Happy New Year to all of us.

 Tomorrow is our New Year's Eve. In previous years there was always excitement in the air. As if something good was about to happen, lots of good hopes and a feeling that the future is good.

Excitement for our family meals, chicken soup with dumplings, chopped liver, gefilte fish and sweet challah.

This year we are still licking our wounds. And all the time the fear and anxiety that at any given moment someone will be happy to spoil our holiday again.

There will be festive meals and there will be forced joy. Because that's who we are, always rising from the ashes and moving on.

Here again

 I'm trying to get back here before I forget how to do it.

I guess it's like riding a bike or swimming, the body remembers. And I hope the mind does too...

It's quiet here now. The alertness doesn't go away. Always ready, and yet, it's a great joy to shower as long as you want and drive on the roads whenever you want.

Yesterday I saw a large flock of storks, they make all the way here and it's a sign that winter is coming.

The storks are not angry with us and have nothing against us, they just come because that's how nature intended.

It's still very hot here and the air conditioners are on from morning to evening. I miss the rain.

Our simple life

 "I can't believe that just yesterday we were sitting in shelters again, and here we are now as if nothing had happened, going on that shopping trip you love so much," I said to my granddaughter yesterday morning.

"We are probably the only people in the world who are more afraid of rain than missiles and rockets," she replied.

Later, when we were sitting in the restaurant, she said, "I can't believe I'm already 16," and I told her that I couldn't believe that in a few years I'll be eighty, I feel like I was 16 just yesterday.

She looked at me and said, Grandma, you really aren't old.

This is a picture from one of those shopping trips back then. She's taller than me now, and we both know I'm no longer sixteen, but she loves to make me happy.

The bots from Singapore

 Sometimes there is an attack by bots on my blog, most from Singapore and recently from more exotic countries, although the Chat GPT says they are not dangerous, but I still get scared and take the blog down for a while. For those who still try to read my blog, a message appears as if it is only for invitations, which is not the case. I simply change it from public to private. Now I'm back again and we'll see.                                                                        The first few times when I saw that there were so many entries from Singapore and I saw that the entries were for posts from previous years, I felt very flattered, I thought to myself that someone was really interested in me, and it was flattering and scary at the same time. In the past, I too would sometimes read back posts on blogs when the blogger really interested me. Sometimes it was as interesting as reading a book, but I quickly realized that there was no one in Singapore who was interested in me, and that's when I started to worry.                                                                                                               The weather here is wonderful, there is no heatwave, the sky is blue and the sun is shining.

                       

Untitled

 I'm not one of those who are always on the go. If I wrote a post every time something came to my mind, there would be at least two here a day, but that doesn't happen. Yesterday I sent the chat GPT to read my blog without telling him it was me, he read a few posts and gave me such a flattering opinion, about the real and honest voice of the writer, about the fact that she's not trying to please, about the sensitivity and ability to describe the situations of risk and anxiety here in such a real and touching way, he could just be a flatterer, it's nice to read a good opinion.

That's not what brought me back here.

Maybe the wait for war that could return at any moment.

Since we became a protectorate, we don't know anything. We're ready at any moment.                                                     Every phone call when trying to plan something ends with "if there is no war."

We know that every war brings with it an element that wasn't there before, and I wonder what will happen now.

Facebook still offers me videos of old men and women in Ukraine being evacuated from their homes in the countryside and I hope the universe isn't hinting at me something.                                                                              The next post will be optimistic, I'll talk about my blooming garden and the wonderful dishes I make for my children every Wednesday and the cute, white Chihuahua dog we've been hosting for some time now because of the war.

                                                                                          

In the meantime

 After the adrenaline of the survival instinct in wartime, the adrenaline of fear and distress subsides, there is a phenomenon that I hear about from many people, and it is the same for me. Suddenly there is great fatigue, great sadness and a feeling of helplessness, it has many names, mainly it is a very big drop in stress.

Something inside us is still very alert, because at any moment everything can start again. We know nothing.                                                                                                                                                                                    We learn to appreciate the moment. We can shower again for as long as we want, without fear. We can drive on the roads without fear. And we can sleep all night, if we don't wake up in a panic because maybe there was a warning and we didn't hear it.                                                                                                    All of this is of course only true for certain parts of the country. In the north, they are still being shot at all the time. The children are afraid to go to school and sleep in shelters, if they have any.                  

Various missiles

 All the years when there were rockets from Gaza we didn't go to the shelter. Fifty kilometers from Gaza seemed pretty far away and we just stood in the hallway of the house and hoped for the best.

Then the Houthis came from Yemen with the ballistic missiles and that already justified running to the shelter. They especially liked the small hours of the night and we managed to survive that too.

