Jerusalem Diary : Thousands in U.S. Peek Daily Into Family’s Life Via Computer

‘We had a quiet night; the best present for our anniversary that anyone could give us. I remembered the date but bought Golda nothing; she forgot but went to her exercise class early in the morning and returned with a present for me--a plastic bag ($7.50) for carrying my gas mask.

--Bob Werman,in a computer dispatch from Jerusalem on his 37th wedding anniversary

Jan Gartenberg has become obsessed with Israel. His dining room wall is papered with maps of the country. The clock in his bedroom is set 10 hours ahead to Israeli time. And in a messy back room of his West Adams-area home, he escapes each day to Jerusalem by way of his personal computer.

“When I don’t hear from him, I get worried,” said Gartenberg, leaning over his computer keyboard as his fingers punched a series of commands. “I don’t know if they have come and taken his computer away, or if Jerusalem has been hit by a missile attack.”

Gartenberg is talking about Bob Werman, a professor of neurophysiology at Hebrew University, a stranger from a foreign land who unwittingly has captured the hearts and minds of thousands of people across the globe.

For more than a month, Werman has been writing a daily journal about the Persian Gulf War from a computer in his Jerusalem home. The sometimes angry, sometimes funny, sometimes tearful chronicle of life in Israel is being dispatched by computer, initially to about 100 friends and colleagues, and ultimately through them and so-called computer bulletin boards to tens of thousands of computer hobbyists.

The poignant accounts have become a vital link to Israel for many Jews and non-Jews alike. They have been recited at services at a synagogue in Albany, N.Y. They have been published in newspapers from Japan to Alabama. They have incited others in Israel, displeased with Werman’s occasional political diatribe, to offer competing missives.

“You are almost in the room with him,” said Robert Cooper, an avid reader and fellow Hebrew University professor, who is on sabbatical at UCLA. “You are as close to being there without physically being present.”

Werman is one of a handful of computer diarists who have emerged in Israel, the voiceless equivalents of ham radio and shortwave operators of wars gone by. Their material is available, usually in a matter of minutes, unedited and uncensored, to anyone with a computer and access to one of a variety of networks and bulletin boards.

Unlike the countless computer hobbyists who use the networks to exchange sporadic messages about the war, Werman provides an unfailing, reliable and often literate account of wartime in Israel. It is a deeply personal chronicle of one man in one small corner of the Persian Gulf War.

“I was struck by the ultimate loneliness of the sealed room, the sense that other people, even family, there did not counteract loneliness. . . ,” Werman related in a recent dispatch, explaining why he writes the diary. “I did not know if I was to survive this loneliness, but I felt I had to share my knowledge if I could. . . . The closest analogy I could find was the tales told by those who died or almost died and were brought back to life. We are terribly frightened by the thought of dying, some of us by fear of pain, many more by the ultimate uncertainty of how death is perceived by the one who dies.”

The daily essays make no attempt to compete with war reports filed by professional journalists--indeed, Werman intentionally steers clear of identifying missile targets, and he rarely interviews experts or quotes government sources. The journal focuses instead on the human story, a small and vibrant slice of life as seen by a proud but frightened Israeli.

“What then are my qualifications?” Werman wrote one day. “I am a scientist and as such I have devoted my life to science and truth. I also am deeply committed to Israel, the ancient and present homeland of the Jewish people. I also am a religious Jew. These may be inadequate for the work I have undertaken.”

Robert Werman (he signs his diary Bob), 61, is an Orthodox Jew, born in Brooklyn, N.Y. A one-time resident of San Diego, he emigrated with his family to Israel in 1967 from Bloomington, Ind. He lives with his wife, Golda, in a house with a neatly landscaped garden in a turn-of-the-century neighborhood outside the walls of Old Jerusalem. He has written two books of Hebrew poetry and countless manuscripts in neurophysiology, but never anything quite like his computer war diary.

“He is a bit of character,” said Yale University senior Joel Spolsky, who is Werman’s godson and one of numerous distributors of his journal in the United States. “His Hebrew poems are extremely esoteric--poems that nobody understands. I think he digs through Hebrew dictionaries for words.”

Cooper, a friend, described Werman as both witty and ponderous.

