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Israelis were fearful during ‘67 war
First of two-part series
YOUNGSTOWN
A Boardman woman who lived in Israel during the Six Day War between the Arabs and Israelis in June 1967 recalls that war as a time of great anxiety for Israelis, many of whom had survived the Holocaust more than two decades earlier.
Monday is the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the war.
“There was fear in the air. People were afraid that there would be this huge attack,” Chaya Kessler said of Israelis’ reaction to the amassing of Arab military forces and the imposition by the Arab countries of a naval blockade against Israel before the war.
“Israel pre-empted an attack and struck against the Egyptian Air Force” as the war began June 5, Kessler recalled.
“Women were clutching their purses and the keys to the house. It was a very tough time. I was nervous,” said Kessler, who came to the United States from Israel in 1980 and is now Kent State University’s director of Jewish studies.
When the 1967 war erupted, Kessler was a junior high school-age student living in Kiryat Gat, a town founded a decade earlier, which had become home to many newly arrived immigrants to Israel.
Kessler was born in Siberia, to which her father had been exiled because he was a Zionist (a person who believes in the protection and development of Israel), and she had lived briefly in Belarus and Poland before arriving in Israel by ship from Italy in 1960.
“I was shocked. As a child, I didn’t even think that war was possible anymore,” she said of her reaction to news of the outbreak of the 1967 war.
“The women would congregate downstairs because you felt more secure with people that you can talk to,” Kessler said of the four-story apartment building where she lived during the 1967 war.
She remembers hearing emergency-alert sirens, taking shelter in a school, and painting over car headlights and placing heavy blankets over windows at night to reduce the visibility of targets to enemy planes.
“There were no bunkers like there are today” in Israel, she noted.
“There was nowhere to go. We did not have an escape plan,” she added.
“It was definitely this David and Goliath feeling,” she said, referring to Israel’s smallness in population and land area compared to its Arab neighbors.
Her brother was a boarding school student in Jerusalem.
“They evacuated all the students. They sent them home, so my parents were very nervous,” she said.
In those days, she observed, the lack of cellular phones made it difficult or impossible to immediately ascertain someone’s whereabouts or well-being.
Her family got news of the war by radio because they did not have a television, she added.
“There was a feeling of euphoria,” when the war ended with an Israeli victory, an Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem and Israeli access to the holiest sites in Jerusalem for the first time since the modern State of Israel was founded in 1948.
“After ‘67, when Jerusalem was reunited, and, all of a sudden, people could go the [Western] Wall, this was like a fulfillment of a dream,” Kessler said.
“This ability to go to a place and touch this ancient, most important place in Judaism was amazing,” she added.
“Israel exists miraculously, and in spite of everything, because it has always been able to defend itself by itself,” observed Bonnie Deutsch Burdman, director of community relations and government affairs for the Youngstown Area Jewish Federation.
“Israel really didn’t have the qualitative military edge in ‘67. I think what they had was the overwhelming will to survive,” Burdman added.
“Israel was condemned after ‘67 because they were supposedly the actual aggressors in the world’s eyes because they did take the first step, but it was a step to survival,” Kessler said.
“There’s a saying in the Talmud [the body of Jewish civil and ceremonial law]: ‘If someone comes to kill you, it’s incumbent upon you to save yourself,’ and this was a ‘save yourself’ kind of moment,” for Israel, Kessler said.
Kessler was later directly engaged in Israel’s defense as a sergeant in the Israeli army before and during the Yom Kippur War of 1973.
Kessler was assigned to an intelligence unit, in which she and others monitored and recorded radio communications of Russian military advisers as they spoke Russian while training Egyptian and Syrian soldiers.