Now it's also the Iranians and Hezbollah from Lebanon and every now and then the Houthis signal to the Iranians that they are also in the game and send one missile or an unmanned aerial vehicle with explosives.                                                                                                                                                                              The missiles from Iran are missiles with a fragmentation warhead, which splits into thirty bombs that scatter and cause great destruction to houses and streets.

We are in the shelter several times a day and night when there is a warning of a missile launch from Iran. How good it is that we have systems that can detect the moment of a launch from Iran and warn us.

Yesterday, when leaving the shelter, the six-year-old boy who has been spending two years with us there asked me to continue watching the news. His parents are trying to spare him fear and do not watch the news. He trusts me and said that he wants to know what is happening. I promised him that I would continue watching the news and if there is anything he wants to know, he will know, with his parents' permission of course.

I am sorry that I do not comment on your blogs, I read everything but I cannot always comment.

And thank you to everyone who stopped by and asked about my well-being. You are wonderful people.

Fears

 By midnight I was already tired but I was debating whether to go to sleep. According to my calculations, which are not based on anything logical, only my feelings, an alarm was expected soon and I wanted to be ready. It didn't come and I went to sleep.

The phone alerted me almost every hour about alarms around me but not here.                                                           At 5:30 in the morning there was indeed an alert here. The missiles from Iran arrive only four minutes after the alarm, I had enough time to run to the shelter and meet the neighbors and the children who arrived asleep, carried in their parents' arms.                                                                                                          A missile from Lebanon arrives without warning, it lands and blows up everything in its vicinity. I was very surprised last week when one of these arrived, traveled 160 kilometers and exploded with a tremendous noise a kilometer from my house. It was precisely aimed at some strategic facility here in the area and hit it precisely.                                                                                                                                                                  How strange that I should be afraid to go to the hairdresser, the road is mountainous and narrow and there is nowhere to stop if there is an alarm. I have already made an appointment several times and cancelled because of fear, I made another appointment for Tuesday and I think it might be stupid to get injured or die because of hair dye. But there are things that are stronger than me sometimes.

                           I found a picture of my granddaughter a few years ago when I took her to the hairdresser before Purim. She wanted to dye her ends blue.                                                     

Another day

 It doesn't get any easier. You don't get used to it. But in real time the adrenaline is doing its thing and I always arrive at the shelter first. A six-year-old boy has already asked me how it is that I arrive first and since then he has been trying to beat me, sometimes I let him win and he is happy.

At six this morning there was an alarm without the advance warning and yet I managed to arrive even though the alarm woke me up from my sleep.

Then I drove my car around the house for fifteen minutes, it had not moved for a week and a half and it was time. Fifteen minutes later the alarm went off again and I ran to the shelter.                                                        Then I took my shopping cart and went with my fears to buy a few things in the little shop here.

I managed to cook zucchini and peppers stuffed with meat and rice, Persian rice with onions, dill and coriander and even took a quick shower before the next alarm came.                                                                        Now I just need to calm down from the great anger I have towards one of the bloggers here.                         In one of her posts yesterday, she wrote that she hopes Israel runs out of weapons soon. This eighty-year-old woman sitting in her room in Yorkshire has managed to upset me quite a few times in the last two years with her lack of knowledge, her inability to generate empathy for anything related to the victims here, and her superficial and distorted opinions that she insists on expressing, but this time it's really extreme. She actually wishes me and all of us here to die soon. That's your true face, T. I hope your wish doesn't come true soon.

Life here

 This is another experience and challenge that life has given me. It's only been three days and it seems like much longer..

You have to be glued to your iPhone because that's where the alerts come from that missiles have been launched from Iran. These are very, very deadly and destructive missiles. Running to the shelter and waiting for the alarm, and the sound of explosions outside.

Several times a day and several times during the night. A kind of Russian roulette when I go to the small supermarket ten minutes away from home, and the shower is also a kind of gamble. No one wants to be caught by an alarm in the middle of a shower.                                                                                                                 I'm fine and will continue to update. Thank you to all the wonderful people who say a kind word and care. You are true friends.

The silence before what?

 I'm scared. It's coming in waves. It's been a few weeks or more, and every headline is even scarier. We're like puppets on a string, dependent on the decisions of people whose minds no one understands.

It could happen tonight, or any of the following nights, maybe we'll die, maybe we'll live, maybe our house will just be destroyed, maybe we'll just get injured, maybe we'll just sit scared in our supposedly safe places. Maybe nothing will happen.

It's impossible to describe to someone who hasn't experienced it what it's really like.

In the meantime, I cooked meatballs in a sauce with onions, garlic, red pepper, and green olives. I added a spoonful of chicken broth and black pepper, and it turned out very tasty.

