By Andrew Adler
Community Editor
“We’re at the witching hour with the Iranians.”
So said Peter Anik, a former JCRC staffer, Federation staffer, and Hillel director, speaking from his home near the northern Israeli city of Karmiel.
Like everyone else in the country, Anik had been on edge since Israel sent waves of fighter jets to attack Iran on June 13, seeking to neutralize Iran’s ability to build and deploy a nuclear weapon. In the days following Iran responded by launching more than 100 ballistic missiles and drones against Israel, killing upwards of two dozen civilians and wounding hundreds of others.
He spoke six days before U.S. military forces, using “bunker-busting” bombs and submarine-launched cruise missiles, conducted airstrikes on three of Iran’s uranium enrichment sites. These included Natanz, Isfahan, and the most heavily fortified. Fordo.
Iran responded with a low-scale missile attack on the massive Al-Udeid U.S. military base in Qatar. The attack caused minor damage and no casualties, and following this and renewed Israeli air assaults on Iran, a tenuous ceasefire between Iran and Israel has been holding (as of June 25, when this issue goes to press).
Though the missiles have struck mainly urban areas such as Tel Aviv and Haifa, the entire nation has been on high alert since the Israel’s initial attacks, aimed first at destroying Iran’s anti-aircraft defenses, and then at its principal uranium-enrichment sites. Israel has long regarded Iran as an “existential” threat, and having decimated Iranian proxies Hamas in the south and Hezbollah in the north — plus severely degraded the Yemen-based Houthis — decided the time was right to strike Iran.
All this has dominated the world’s attention, enough for the war against Hamas in Gaza and the plight of the remaining hostages to have become a secondary priority. Hamas lobbing small, short-range missiles across the Gaza border is one thing. Iran launching ballistic missiles bearing 1,000-pound warheads is quite another.
“We’ve been in the (bomb) shelter twice already today,” Anik said on the evening of June 16, sitting not far from his wife, Dalia. Their home is in Lotem, a part of which used to be a kibbutz and is now a village of about 800 residents. Lotem lies adjacent to Karmiel in the Israel’s Galilee, just outside Louisville’s Partnership2Gether region in the Western Galilee.
Iranian missile barrages typically have come at night. Israelis have become accustomed being jolted out of sleep by the shrill warning alarms pushed to mobile phones across the country.
“The government has the cell phone numbers of every person in Israel,” Rabbi David Ariel-Joel of The Temple, an Israeli native, said recently. “Can you imagine getting such an alert that shocks you to the core, and tells you that you have 10 minutes to get to the bomb shelter? And that happens a few times a day.”
Many Israeli homes have “safe rooms” with reinforced walls and ceilings, and exterior windows shielded by steel shutters. Residents lacking individual safe rooms can retreat to shelters in common passageways, or larger outside shelters, equipped with heavy, blast-resistant doors designed to withstand shock waves from warheads that explode nearby.
Still, nothing can protect against direct missile hits or close-in detonations. Ariel-Joel said that such a blast largely destroyed his nephew’s Tel Aviv apartment — fortunately the nephew was in Louisville for the wedding of Ariel-Joel’s son, who — like many Israelis abroad — found himself stranded in the U.S. after Israel closed its airspace and evacuated its planes to Cyprus.
Israel has a robust, layered missile defense system — Iron Dome, Thaad, David’s Sling, and Arrow — which has intercepted and destroyed most of Iran’s incoming missiles and drones. But because no defensive screen is perfect, Israelis continue to live amid a high-stress, potentially lethal reality.
“My sister lives in Herzlia (just north of Tel Aviv),” said Louisville’s Bekie Admony, another Israeli native. “She has kids and has woken up several times in the middle of the night. They don’t have a safe room, so they’ve had to go all the way to a shelter. She says it’s a nightmare.”
