As told to Toby Klein Greenwald
Rivka Demsky and Professor Aaron Demsky of Efrat share their memories of living through the Six Day War.
Rivka Demsky: We made aliyah from New York in 1965 with two children, ages two and a half and one and a half. We were both from Brooklyn. I was in B’nei Akiva but Aaron wasn’t and had no particular desire to come on aliyah. I did, but he had this wonderful offer of doing his doctorate with all the top-notch people in Hebrew University in Jewish History. His topic was on Reading and Writing in the Ancient Near East. I got a scholarship to do my masters at Hebrew University in The Institute of Contemporary Jewry. We lived on Rav Berlin St. in Jerusalem
The period leading up to the Six Day War was very frightening due to the indecision. Nobody knew what was going to be. We had never been through any war, but our neighbors had, so about a week into the tension, during that two-week period, one neighbor asked if I had stocked up. “With what?” I asked. “With food?” I didn’t know I was supposed to. I went to the supermarket and the shelves were absolutely empty.
We passed the houses of people who had left the country because they got nervous. The atmosphere was fraught with a lot of tension.
Toby Klein Greenwald: Why did you stay?
RD: We felt it was our country and that whatever happens to everybody will happen to us. We were very Zionistic.
TKG: Did your families try to persuade you to leave?
RD: Yes, and remember there were no phone calls, everything was done via telegrams. My father-in-law wrote to us, “We’ll make arrangements for you to return home, just tell us when,” and we wrote back, “Thank you, but we’re going to stay.”
They started building the bomb shelter in our building the day the war started. That didn’t help us, so we all went into a neighbor’s apartment that was more protected. All the neighbors were there during the day, and at night they found us a place to stay because we were the only ones with small children; our third child had been born in November. We had to walk across the street to this other person’s house to sleep. It was absolutely dark, there was no moon, and there was a total blackout. We were near Emek Hamatzleva (next to the Israel Museum). There was no radio, the home belonged to an old lady, she had no candles, and we weren’t supposed to light them anyway.
It was pitch-black, we heard machine guns all night, and it was very frightening.
During the day, we made sandbags to put on the windows; they had brought them to build the bomb shelter, so we put them in the windows, and it was a very good feeling, this camaraderie with everyone in the building. People congregated together and were very kind to us, especially since we had three little children.
When we listened to the radio, there were no details of what was happening, so we didn’t know. There were some in the building with us who had “connections” and they heard rumors but nothing was certain. You could hear from the foreign radio station Voice of England, I think, but nobody really knew what was happening.
All the reports were what the Arabs said: “Egypt reports . . . Jordan reports . . .” but nothing from Israel, and whatever we heard was terrible.
We first heard reports from Israel after Jerusalem was captured, on Wednesday. We heard through neighbors, and then it was announced on the radio.
TKG: How did you feel?
RD: Elated, very excited. We felt we were living through history.
On Shavuot we all went to the Kotel. We thought we wouldn’t be able to go, because of the kids, and we were home feeling very down, and all of a sudden a cousin of mine, an American, who had come to volunteer in the war effort, came to visit and he said that he had just come back from the Kotel and he’d watch the kids and we should go.
That was the most moving thing that ever happened to me. Walking to the Kotel, walking through the Old City, and coming to the Kotel . . . it was like a dream come true. Very moving. Then the following week we happened to be walking in Jerusalem and we heard a noise and we saw the wall separating the old from the new coming down, and that was also like a dream. Because there had been [separation] barriers all over the city before.
TKG: Describe your life that followed.
RD: I worked for many years in the Institute of Contemporary Jewry in research, then as the assistant director of Ohr Torah Stone, and Aaron lectured as a professor of Jewish History in Bar Ilan University. He started an Institute for the Study of Jewish Names.
We moved from Rav Berlin Street to Kiryat Moshe, and from there to Efrat in 1983.
Today, Rivka Demsky is a board member of the Women’s Beit Midrash of Efrat. Professor Aaron Demsky is professor of biblical history at Bar-Ilan University. He is an epigrapher noted for his work on onomastics and is the winner of the 2014 Bialik Prize for his book Literacy in Ancient Israel.
Toby Klein Greenwald is a theater director, editor of WholeFamily.com, and a resident of Efrat.