The Yom Kippur War

After the Six Day War, the Israelis were to yield to nonchalance. The crushing of the Arab armies and the giddiness of the victory would provoke a general laxity. Six years later, the enemy surprises them while they are gathered in their synagogues for the prayers of the most sacred and most crucial day in the Hebrew calendar, the day of Yom Kippur – of the General Pardon. On October 6th, 1973 at two o’clock in the afternoon, Syrian and Egyptian troops simultaneously launch an attack on the northern and southern fronts. Rabbi Theodore Friedman describes the atmosphere that prevailed on that day in Netanya:

…the day of Yom Kippur dawned with skies as unclouded as our hearts and minds. It is true that an article had appeared in the Israeli press on the previous Thursday noting the fact that Syrian and Egyptian troops were amassing on the borders. However, such reports were regular occurrences that, up to now, had proved to be false alarms. On that particular morning of Yom Kippur as I was on my way to the synagogue in Netanya (where I was conducting services for the local Conservative congregation), the sight of three Phantom jets flying north failed to bring to mind the short article in Thursday’s newspaper. The sight merely evoked astonishment that the Israeli Air Force would conduct routine flights on Yom Kippur. Those airplanes were just about the only machines that could be seen operating on that Yom Kippur morning in Netanya or anywhere in Israel. From my seat in the synagogue, which offered me a view of one of Netanya’s main thoroughfares, I hadn’t seen a single car or taxi drive by all morning. The total quiet of Yom Kippur had descended upon Netanya as it had all over Israel.

At two in the afternoon – the fateful hour – our musaf service [the conclusion of the first religious service of the day] had ended as previously announced. There was a forty-five minute recess before minhah [the second religious service of the day]. As I left the synagogue with a few friends for a brief stroll, I noticed, to my astonishment, groups of people huddled together around transistor radios as well as the sudden movement of traffic. [I knew, of course, that Israel’s radio goes off the air on Yom Kippur]. When I inquired about what had happened, I was told that at ten minutes to two, the Egyptians and the Syrians had launched a massive attack against Israel.

Within minutes, a police car drove through the streets with its loudspeaker blaring, instructing the population to turn on their radios. Taxis were racing through town displaying hastily drawn signs in their windshields: “In the service of the Army”. Their drivers were distributing mobilization orders. I saw several men receive them on the street, return to their homes and leave again after a few minutes, wearing army uniforms and carrying their guns. After a hasty farewell to their families, they were on their way to the designated points of assembly where trucks and buses were waiting for them to take them to their units at the front. A growing number of men in uniform were gathering at various points accompanied by a mother, a wife, and in some cases, their children (Someone joked that it was the first time in history that Jewish women sent their men off to war on an empty stomach). Judging from the remarks I overheard, a heavy threat hung in the air, mitigated, nevertheless, by supreme confidence as to the outcome of the war: “We’ll finish them off in three days.” This attitude was to be echoed in the speeches that General Dayan, the Minister of Defense, and General Elazar, the Chief of Staff, broadcast that evening on television.

A much smaller congregation reassembled for minhah. People were glued to their radios so as not to miss the news that was broadcast every fifteen minutes. […] At the beginning of the neilah [the closing service of Yom Kippur], the synagogue began to fill up. But during the service, I noticed several women enter and whisper something into the ears of their respective husbands who promptly folded their prayer shawls and left the synagogue. Obviously, their wives had brought them the message that they had been mobilized.

At 17:00, the gabbai informed me that we had until 18:00 to remove all our belongings and vacate the building, which had been […] requisitioned by the army. I had planned to conclude the neilah at 17:40, but the service was cut short by the first air raid alarm. I instructed the cantor to immediately proceed to the Shema. We then rose, blew the shofar [the ram’s horn], proclaimed the ritual rallying cry “Next Year in Jerusalem!”, and then the entire congregation, the men still wearing their prayer shawls, proceeded to the adjacent shelter. The tension was palpable. I asked the cantor to lead us in singing “Bless us”. The fervor in the shelter was even greater than it had been in the synagogue. About twenty minutes later, the all-clear signal sounded and we emerged to face a blackout that was to last eighteen days…

Conservative Judaism, Winter 1974

Backed by their artillery and covered by their aviation, the Egyptians cross the Suez Canal and storm the posts stripped from the line of bunkers that were supposed to resist any assault. The last post holds out for three days, losing a third of its men. The survivors receive the order to surrender. In the meanwhile, the first reserve soldiers are dispatched towards the Golan where the Syrians are advancing, threatening to descend to the Galilee. Soon after, pulling themselves together, the Israelis recapture the Golan Plateau and cross the Suez Canal, cutting off the Egyptians from their rear guard. The two counter attacks claimed a heavy tribute in blood. Military exploits in such a critical situation are numerous. The following two accounts appeared in the magazine of the Israeli Army – Ba-Mahaneh:

Major Shmulik’s tank was the first to confront the Syrians on Saturday, Yom Kippur at 13:15. Shmulik’s force had just been mobilized and was on its way to reinforce the post controlling the main axis on the northern front. The Syrians had already crossed the ceasefire line.

