Tense security in Israel won’t stop the parties

“I am the grandma, how can I not go?” says Barbara Gilbert of Las Vegas. Her grandson, Yosef Aryeh, will be having his bar mitzvah this February in Efrat. Though she says the trip makes her “very nervous,” she is still planning to travel to the Holy Land for the celebration.

But not everyone is as resolute as Gilbert. Many grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins have decided not to attend their relatives’ simchas because of the security situation in Israel — a situation that ebbs and flows and whose hotspots shift from one part of the country to another. 

Renee Ghert-Zand made aliyah from Palo Alto, Calif., to Jerusalem six months ago. Her son celebrated his bar mitzvah on Dec. 24, with his grandfather as the only family member from outside Israel in attendance.

Ghert-Zand says the Nov. 18 Palestinian terrorist attack on a synagogue in Jerusalem’s Har Nof neighborhood, which killed four rabbis and a Druze policeman, pushed possible attendees over the edge.

“Later that day and the next day, I got one cancellation after another,” she says.

Barbara Gilbert’s son and daughter-in-law and their three children have been living in Israel for more than a decade, and Gilbert has seen them go through the Second Intifada and multiple Gaza wars. Yet this past summer’s events on the ground left her particularly shaken and scared.

One Saturday evening when she was visiting Israel during Operation Protective Edge, a siren went off while Gilbert was walking with her daughter-in-law and 2-year-old grandson. The family, which was far from a shelter, ran to take cover at a nearby medical center.

“The siren was going and it was such a loud and very scary noise,” recalls Gilbert, noting that the medical center was locked, but that her daughter-in-law and grandson ran and hid under the overhang. “I was a little older and I didn’t make it.”

During the short run, Gilbert told herself, “I am a nice person. Why do they want to hurt me?” She cried and clenched her teeth so hard that she broke a tooth.