On Monday, Fellowship staff were in Tel Aviv ensuring that the city’s public bomb shelters were stocked and providing five mobile shelters, as air raid sirens sounded intermittently and Iran rained rockets down on the Holy Land. Because of this, families and elderly residents must remain in shelters for long hours—sometimes even days. To help, The Fellowship supplied beds for a Tel Aviv public shelter. Now elderly Israelis like Meir have a place to sleep.
Meir is an 89-year-old Holocaust survivor and longtime resident of Tel Aviv who lives with his wife in a building without a bomb shelter. Had it not been for the public shelter, they would not have anywhere to go for safety. Their stays there often lasted hours, and they were only able to sleep during the brief moments when the sirens stopped, sharing a hard, worn mattress on the floor. As Meir told Fellowship staff in the shelter, this was not his first encounter with a threat seeking to eliminate the Jewish people.
Born in 1938 in Croatia (then Yugoslavia), Meir was an only child living with his parents. Soon after Germany invaded, the family went into hiding because they were Jewish. Eventually, they were discovered along with 60 of their neighbors. The Nazis told them they would be taken to work but then wheeled out a truck with a mounted machine gun. Some people ran before the soldiers began to fire. Meir and his parents managed to escape and hide until the area was liberated.
Of all the hardships he endured as a child during that time, Meir remembers the hunger most vividly. The only food he and his parents had was canned food meant for animals. Because his mother spoke Russian, she was able to ask the Allied troops for help when they arrived, and the three of them were rescued. Meir made aliyah to Israel in 1948 and has lived in Tel Aviv for the past 50 years.
“I love this country,” he said as Fellowship staff brought his bed to the shelter. “I am a proud Zionist Jew. Enough with baseless hatred. We must be united. This is our strength—that we are together. No one can overcome us because we are united. Continue what you are doing. With God’s help, everything will be alright. We will see the light at the end.”
