Watching Israel burn

From his fourth-floor apartment in the Ne’veh Sha’anan neighborhood of Haifa, Menachem Kellner could not see the fire, but he could see the smoke filling the sky.

“The smoke cloud was unbelievable.” Kellner wrote to friends and family. “It looked like an atom bomb blast, climbing high in the sky, and then turning west towards the sea.”

Kellner, a professor of Medieval Jewish Thought at the University of Haifa, had a front-row seat to one of the worst natural disasters in Israel’s history. The fire, started by a discarded coal from a teenager’s huka pipe on Dec. 2, quickly spread through the dry land of the Carmel Forest, burning 12,000 acres of forest and scorching the land for miles.

Unrelated to the fire, the University of Haifa had distributed gas masks earlier in the week. At first, unaware of the magnitude of the fire, Kellner wanted to send a lighthearted message about the masks. Then he heard about the busload of prison officer cadets that were caught in the flames.

“Suddenly an ecological disaster had become a human disaster of horrifying proportions,” Kellner wrote.

The bus carried what he called a cross-section of Israel: observant and secular Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews, a Druze, an openly gay woman and a Muslim whose family asked that his name be withheld.

Also caught in the fire was Israel’s highest-ranking female police officer, Haifa Police Chief Ahuva Tomer, who rushed to the scene. Tomer was born in Russia and brought to Israel as an infant on the same plane as David Ben Gurion. In an interview with the Jerusalem Post at the time of her appointment in 2006, she downplayed her accomplishments.

“I don’t feel like I’m special,” she said. “I do function in a predominantly male society, but I am an equal among equals and I try to be the best I can. But women need to understand that this is not just a question of equality of opportunity, but also equality of responsibility.”

As the day progressed, the situation worsened. Israeli firefighters were clearly outmatched. A nearby town of Nir Ezion was evacuated and Kellner saw one of his students take the Torah scrolls from the synagogue on television. Tomer sustained burns over 80 percent of her body.