“I ordered my men to allow them to come closer. Then when they were within very short range, we opened fire. All our first shells hit their targets. I fired a round that ripped a turret off an enemy tank.”

Within a very short time, Shmulik’s unit had destroyed fifteen of the Syrians tanks that were leading the armored column:

“They had blocked the road to the other vehicles concentrated one next to the other over an almost two miles stretch. We then discovered that there were another six Syrian tanks only two hundred yards away. They were the ones that had known better. Realizing that things were not going their way, they withdrew, almost destroying a U.N. observation post, and tried to approach us from the other side. We destroyed them, one after another, leaving them in flames. I thought we had stopped them for good this time. But then we saw a third column heading towards us from the south, five hundred yards away. I can’t remember how many times I screamed “Bulls eye!” I only remember realizing that we were running out of ammunition. I had only two rounds left when I saw our reinforcements approaching. It was getting dark by then – around a quarter to six – and we had been in battle for almost four full hours. I wanted to show our reinforcements where our enemy was so I looked around and spotted an armored troop carrier and hit it with our second to the last round. I immediately received a response from the commander of our advancing unit. ‘Beautiful’, he said, I see them now. We’ll take care of them.’ The reinforcements went into action and we were finally able to take a break.”

Shmulik jumped down from his turret for a closer examination of this “cemetery of Syrian armor”, as he called it. A few seconds later, “ a shell whistled by and exploded on the cupola of my tank. A shower of fragments rained all around me. Eight had hit me in the throat. Before I could gather my wits, one of our tanks opened fired, destroying the Syrian tank that had fired the shell. “

Shmulik praised his gunner, Sergeant Yitzhak:
“He’s the best goddamn gunner in the battalion! He may have emptied our ammunition store, but every shell hit its target. All told, I think that my tank alone destroyed over thirty enemy tanks.”

Shmulik’s unit, which had in the meanwhile regrouped, spent the night listening to the ominous clamor of the enemy tanks in the darkness. The enemy knew that we sought to surround them and cut them off from their rear guard and that they would have to fight their way out at daylight. They were refueling and getting new ammunition supplies:

“At day break, we were stupefied by the number of enemy tanks, more than we had ever seen before at one time, dotting the plains all around us. Every time we fired, we hit our target – over and over again. I remember beginning to experience real fear – because as much as we hit them, they remained in place, refusing to retreat. It was then that I looked up at the sky and said: “Where the hell is our air force?”

As if in answer to Shmulik’s imprecation, four Phantoms ripped through the sky, adding the finishing touch to what the tanks had begun.

Eyal’s story takes place at the Suez Canal. During the first night of the war, the Egyptians concentrated their fire on the Israeli outposts along the east bank of the Canal. Eyal, a twenty-year old tank commander, was ordered to stop, at all costs, the Egyptian advance on the east side of the Canal near Kantara. His tank, along with two others, was hit and immobilized.

“It seemed that our tracks were damaged, but the firing system was still functioning and we continued to fire from a stationary position. At daybreak, we realized that we were only fifty yards away from one of our bunkers. One of the crew went out to scope it out and found that the post was stilled occupied. The commander of the outpost ordered us to return to our tanks and to continue shooting to defend the position and repel the enemy. But when the three tanks had been hit, we were forced to abandon them and joined the garrison in the bunker. […]

At 23:00 on Sunday night, we were ordered to abandon the bunkers and to move out towards the marshes where we would be picked up. But the enemy spotted us and randomly opened fire, pounding the area. We soon realized – we were forty-two strong – that we had not received clear enough instructions about the direction we were supposed to take. The enemy had surrounded the entire region south of Kantara with artillery batteries. We had walked into an ambush and were being shot at from all sides. We retreated to Kantara where we hid in one of the abandoned houses. After consulting with each other, we decided to strike out in another direction. We were again ambushed and shot at from a distance of only thirty to forty yards.

We took cover. I was certain that this was the end. A dog, which had befriended us and had stayed with us in the bunker, stayed closed to my heels. He was hit and fell down between my legs, writhing in convulsions. We again retreated to Kantara. We suddenly heard a truck approaching – it was full of Egyptian soldiers. We finally hid in the cemetery in Kantara to try to decide what to do. The commander of the bunker, who was superhumanly calm and collected, located a path leading to the marshes. We followed the path and despite the fact that we passed only a short distance from Egyptian tanks and artillery batteries, we remained undetected.