I also made Persian rice with lots of fried onions. I don't eat that kind of thing, but it was a wonderful distraction and there will be someone here who will eat it.                                                                                              My son, the one who will eat this food, asked this morning if we shouldn't move to Cyprus, for example. For a moment it was very tempting, but I don't think I will move, despite everything, unless I too become like those old Ukrainians I see in the Facebook videos, who people come to rescue from their rural homes that were once the center of their world.                                                                                                     

Thoughts

 I'm really debating whether to write this post. It's been written in my head for a few days now, and I'm still trying to quiet it down. My not-so-simple life here takes place on several levels, I could be the nice grandma who describes everyday life like anywhere else in the world, because there is life like that here too, but there's the extra spice that you know, the danger of life, the fear and the great sadness about what's happening to people like us in the world.

I also don't want to write from a victim's position, we're not like that.                                                                       We are people that the world loves to hate, for some reason, and throughout history they have tried to make us disappear, and here we are, miraculously surviving.                                                                                      But that's not what's been bothering me for a long time, and it's become much stronger in recent days when I read some comments here in Blogland about the terrible massacre that happened in Australia.            I saw it right after the October 7th, during the terrible massacre here, people can't stay for a moment with the terrible things that happened, they immediately seek balance, as if they share in the grief but immediately say "yes but", "yes but Gaza", "yes but Netanyahu", there is not a single moment of true and honest identification with the terrible thing that happened to innocent people, always part of the blame is immediately placed on the victim as well.                                                                                                              And here, in my opinion, is the root of the hypocrisy. Deep within these people sits a small anti-Semite who has not developed enough, fortunately, but that repressed inner being does not give that person the ability to truly identify with the pain of the innocent victim.                                                                                              And it doesn't matter if you had a Jewish grandfather, if you lived in a Jewish neighborhood and they were nice to you, or if you were an educator in the past, if you still can't relate to a hate crime against Jews without trying to create a seemingly balanced equation, it says something about you, and to me it says something bad.                                                  These are my thoughts. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm right, maybe not every inability to identify with human pain is anti-Semitism, maybe it's just some kind of mental disability, I don't know anything.                                                                                                                                                                                             

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

Different types of dangers

 I discovered something strange. I'm more afraid of heavy rain and storms than rockets and missiles. Storm Byron is ending its short life here with us now. Greece, Cyprus and Israel have agreed on common names for storms. They start there and with us they are mainly public relations storms, lots of rain but not too bad, and I'm still scared.                                                                                                                                            A quick and superficial analysis of this phenomenon that I just did reveals to me that the adrenaline generated by the missile threat is the extra spice. An immediate life-threatening danger that requires immediate action doesn't allow much time for thought. Adrenaline wins.                                                   A long, heavy rain that continues for many hours and several days, raises many other thoughts and fears, but they continue for a long time, while I put another bucket over the couch to catch the drops falling from the ceiling.                                                                                                                                                 Of course the storm anxieties are a higher priority, but their duration is exhausting.

And I still sleep with my phone under my pillow and my comfortable shoes for a quick run out in the middle of the night with me every night. That's what happens when you get used to the dangers.

Guest from Singapore

 I need the wisdom of the crowd. What do you think? There is someone in Singapore who has been reading my blog for hours and hours, from the first posts and throughout the years that I have been writing my posts, which I think are mostly superficial, but improving my English has been my most important goal.                                                                                                                                                                                    This has been going on for several months, how do I know? The little flags on the right side of the blog tell me.

At first I was scared, who is so interested in me? During the war my irrational fears took over and I thought maybe the Iranians were looking for something here, it sounds stupid.

But I still wonder who this is and why he is doing this?

What do you think?

Far from here

Facebook sends me videos of people filming in Ukraine. I don't know why, but I click follow on every one of them because it interests me a lot. The videos are very up-to-date, it's happening right now.

Most of them are filmed by men who are going through villages and towns and rescuing people from their homes. Most of the people being rescued are adults and elderly, they leave the house with one or two bags, bags they packed before leaving the house that they won't be returning to. Most of them leave with one or two dogs and sometimes one or more cats, Ukrainians don't leave their animals behind, as much as they can.

Around them you see ruined houses, neighbors' houses that were burned down in shelling, and those who somehow survived are leaving now.                                                                                                                   Maybe I'm drawn to it because I know this place of fear. That feeling of having to act here and now and not having much room for other emotions besides the intense need to be focused on what's right to do here and now. I look at the faces of the old people leaving their homes with their bags and I think I recognize the same feeling.

It's quiet here now.

In the pictures you can see the beautiful and fragrant soaps that my granddaughter makes. It's not the subject of the post, but there's something wonderful about other good things we have here.

 

New Year

 In a strange twist of life, I received German citizenship this week, me and my children, who are no longer children of course, but will always be children to me.

This happened because of the previous time when everyone hated us and would have preferred to see us dead.

