On Yom Kippur we used to meet in the synagogue, and visit the homes of our friends from the sect.
Every Yom Kippur evening, we are all dressed in white shirts, standing in circles next to the large synagogue on Middle Street, which is closed to vehicles: groups from the class, from the youth movement, groups of parents' friends. The whole neighborhood is here.
every year. A well-known and well-loved tradition of self-indulgence.
On Saturday, I got up later. After all, fasting, where is there a rush? The house is silent, the street has stopped.
I left the house to Vardi Hagara further down the street and from there we decided to wake up Jinjit who liked to sleep without limits.
We arrived, knocked as usual on the shutter of a room located on the way to the entrance to the house. They wake her up just before entering.
The silence and the joy of our pranks, the terror was a sharp siren that pierced the sky and the breath.
"Is this an alarm?" we asked each other in amazement. "It's not possible, Yom Kippur today" we answered ourselves.
But the voices did not let up.
Radio voices from every window pierced the silence, followed by more and more panicked voices, people flocking from the synagogue on Middle Street and scattering to the houses.
The three of us are sitting on Redhead's bed.
The news broadcasters announced attacks, the mobilization of reservists in panic.
All this also reached us. Dad was drafted into the war with his taxi.
Yom Kippur 1973.
Shmuelik remained in the Golan Heights, as he had planned.
I waited for the letter as he used to write me every week. Every day he wrote a page and when he knew the mail was about to arrive at the base, he closed the envelope and sent it to me.
The radio and also our new TV updated us on the difficult situation.
Passwords that were code names of units, were called to mobilize and assemble.
The radio doesn't stop talking, mom tells us too many details she got from friends over the phone.
I wait for the letter every day. And a regular phone call to Sarah, Shmuelik's mother: "Did you hear anything?"
"No", was her broken answer and sadness in her voice. "Yehezkel went to the command to find out and maybe he will continue to the Golan Heights. On the way, he will try to find out in hospitals," she added.
I decided to check what was happening with Shimon, a classmate of Shmuelik from "Bari" school.
Shmuelik told me that he also joined the regiment. Although not found in his battery, but that would also help me, I reflected.
I arrived at his house, he lives on the first floor in the house next to our youth movement on Hanita Street.
The blinds were closed. I knocked on the door.
No one answered. I knocked repeatedly and no one answered.
For some reason I felt that someone was in the house. You waited two minutes, tried again and returned home.
I came to the house a few more times and they never opened the door for me. I told my mother that it was very strange that none of Shimon's family was at home on days like this.
Very strange!
And so day after day. Studies, searches among friends.
The postman arrives, dropping letters into mailboxes, but not ours. No letter!
Shmuelik is not in a hospital. His father was unable to obtain information about him from any source.
The sadness took over every corner of my body, my mind.
I continued on the daily route. I finished an exhausting school day. Sitting crying, staring.
A broken routine.
I ponder on the way home:
something new?
Did you hear anything?
Has a letter arrived?
The same thoughts every day.
"If he is in captivity, he will surely return, he knows how to deal with any situation. I mutter to myself.
My mind was spinning and spinning and the way home, which was quick and short, seemed like an eternity. I am immersed in the unknown. I almost missed the stop near the house, I jumped out of my seat in time to press the stop bell.
I got off the bus.
tired, hungry, sad, miss and what not.
I walked towards the house and in front of me as usual was Shmuelik's balcony.
The blinds are closed. When Shmuelik is not at home, no one sits on the balcony. A neighbor looks at me from the nearby balcony. The street is as quiet as at night, no cars pass by, the radio is not heard from the neighbors' balconies either. quiet street
Passing by the concrete railing that we used to sit on when we all met, all the friends, he is also an orphan.
I continued towards our house. I went up the stairs, opened the door of the house.
Verdi his girlfriend came out of the kitchen.
"What is she doing here, we finished studying a few hours ago", I pondered for a second.
"That's how it is when you have good friends, who also sit next to the school desk all the years, and also meet every afternoon."
I answered myself immediately.
Mom called me to eat, it's already five o'clock, I haven't eaten almost all day.
I went into the kitchen and there was a plate: steak and vegetable salad. Exactly what I like.
The truth is that I was surprised that in the middle of the week my mother made me such a steak. Hunger prevailed and I immediately attacked the food.
"Verdy, why is your face like that? Are you offended by something? Did we annoy you?' I asked.
Verdi did not answer me.
Mother looked directly into my eyes and said: "People from the city officer arrived at noon and announced that Shmuelik was gone. He was killed.'
That's what she said.
So she said and did not sleep.
I look at her, look at Lordi, look around, and remain silent.
Verdi was silent, her big blue eyes were watering.
"I just passed by there, there's no one there, the house is quiet," I said.
The eyes were covered with a veil, a dim screen. The throat, something was blocked in it as if the tonsils were connected to each other.
Swallowing is difficult.
I ran to the shower.
I cried alone.
I sat down on the side of the bathtub.
I sat
Mom called me.
I understood that she was worried.
I washed my face, got out of the bath, and announced that I was going to Shmuelik.
I quickly went up the stairs, the door was open. I entered
The living room was full of people I didn't know.
Sarah, Shmuelik's mother, saw me through her red, tearful eyes, gripped the armrests of the armchair tightly, stood up and reached out her hands to me: "He was dear to you, wasn't he? He loved you, she added.
