The Familiar Is a Mooring on Israel’s Front Line

The Cohen Brothers Bakery has been doing its best to churn out the challah every day (except Shabbat) since the warfare between Israel and Hezbollah guerrillas engulfed this city a month ago.

“I have customers,” said owner David Cohen, a Moroccan Jew from Casablanca who immigrated to Israel more than 50 years ago. “People need bread.”

In the most extensive lethal rocket and mortar barrage of Israel’s history, Kiryat Shemona has absorbed the brunt. The shells of cars burned by Hezbollah attacks have been shoved to the sides of nearly deserted roads, where the bricks and stones and glass of ruined buildings are scattered. Residents have huddled in stairwells, covered car parks and basement shelters every time the air-raid sirens wailed -- five, six, 10 times a day.

And yet some of the people of Kiryat Shemona have been trying to carry on with some semblance of a normal life.

They are not the emergency workers, whose mission is defined by disaster, but ordinary people whose work these days has involved defying death just to ring up purchases, fill a prescription, pump gas or deliver a pizza.

In times of crisis, these Israelis illustrate the national ethos of perseverance and chutzpah. A local mental health expert calls the residents “islands of resilience” who radiate stability that is good for the entire community, and could provide the cornerstone of recovery if, as world leaders hope, a cease-fire due to begin today takes hold.

Some think they are providing a service that is all the more crucial in times of warfare. Others find their own personal therapy in maintaining a routine. In some cases, they are filling a void left by a breakdown in city services.

Normalcy is relative, of course. There is nothing normal about shopping alongside battle-ready paratroopers or adjusting your carpool schedule to avoid rocket barrages, or making mental calculations about whether the explosions are incoming or outgoing. But there is something to be said about feeling that you have even a modicum of control over your life.

Moshe Kastoriano has managed to keep the local radio station, Voice of the Upper Galilee, broadcasting daily -- by relocating to a bomb shelter. On some days, Kastoriano sits alone at the controls, flipping switches and shifting seamlessly between Frank Sinatra and Eric Clapton. Other days, he has unexpected company: dozens of soldiers taking cover from the latest Katyusha rocket attack. No problem. Kastoriano opens the mike, and the young men say hi to mom and tell their girlfriends not to worry.

“We connect people,” said Kastoriano, a stocky, softspoken man who fought with a tank crew in Israel’s 1982 war in Lebanon. “That’s the only thing I can do to stay normal. It is important for the community to know that there are people who are doing their job. If we can show that we are continuing our lives, then it will tell others that the killing and tension is not for nothing.”

Even in good times, Janet Hansen has a tough job. She runs a kennel for homeless dogs. Her population has grown by half since the start of the conflict, and her mission has multiplied.

Hansen lives on a kibbutz several miles south of Kiryat Shemona, theoretically in a safer area. But she drives into the city every day to feed pets that have been left behind by their owners or to take food to pet owners too afraid to venture out.

She tries to hit the road early, before the usual late-morning rocket barrage, but inevitably gets delayed, by people calling to offer donations or dropping off food. As she patrols the streets of Kiryat Shemona, she frequently gets caught in bomb raids and has to leap from her pickup truck to seek shelter. One day (she swears) an abandoned white shepherd that she had rescued rescued her, Lassie-like, by leading her to the nearest shelter.

At first Hansen, a somewhat haggard-looking Canadian native who has lived in northern Israel for nearly three decades, would troll the streets listening for the barks of hungry dogs. By now she thinks she has identified where most are and can get food to them, or she has taken them to her kennel. Some residents took their dogs to Hansen before they fled; two were leaving so hastily they sent their dogs to Hansen in taxis.

When Hansen first showed up with bags of dry dog food to give to stranded pet owners, she said, they practically tackled her for it. Now that they know she is coming regularly, they are not so panicky.

Although the job has gotten increasingly dangerous, Hansen says she does it because “I know the dogs are out there.”