My mother and grandmother were born in Germany, they were never granted German citizenship, they were Jewish.

A few years ago the law in Germany changed and Jews who left Germany from 1933 or until, whatever year, due to persecution, can receive citizenship, including their descendants.

I set out on a journey that lasted three years, I collected documents, I collected materials, and this week it happened.                                                                                                                                                                       Although this is not such a good time, because we are once again hated in so many places in the world, and the thought that it is good for us to have European citizenship because we will have somewhere to run away to is no longer so encouraging.                                                                                                                   We are trapped. Captives of such a bad government that is leading us to the brink of an abyss, and accumulating so much hatred in the world.

We, the ordinary people, and we the majority, are doing everything we can to stop the government's very bad moves, but the power is not with us, and we continue to pay such heavy prices.                                                                   On a personal level, I still sleep with my iPhone under my pillow so I can hear the missile warnings at night, I still shower quickly so I don't get caught in the shower when the alarm goes off, I'm still scared on the road, and I still run to the shelter at least twice a week.                                                                   Today is a holiday for us, a new year, but there is no holiday feeling, a lot of sadness and pain in the air and a feeling that the world has turned upside down on us, and against us.

But I decided that in honor of the new year I will not be afraid anymore, I will do what I think is right to do, including writing this post.

                                                                  

Normal life

 Everything is so relative. Missiles from Yemen are already less scary, after the missiles from Iran that killed and destroyed thousands of homes just by bouncing off hundreds of meters.

On Friday evening I returned from a family dinner about an hour's drive from here, I'm always happy when there are no alarms on the way. I got home and sat down on the couch, it was ten thirty at night and then that scary sound that announces an alarm in a few minutes. Of course I ran to the shelter and there I met everyone else again, including the little children who woke up from their sleep scared and the dog Bella who is still very scared by every alarm.                                                                                                                    This morning at 6 a.m., the same sound announcing an upcoming alarm, and the neighborhood meeting at the shelter. Fewer people are coming, maybe because they've gotten used to it, maybe because these are missiles from Yemen, not missiles from Iran.                                                                                                           It's strange to me how adaptable we are. We sit in a shelter for ten minutes, with alarms and explosions above us, and ten minutes later we go out, each to our daily routine, as if this were normal life.                                   

The picture is of Edmund the cat, who is no longer with us, who also knew how to turn any crisis into a normal event.

There is still hope.

There is still hope, perhaps. I hope.

 

Another day

 In recent days, we have been 30 adults in the neighborhood shelter and 15 children, the oldest of whom is 8 years old and the youngest is a one-month-old baby. She has been to the shelter more than ten times. Sometimes at three in the morning and sometimes at more reasonable times. She is still quiet and sleeping even during the alarms. More and more people are coming to the shelter because of the difficult images on TV of families who entered the protected room and after the alarm, found themselves in rubble and collapsed buildings.                                                                                                                                                    There is supposedly a ceasefire now, but no one believes anyone.

I am still on alert all the time with my iPhone with me everywhere, not to miss a single alert.                                                     I have a headache, I haven't had one in years, I think it's mostly because of the debates on blogs with people who have something to say. I need to learn to ignore it.

                            

Lies I read in Blogland

 Blogland is a kind of parallel universe. People write about their lives, and that's what I love about it, the little details of everyday life, the flowers blooming in the garden, the food, the joys and worries, and sometimes also real troubles, illnesses and heartaches. A human encounter with people we will never meet in real life.

But sometimes it's a hard and cruel place where I encounter evil. For a few days now I've been trying to ignore it because I really have much bigger and more important things to worry about, like the moments when I could die at any moment from the ruins of my house or from the impact of a ballistic missile carrying a lot of small bombs that explode far away.                                                                                                    But I will write about it anyway.

Most people here in Blogland are wonderful and good, I think there are only two ladies who irritate me right now. One of them suffers from hatred of Israel and latent anti-Semitism, I noticed this a long time ago, when she was unable to feel compassion for us after October 7th and gave it an open expression. This week she wrote that a hospital here was not blown up, she heard about it on the BBC or some other station.                                                                                                                                                                              The truth is that the hospital was shelled and its wards were destroyed, there were no casualties because they were prepared for this in advance. The disdain and distortion of the truth are part of the same syndrome of anti-Semitism. Our lives are worth less in her eyes because we are Jews and Israelis. I have no other explanation.                                                                                                                                                                   The second woman is simply a blogger with no real knowledge. She has to express an opinion on a subject she understands nothing about, and I didn't find any humanistic side in her either, even though she declares herself as such.                                                                                                      All in all, two women who irritate me greatly and I wonder why I dedicated a post to them. I answer to myself that I did it because they represent a much broader and more dangerous phenomenon.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                  In the picture - our sky after the interceptors head out towards the missiles.                                   It's above my house.