While many visitors and volunteers have been arriving here the last two weeks to help lend spiritual, physical and moral support to Israel, none quite expects to touch down right in the middle of a missile attack.
But so it was for three leaders of the American Jewish Committee, who arrived here Tuesday night for a two-day solidarity and factfinding visit. One hour after their arrival, air raid sirens sounded warning of an imminent Iraqi missile attack.
“When the siren sounded,” said David Harris, executive vice president of AJCommittee, “we had just arrived at our hotel in Jerusalem. We took our gas masks and walked up nine flights of stairs to one of the sealed rooms.
“I was struck by the calm and sense of discipline among the people here,” he said.
“In the room with us was a man and his daughter, both from Florida,” he recounted. “She is here on a year study program and didn’t want to leave. Rather than pressure her to come home, her father came to be with here to face the situation. I asked what their motivation was, and he said, ‘We’re believers in Israel.’ I was very moved by their feelings, and will long remember this.”
Harris, along with Sholom Comay, AJCommittee president, and Alfred Moses, chairman of its board, said Israeli leaders want to see more visits by Diaspora Jews at this difficult time.
“On the political level,” Harris said, “there has seldom been a more important time, and a more significant opportunity, for Jewish leaders to enhance understanding in the U.S. of Israel’s security predicaments.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