And... I didn't understand
why did he love
Why was it expensive?
He will come back.
"I want to live for our country," he told me.
We got closer to each other, she caressed my cheek.
She looked into my eyes and collapsed back into the armchair.
Fridays at four o'clock were dedicated to Sarah. For the glass tea cup a minute. The plate of cookies was probably already ready since lunch. Every Friday at four o'clock, I knocked lightly on the door, so as not to wake Yehezkel, his father. Sara limped out of the room, opened the kitchen door and closed it so we wouldn't be disturbed. She is limping and I am limping.
We only drank and not for many years.
Sara could not live in this life, life after the black Yom Kippur. Her body and spirit longed for peace next to her Shmuelik.
Our Black Sabbath
I knew Shmuelik, the late, quite superficially... from the neighborhood. We lived on Shaul Street in Neve Sha'anan at the time. Close. I read and cried. Daniel.
I read and my throat chokes and my heart hurts. May Shmulik's memory be blessed.
Hannah Hi. Very exciting to read you. Shabbat Shalom
so sad
I remember him well from the class at Bari school. May his memory be blessed.
Dear Sylvie,
Yes
This is a boy blessed with talents that we used to hear a lot about as a talented and influential mature man.
His mother could not bear life without him.
Her body did not meet this deficiency.
How much have we prayed since it will be the last space ????????
Edited into one file and will soon be uploaded to the web. i will share
At the beginning of September, we held a conference for the first grade of the Reali school in Malat
50 years to graduation. I was a member of the organizing committee. Tzvia Arnin, a graduate of the cohort, took it upon herself to organize a written commemoration of the many fallen from the cohort in Israel's wars and of those who have died to this day.
We shared the writing. I wrote, among other things, about Shmuelik. We did not have
Contact during studies. Fate brought us together in the same artillery battalion
And I witnessed from hundreds of meters away the double charge that resulted in his death and the death of 5 other fighters. Perhaps in commemorating this, I contributed a little to his memory and that of my friends who stopped the Egyptian and Syrian army in the terrible war with their bodies
Can you send me what you wrote about him? Thanks
I will transfer to Rachel his sister.
As usual, your writing is so clear, precise, touching and chilling. You made me cry again. May the memory of the entire Goldfinger family be blessed.. May the memory of all our loved ones who have gone from us be blessed.
A permanent scar
Shmulik studied with me at the Reali school.
The next time I met him was at a pilot course, at the end of 1972.
Shmulik did not pass the piper screening, and was dismissed from the course at an early stage.
I remember very well that I was standing in the squadron, and I saw Shmulik's back on the road, who was walking in silence towards the residence.
I watched him until he disappeared around a bend in the road.
That was the last time I saw him. To the best of my knowledge, Shmulik was killed as a gunner in the Golan Heights.
As the rest of the pilot flowers, I spent the war in a protected base.
They guarded us with cotton wool.
I was expelled from the course almost at the end, a little over a year after Shmulik.
In this war, many of my peers were killed and wounded, and our cohort at the Reali School lost 15 of its graduates.
I've been through another war since then, as a gunner, like Shmulik, but every now and then, I wonder what my fate would have been if I had been dismissed from the pilot's course at an earlier stage,
And to this day, every time this thought crosses my mind, I go back and see the same image that was burned strongly in my mind:
I see Shmulik's back moving away from me down the road, until he finally disappears behind the bend in the road.
Of blessed memory.
Yes. I remember the transition from the pilot course to the artillery battery.
Human error deprived the battery crew of their lives.
And the chaos that occurred in those days, prevented the parents for quite a long time from knowing what happened to them?
may them rest in peace? A permanent scar?
Wow, Hanala, a chapter of your life that I was not familiar with. big hug
Yes. In the short and favorite meetings, is it difficult to get into all the layers??
May you be signed and sealed in the book of life??
Hanna, very moving, I was next to Shmuelik when the terrible explosion happened that killed six fighters including Shmuelik.
We were busy with the hard battles in the Bakka valley, we were restrained by our bodies and the shells we fired continuously from the 160 mm mortars.
Shmuelik and many other fighters paid with their lives to stop the attack of the Syrian army.
We are here to remember and remind.
Thanks for sharing
Avisher Rath
Just from meeting you, we realized that everyone knew they weren't, only the families didn't.
His father's trips to the Golan Heights, his search and mine in the hospitals.
The time when we thought Ochi was with us, actually, quite a long time, isn't it?
Every year you wish that there would not be more martyrs of the Tshal??
Hanna, you wrote so movingly, you really brought us with your writing to Shmulik's house, until the lunch where they announced his death, I even managed to wait watching Shmulik's sadness with you. Tears are flowing from my eyes, so sad, so many Yom Kippur stories about another family, another friend, another married woman whose world was destroyed in one... Many years have passed but the sting of the Yom Kippur war will never fade, the pain is as if here and now and I was girl.
I wish that another Yom Kippur war would never return to our countries, the pain is too much to bear. It seems to me that we can no longer stand such sorrow.
Dear Hana, for many years you carry your story and your pain in your heart.
Thank you for sharing so eloquently and as if you haven't forgotten a single moment of that time.
A huge hug my love. Thanks