By daybreak, we were in the middle of the marshes. We hid in the bushes during the day. When night fell, we heard tanks approaching. They were Israeli. But how could we identify ourselves before they opened fired on us? One of the boys, a rabbinical student had an idea – he took out his prayer shawl and ran towards the tanks, waving it. Our men recognized the prayer shawl, which saved us from certain death.”

Jerusalem Post, November 9th, 1973

The Yom Kippur War was to last many months, killing more than 2,500 Israeli soldiers and injuring almost 10,000 and plunging the country into mourning and depression. An investigation commission, charged with examining the circumstances of the war and of establishing the responsibility for the grave negligence on the part of Israel, was established in response to the protests and demonstrations of the demobilized soldiers. Many long months, perhaps even years, would go by before Israel would recover from the trauma of this war. The military achievements on the two fronts could not erase the feeling of vulnerability and impotence that lay hold of the population during the first hours of combat.

One of the first to pull himself together was Yigal Mossinsohn, a writer and playwright, a veteran of the War of Independence, who had lost his son, Ido, in the Golan. In an interview, he stated:

An open scar

“If Ivan Ivanovich had failed to kill Ido’s grandparents during the Ukrainian pogroms in the beginning of the century, he succeeded in killing their grandson on the Golan Heights – that’s how I see it. We are once again learning the old and bitter, Jewish lesson, which too many Israelis have forgotten: the lesson of the Inquisition, the pogroms, the Shoah. The people had thought that all that was behind us, but no. However, there is a difference: now we can get up and fight.
The Nazis murdered Ido’s maternal grandparents. His paternal grandparents hid under the bed to escape the Ukrainian hooligans. And when they got tired of hiding under the bed, they immigrated to Israel. They were crazy, but they were right. The sane ones went to Western Europe and to the United States. Going to Eretz Israel was something only madmen did. It was a dead land; today we only have the Dead Sea, but at the time, the whole country was dead. It was almost empty. There were a few Arab villages here and there…

Now, the Arabs are also claiming their rights to this land. And there are some among us who recognize their legitimacy even if there is a conflict between their rights and ours. It’s insane. We made the country what it is today and that’s what grants us our right to it. I don’t want to go as far back as the Bible, to Abraham, but only to the beginning of the century when we won our right to this State by pulling it out of its desolation and bringing it back to life.

What is so troubling is that we have forgotten everything, under the present circumstances, the price we have paid for this right. Those of us who were born here and who fought in the War of Independence would tell our elders: “You do not have to tell us repeatedly, we know why this country is ours.” But the next generation does not know and does not want to know...

It is true that I am mourning the personal loss of a dear one. But I admit that I do not understand all those who are ceaselessly going around lamenting ever since the Yom Kippur War. I know no other people who entered a war under such terrible circumstances and who achieved such success only two days after the beginning of the hostilities. But instead of being filled with pride, we are consumed with self-doubt and remorse. I always thought that we needed two Messiahs: one to get the Jews out of the Diaspora and another to get the Diaspora out of the Jews.

We have forgotten our past. We imagine that we have become a nation like all the others. But we haven’t. We must the forget the great right that living in the land of Israel has granted us: the right to not die on our knees, to not be led to auto-de-fes or to crematoriums, but to stand on our feet and to fight for our lives.

We must pull ourselves out of the wholesale gloom in which we are immersed. Let those who have lost their dear ones in this war mourn. But the rest of the nation must not continue to turn around in circles in the haze of doubts. Life claims its rights. I know that some people were hurt to see others enjoying themselves at Purim parties. Why not? Life must not come to a halt. There is such a thing as tact. You do not dance in the middle of a funeral procession. But why not dance one street away from the procession? That is life: we have learned that death is a part of it and that the moment we are born, we begin to die.

Death is not a plague. There are some people who are afraid to come near you as if death was contagious. I experienced this after Ido was killed. Some people, including friends, stayed away. They didn’t know how to act; perhaps because the living do not like to talk or think about death…

[…] We are definitely a strange people: when we are happy, we touch the sky; when we are unhappy, we bury our faces in the dust. Maybe that is part of the Jewish charm. Be it as it may, we are not a normal people. Only madmen could have done what we have done. Just think about where we started and where we have come. Today, we are over three million. That’s the reality…

Do you know where I found my answer to the question: Who is a Jew? At Latrun. During an interrogation when I refused to answer the British wardens, not that I knew all that much, but because I did not want to tell them the little that I did know. That’s how we were educated. I said to my British warden: “I am a Jew. I was born here. This is my country.” They smashed a rifle butt across my head. That was their response. Since then, I know who is a Jew.

Jerusalem Post, March 26th, 1974