Wandering Jewess and Her Two Granddaughters

Half a year has passed since the beginning of the war in Israel, which erupted on the 7th of October, 2023. Everything has turned upside down for us Israelis. Everything has changed – more so than in the preceding eighty years, since the Holocaust.

Some of the survivors of the Nova music festival massacre have committed suicide, haunted day and night by the scenes of the butchery perpetrated by Hamas. Other survivors have been forcibly hospitalized in psychiatric wards to ensure that they won’t kill themselves. Every evening on Israeli television, they broadcast funerals of fallen soldiers, interviews with young military widows who gave birth to their babies after their husbands had been murdered, weeping grandmothers and grandfathers who have lost two or three of their grandchildren in terrorist attacks, or in the war, or in the shelling of the north and south of Israel. Several fathers who lost their sons on the battlefield later killed themselves on their graves. The son of one of my colleagues, a young man, lost both his legs in the war, but at least he is alive. The atmosphere in Israel is heavy, bordering on unbearable. People anticipate a war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, which will mark the beginning of the Third World War.

My daughter and her husband are now looking to rent another apartment, to move from the one they are renting now in the north of Israel. They are looking for an apartment with a bomb shelter, but such apartments...