Admony grew up in a West Bank settlement, where her mother still lives. “My mom tried to call me the first time there was a siren,” Admony said. “I told her, ‘You need to go to an actual shelter — this is not the war of October 7. We’re talking something else.’ I explained to her about the missiles, how big they are.”
Anik, who made aliyah in 2009, also recognizes that this newest conflict carries exceptional risk. “For the last couple of years, I’ve lived through the war with Hezbollah (in Lebanon), which was at our back door,” he said. “This is different. They’ve attacked us with massive ballistic missiles. I could argue that we are in less immediate danger, because they are aiming for Haifa and Tel Aviv, the metro areas, with large warheads. But we are in the way.”
Indeed, Anik says that where he lives, the greatest danger isn’t from in-flight blasts — it’s from the aftermath of successful Israeli anti-missile missiles.
“Right here we’ve had two incidents this week of falling wreckage,” he said. “These ballistic missiles are so large, if they get intercepted, they’re extremely dangerous because the warhead may be intact, and you will also have hot metal raining down.”
Anik told how one night, while neighborhood residents were peering at surveillance cameras, “all of a sudden, clunk, this piece of metal falls into the picture and into the backyard.”
In this newest of Middle East wars, the only certainty is uncertainty. The 2025 Maccabiah Games — often referred to as “the Jewish Olympics” and drawing some 8,000 athletes from 55 countries — were set to begin July 8. The Games have now been postponed until 2026, with organizers saying, “the most prudent step from a security, safety, and logistical perspective is to postpone the event by a year to a quieter and safer time.”
Meanwhile, the tension goes on and on — sometimes manifesting in suppressed anxiety, elsewhere raw and brazen.
“I’ll quote my good friend,” Rabbi Ariel-Joel said, recounting her experience having sleep ripped away by a phone delivering a shrieking wail of potential doom.
“She said she didn’t know what’s worse, the missile or the noise, because it’s so scary. And then they have 10 minutes to get to a shelter, but there are people who are elderly, so 10 minutes is not enough for them. My brother is very lucky: He has a safe room in his house, so he can go there — if you can call that luck.”
The surging anguish recognizes no borders, no distances, no politics. “The first night I went back to work, I was crying a lot,” said Admony, a critical care nurse, remarking how some colleagues and friends don’t realize the import of what’s transpiring 7,000 miles to the east.
“I’m like, ‘You know, there’s a war going on,’ and they’re like, ‘What are you talking about?’ Honestly, I’m scared. I’m trying to be positive, but we can see how much (the anti-Israel rhetoric) is escalating in other countries. I mean, is anybody else going to turn against us?
Perhaps staying sane is a matter of seeking and grasping onto joy, even when missiles are falling half a world away.
“When my son got married last week, my entire family from Israel, 50 people came here — both my wife’s family and my side — and we were all celebrating. That made it much more surreal. Then my nephew was in New York on the plane to Israel, but the plane didn’t leave. So now he’s stuck in New York, waiting for El Al to tell him he can go back.”
Was this new level of Israel-Iran conflict inevitable? “Iran forever has been (saying) we’re a cancer, that the ‘Zionist entity’ must be destroyed,’” Anik said. “Clearly, everyone believes that Hamas and Hezbollah work together, that they are Iranian-equipped and funded proxies.”
Whether Iran is truly on the verge of becoming a nuclear power remains open to debate. Tulsi Gabbard, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, testified before Congress that the intelligence community had concluded Iran was not intent on building a nuclear weapon — a conclusion President Trump flatly contradicted.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister insists the Iranian regime was closing in on success. Rabbi Ariel-Joel, who is no friend of Israel’s far-right coalition government, is deeply skeptical that this is a necessary war.
“I’m not sure in my lifetime — or even in my son’s lifetime — we will know whether it was justified or not,” he said. “Who knows if this was the right moment?”
And woe to those who believe America should be an active participant, Ariel-Joel offers an unequivocal response: “It’s not going to be good for the Jews if we end up with Israel dragging the United States into another war in the Middle East.”