“The idea of not showing up after you’ve been there to feed them

She normally houses 150 abandoned or stray dogs in her kennel, a ramshackle but cared-for collection of fenced-in pens. Seventy more have been added since the violence began.

One was a dirty gray mixed border collie, who stood on his hind legs and pressed his nose against the wire fence to bark at a visitor. Each yelp, yelp sounded like help! help!

Warfare also makes people adapt. Guy Fegelson took his pizza business on the road, delivering to soldiers massing near the border and even to bomb shelters. He had to suspend deliveries after about two weeks, however, when he was summoned to emergency-relief duty.

At the Superpharm pharmacy in the Kiryat Shemona Mall, the clerks are disconcertingly cheery. They smile broadly when a customer approaches and are full of greetings.

“Coming here to work every day keeps me sane,” said Tami Mogel, 47, even though it means running a gantlet from her battered neighborhood down “rocket alley,” as Kiryat Shemona’s main street is now called. “It gives me a reason to wake up in the morning. It makes time pass faster. You see people, hear how things are going, about who left and who stayed.” In the background, the loudspeaker announces to empty aisles: Attention, shoppers. Today’s special: Cosmetics, buy one, get one free.

Of 50 employees at the pharmacy, five or six have remained. Customers have declined from 800 a day to about 100, many of them soldiers about to head into Lebanon and journalists in town to cover the fighting.

In between sitting and waiting for customers, pharmacist Yossi Amado and his employees head down to the shelter several times a day. The shelter is in the B-Active gym in the mall’s basement; Amado and the rest seek refuge among the exercise mats, stationary bicycles and big rubber balls.

Amado says running a business during this conflict has presented other problems as well. Banks aren’t functioning and have instead set up a “mobile bank” consisting of an employee in a van who will receive deposits. Amado had 70,000 shekels in cash, the equivalent of about $16,000, but missed the mobile bank. He had to drive like a madman through streets without working traffic lights to reach the mobile bank and relieve himself of the princely sum. (And without a seat belt, because police counsel that it’s better not to wear one so as to be able to escape easily from a car during a rocket attack.)

Their families nag them to leave. Amado sent his wife and children to stay with relatives in the center of the country.

“Everyone wonders, is it really necessary to risk our lives here? What for?” Amado said. “It was easier to give an answer in the early days. Now I sometimes also wonder is it worth it or not. I guess we feel like we are on a mission. We have to do it.”

The pharmacy and a grocery store are the only businesses open in the ghostly mall. Other shops advertise “final sales” without customers or merchants. Plants decorating the center of the mall have shed their leaves. Electricity comes and goes. A fire alarm, in need of resetting since a power outage, chirps an annoying low-level beep nonstop. “No one will come to fix it,” Amado said.

Mooli Lahad is a psychiatrist who founded the Community Stress Prevention Center at Tel Hai College on the northern fringe of Kiryat Shemona, which has been on a front line many times through the years.

Lahad said the people who tried to maintain regular lives were valuable to the community’s ability to cope and recover. His organization tries to create what he calls mock normalcy in bomb shelters by providing hairdressers, manicurists, masseuses and reflexologists.

“Fear is contagious,” Lahad said, “but so is resilience.”

He worries, though, that the community’s capacity to endure has been stretched to its limit. Even if the end is now in sight, no one expected the warfare and daily rocket barrages to last this long. Exhaustion has set in, Lahad said.

And that is what happened, finally, at the Cohen Brothers Bakery. In a month of baking amid conflict, all of the employees either fled or were drafted. It was up to brothers David and Nissim, and David’s son Shalom, to do everything, opening the bakery at 3 a.m. and sending fresh loaves out the door by 6 a.m. Production fell to 15% of its normal level, and customers were dwindling.

There wasn’t a final straw, so much as an accumulation that rose like the yeasted dough in Cohen’s oven. And so, on Friday, the Cohens threw in the apron. They baked enough bread to last their remaining customers another week. And called it a day.

If there is peace, they will be back.