed PTSD and an impact that only now is beginning to ebb, now that I can put a name to the symptoms.

Five decades later, having served two of them in the interim in the IDF as an infantry conscript and artillery noncom reservist, and having raised a family and made a fulfilling life here despite the threats of war and terrorism, may this Yom Kippur only pass with prayer, introspection, and shalom for us here, and for the entire House of Israel.

I have amended this post numerous times, both to share my thoughts and feelings about that crushing crucible of time and life here, and also as an annual catharsis in the final days before Yom Kippur; my personal vidui (confession): I haven't prayed with much fervor in many weeks, skipping many mornings at synagogue and ignoring numerous options to study; attended few traditional selichot events during the month of Elul this year, both out of the flood of such memories, and the sometimes paralyzing despair that, yes, it could happen again.

May this be my prayer that it never does. Gmar Chatima Tova.