Rabbi Michael Ragozin was attending a lecture at Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem when Hamas launched an attack.
“We were in the middle of the evening prayers, praying to God to spread over us a shelter of peace – and then the sirens went off,” Ragozin said.
It was Tuesday, July 8, and Ragozin, the rabbi at the congregation Sha’are Shalom in Leesburg, and his family had been on vacation in Israel for eight days when they got their first taste of the deadly fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
“My wife had just left back to our apartment to be with the kids when we heard the sirens. What was the most frightening was to be separated from my family and not knowing if they were OK,” Ragozin said in a phone interview from his Virginia home, where he returned Thursday evening.
Uncertain of his family’s fate and deeply worried, Ragozin joined the crowd on the way to a safe room in the basement to wait out the air raid.
“I didn’t know at the time how serious the threat was. Later I learned that in Jerusalem, you have between 60 to 90 seconds to take shelter. You can even go to a website and it tells you exactly how much time you have,” he said.
After the attack, Ragozin rushed to the place where his wife and their two children were waiting. “When I got home, my 7-year old daughter was in tears and continued to cry for another hour until she fell asleep. That was really hard,” he said.
It wasn’t the rabbi’s first brush with the deadly conflict between Islamic militants and Israel. He first visited Israel in 2000 and stayed for two years, during the Second Intifada, a Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation and a period of intensified violence.
“It’s definitely one thing to live in a society where there are a lot of suicide bombers. Every time you get on the bus, you don’t know if something is going to happen,” Ragozin said. “But with the sirens and rockets, that’s a very different thing.”
Ragozin returned to Israel several times after his first visit; the last time in October of 2010. When he planned his most recent trip, he had no idea that he would find himself in the center of a newly escalated conflict.
“The night we got there on June 30, the three missing boys (that were kidnapped by Hamas) were found murdered. There was a deep sadness. People had hoped beyond reason that some of these boys would be found alive and 150,000 people showed up at their funeral,” he said.
Israel has charged three Jews with abducting and burning alive a Palestinian teenager, allegedly killed in retaliation for the slayings of the three Israeli teens.
After the killing of the Palestinian teenager, Hamas began launching rockets against Israel. Ragozin decided to extend his trip to join a solidarity mission, but he canceled a visit to Tel Aviv, the epicenter of the rocket attacks.
While Hamas did not spare Jerusalem, the chance of survival there was greater than in some other localities, he said.
“I don’t want to minimize the threat of rockets and the destructive power they can bring to communities, but the rockets that Hamas fired at Jerusalem, they sacrificed the size of the warhead to accomplish the distance. There was not a fear that the building would be demolished. If you were within an interior staircase, you were safe,” Ragozin said.
But he also thought of the civilian victims of Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, where hundreds have died since the beginning of the attacks.
“I lament the death of civilians,” he said. “There is incredible suffering. A friend of mind said, ‘every time we hear a siren or a boom, just imagine what it’s like living in Gaza.’ ”
However, Ragozin believes that Israel’s war is justified. “I think that the responsibility for the civilian casualties is with Hamas,” he said.
Ragozin pauses to think when asked for a solution for this never-ending conflict.
“At this point, we can accomplish two things. Let’s stop the loss of life immediately and let’s stop the threat of loss of life in perpetuity,” he said.
“In order to achieve the second one, there needs to be an agreement to demilitarize the Gaza Strip, or we can take out the existing tunnel network (that allows Hamas fighters to enter Israel). But it will be rebuilt, and this will erupt again in two or three years. The tunnels are the main problem,” he said.
Back home in Leesburg, Ragozin wishes he was still in Israel. “I just feel a deep solidarity with Israelis. It was very meaningful to be there during this difficult time,” he said.
And Ragozin does not want to give up hope that one day, there will be peace – if people only communicate.
“About 10 days ago, Israeli Jews and Arabs joined together for a joint fast day,” he said.
“Joint ceremonies and dialogues happened throughout Israel and people were really listening to each other. It was very moving and powerful.”
