Family visit in Tel Aviv waylaid by Gazan war

Elliot and Julie Skiddell were eating dinner with their daughter in a Tel Aviv restaurant when an air raid siren went off.

“It’s not an unfamiliar sound to us because we lived in Israel for quite a while,” said Skiddell, spiritual leader of Rockville Centre’s Beth Emeth Synagogue. “We lived up north in the Galilee area, and … the north was subject to regular bombings and rocket attacks.”

The Skiddells go to Israel almost every July to visit two of their children and reconnect with family and friends. This year’s trip, which included a mission with the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, which Skiddell heads, turned out to be four days longer than planned, thanks to the Federal Aviation Administration’s temporary ban on U.S. flights to and from Israel after a rocket landed a mile away from Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport on July 22.

The family abandoned their table — although Skiddell grabbed his sandwich — and headed to a stairwell inside the building, which served as a bomb shelter. “Since it’s inside the building and there’s no windows, and the rest of the building is around the stairway, that’s the safest place to be when there’s a rocket attack,” Skiddell said.

He added that in these makeshift shelters, you get to know people you otherwise wouldn’t have met.

“So everyone from the restaurant and the kitchen staff all piled into this stairwell area,” he recounted, “talking with each other, reassuring each other, comforting each other, saying to each other, ‘It’ll be OK, not to worry, another minute or two and we’ll be able to go back outside.’”

They waited in the stairwell to hear the “boom” — the sound of Israel’s air defense system, the Iron Dome, launching a missile and destroying the incoming rocket. “But then you have to wait for the shrapnel to fall,” Skiddell explained. “So you have to stay in the shelter for about 10 minutes, approximately, so you know all of the shrapnel has fallen and you know it’s generally safe to go back out.”

When it was safe, he and his family went back out and continued their meal. “Because that’s what you have to do,” he said. “We had a number of incidents like that. We had an incident when we were riding bikes along the Tel Aviv seafront. We heard a very loud boom. I think, that time, there wasn’t even a siren.”

That, in fact, was the rocket that landed near Ben Gurion, and brought about the FAA’s ban on flights by American carriers. “I think it was a ridiculous decision that caused problems for thousands of travelers,” Skiddell said. “There was no danger to the airport, because the airport has an Iron Dome system.”

The Skiddells hoped to have dinner with both of their children who live in Israel — a daughter who is a student at Tel Aviv University and a son who is on active duty in the IDF — but their son could not come because he was deployed.

“Just as we were getting ready to go out and have dinner, we were all packed and ready, and the phone rang,” Skiddell said. It was Delta Airlines, informing them that their flight had been canceled, and they had been rebooked on a KLM flight going to Amsterdam.

“Fifteen minutes later we got a message from Delta and KLM that the European airlines were following the lead of the American airlines and also canceling flights,” he said. “So that meant we couldn’t get out on KLM. We tried to get a flight on El Al, because Israeli airlines kept flying, but we weren’t the only ones with that bright idea.”

The flight ban was lifted on July 24, but there was a backlog of people trying to get to the U.S. The Skiddells were unable to return until two days later.

On Monday, two days after they returned, Skiddell attended the pro-Israel rally in Manhattan (story, page 1). “It showed how, in times of stress and in times of trouble, the community stands together and is very supportive of Israel,” he said.

A version of this story first appeared in this week’s Rockville Centre Herald.