“He is a serious person with very strong feelings, but can also be very funny,” Cooper said. “He can be the life of the party with the jokes that he tells.”

One early dispatch showed how Werman uses humor in some of his war stories.

“Following a kidney transplant operation, the patient awoke in the recovery room to find the nurses and doctors all wearing gas masks,” he wrote. “He apparently was convinced by this strange sight that he had died, not aware that an air raid siren had been sounded, and he began to cry bitterly. The staff attempted to reassure him by telling him that his mother was waiting for him. Since his mother had died four years earlier, this was the final proof he needed to know with certainty that he was dead. The staff had mistaken the patient’s father’s second wife for his mother.”

It has been an exhilarating but difficult relationship for both Werman and his readers, who have forged a transcontinental friendship of sorts amid an international crisis of still unknown proportions.

“It shows there are ethics and life and survival even when there is harassment,” said Leslie Fisher, a child safety consultant in Albany, N.Y., who recently read a series of Werman’s entries to several hundred worshipers at his synagogue. “My wife and I read these things and we are amazed.”

Werman has invited his readers to intimate family gatherings on the Sabbath, and taken them on walks through the streets of Jerusalem. He has lectured on the Jewish calendar, Middle East history and politics, and teachings from the Torah. He also has escorted his readers into the sealed room of his home, joining his children and grandchildren, and sharing the horror of missile assaults in minute-by-minute accounts.

“Sitting in the anti-gas room, members of the family try to put on a brave face, make jokes,” Werman wrote one day. “How we all look like elephants; how an elephant would approach one of us and mistake him/her for his mother. Only the dog, a rather stately collie, sits quietly and does not appear at all excited. We pity the dog, for he is the only one without a mask. But then we remember that--without a mask--he is our pigeon in the coal mine, the measure of poison gas that has leaked in.”

The bearded professor (he has even written about his wife trimming his facial hair) has opened up his inner self, inviting the world to see how the war has shaped him and his thoughts.

His journal includes discussions about his marriage (“these days we share preoccupations if not occupations”), his wife’s culinary skills (she “no longer has the patience needed for great cooking”), his own insecurities (“I ask myself if I am cowardly”), his routine before entering the sealed room (“I rush to pee”) and even his sex life (“I only wondered if sex might be used as proof that you are still alive”).

In the midst of one day’s entry, he began to worry about a “distressful heartburn” he had developed between two missile alarms, fearing that he had had a heart attack. The pain did not last, but it returned two weeks later. Last weekend, Werman suspended his diary for the first time to spend several days in a Jerusalem hospital.

“I thought that this would be a particularly ungraceful way to die,” he confessed in an earlier dispatch about his fear of a heart attack.

Cooper, the visiting professor at UCLA, said Werman’s insights help strengthen his long-distance bond to Israel at a time when many Israelis in the United States fear they are missing a historic occasion in their homeland.

“I used to read it at work, but I found I was taking so much time with it,” said Cooper, whose apartment in Jerusalem is about a 10-minute walk from Werman’s home. “I now simply print it out and read it at home. . . . People are very grateful to have this channel, this connection to what is going on.”

Werman, in a telephone interview, said some readers--including his wife, Golda--have reacted unenthusiastically to some of his personal disclosures. Golda Werman has made particularly good copy for her husband, who has chronicled everything from her matchmaking endeavors to her recent job dismissal as ways to relate something about the war.

“The initial response was negative,” Werman acknowledged, “but then I said, ‘Look, re-read it.’. . . Our marriage is still sound.”

Werman sends the daily diary to his friends and several computer networks on Middle East politics and Jewish culture through the central computer system at Hebrew University, which he accesses by telephone from his home. He pays a $40 annual computer fee and the cost of the local phone calls, which during his first month of dispatches topped $500.

Werman has not been paid for any of his dispatches, although he has begun to copyright them, and one small newspaper promised to send him $60 for some excerpts. Several publishers have suggested that he write a book.

For now, though, the war rages on, and so does “rwerman,” as he is known to the computer world.

“It is late. I must finish, go to sleep,” he wrote one day last week. “I am tired. I do not feel civilized. Just safe--for the moment--safe, tired and alive.”