During the recent 40-day war with Iran, dozens of Iranian ballistic missiles rained down on Israel. Elyashiv Raichner, a resident of Yerucham and a journalist for Makor Rishon, visited the town of Arad after it took a direct hit from a missile. He describes how, for a moment, people from across the religious and political spectrum – from all segments of society – came together as Israel experienced unity under fire.

Near the site where the missile fell on Saturday night in Arad, Raichner met on Monday morning with Leah Hershkovitz, director of the Arad Tennis Center. She had come with her daughter to collect sentimental belongings from the destroyed apartment of her parents, Hannah and Yishai Tapsai. The apartment is on the first floor of the building closest to the missile’s impact site – a building that will likely be demolished and rebuilt.

Hannah and Yishai had lived in that apartment for over forty years, since immigrating from Ethiopia in 1983. They raised their seven children there. Leah’s father is already 92 years old. On that Saturday night, as sirens wailed across the Eastern Negev, her parents had not initially gone to the shelter because of her father’s difficulty on the stairs. But when the alert came, Yishai Tapsai made the decision to go down, and as a result, they were unharmed.

Wearing a helmet, Leah entered the destroyed apartment. Throughout the morning, other residents of the damaged buildings arrived to retrieve what they could. One asked to collect clothing for the coming days; another needed diapers for her elderly father. Each required entry authorization and accompaniment by Home Front Command personnel, as the buildings near the impact site had been declared dangerous.

On Sunday, the Prime Minister, the President, and a long line of ministers and local officials visited Arad to support the residents and municipal staff. Monday morning was dedicated to philanthropy. Representatives from the Keren HaYesod Foundation, KKL (Jewish National Fund) leadership, and the Jewish Agency came to show solidarity and leave financial contributions. Arad’s mayor, Yair Ma’ayan, repeatedly visited the large crater on Shimon Street, recounted the events of Saturday night, and collected funds and donations.

From the moment the missile fell, Ma’ayan projected calm. Watching the video he recorded shortly after the impact, one could already sense the contrast between the alarming media headlines about a mass-casualty event and the mayor’s measured description. “The damage was relatively minor – the missile went into the ground, and the buildings only suffered blast damage,” Ma’ayan reported about two hours after the strike.

On Monday morning, Edna Weinstein-Gabay, CEO of Keren HaYesod, told Ma’ayan she was surprised by how calm his video had been. “Forgive me for not being more emotional,” he replied. “A leader needs to reassure. No building collapsed – only walls were pushed – and thankfully, despite injuries, we have no fatalities. It was a great miracle that the missile went straight into the ground and didn’t hit any of the buildings. You can see for yourselves that the adjacent concrete shelter wall remained intact without a scratch.” Ma’ayan noted that his experience as Director-General of the Jerusalem Municipality from 2007 to 2011, having lived through the bus bombings in the city, helped him keep perspective. He raised the need for funding a new therapeutic pool in the city, as well as a more urgent need for forty bomb shelters.

The power of community

The Tlalim neighborhood, where the missile struck, is one of Arad’s older neighborhoods, established about five years after the city was founded in the 1960s. Unlike other development towns in Israel, which were built with crowded, poorly planned apartment blocks, Arad was constructed with more care and forethought, evident even in its older neighborhoods. The main planning principle was that residents should be able to access most services within the neighborhood without leaving or using a car. Shimon Street, where the missile fell, is in fact a wide pedestrian path with no road or parked cars. By what can only be described as providence, the missile landed in the center of that street, between buildings.

The evacuation of residents was swift. Two Home Front Command rescue units were dispatched to Arad, one arriving by helicopter from central Israel. Magen David Adom, ZAKA, United Hatzalah, fire services, and Arad’s local rescue unit all arrived quickly. Their efficiency meant that within less than an hour, there were no missing persons at the scene. The commander of the Nevatim Airbase also contacted Ma’ayan immediately after the strike and sent ambulances and fire trucks from the base.

Many local Bedouin residents assisted as well, evacuating dozens of injured people on their own, in addition to the forty treated by Magen David Adom. Some of these Bedouins live in the city, in nearby buildings. Two of them, Mahmoud and Mamdukh Abu-Jama, were at the scene on Monday morning. Their cousin is a security officer in the Arara council and also serves in the reserves. The two described to Ma’ayan how, immediately after the strike, they rushed into the buildings and began evacuating children. “We saw a mother injured with two injured children – we carried them down the stairs and ran to Magen David Adom,” they recalled. “When we went back to rescue more children, we found a child who had fallen from the third floor. We took him to Magen David Adom and went back inside.”

The blast radius was wide. Windows were shattered in buildings hundreds of meters from the impact site. Public buildings – including the community center, the municipality, and stores in the shopping center – were damaged by the blast. Twelve residential buildings were significantly damaged, with four having entire walls collapse. As of Monday, the Property Tax Authority had approved demolition of only two of the four; the municipality is pressing for all four to be demolished and rebuilt. Each building houses eight families. Altogether, including families from nearby damaged streets, approximately 200 families, nearly 1,000 people, were evacuated.

Contrary to some media reports, this is not an exclusively Gur Chassidic neighborhood. Gur families constitute about a third of those evacuated, but because they tend to be large families, they make up nearly half of the evacuees. The other residents are elderly and young couples, mostly of lower socioeconomic status. About 300 residents were evacuated to the David Hotel at the Dead Sea, a similar number found temporary housing within the city, and about 450 from the Gur community were evacuated to a hotel near Jerusalem, within walking distance of the community’s central synagogue.

The Gur community currently makes up nearly forty percent of Arad’s population, and in recent years there have been tensions between Gur residents and parts of the older population. Just last week, a conflict erupted over a city shelter in the Ne’urim neighborhood being used as a synagogue for the Gur community. Although the shelter was open to all during sirens, the synagogue’s leadership was upset by an unsanctioned children’s program, which in turn prompted some secular women to interfere with learning in the shelter. Ma’ayan is sanguine about it. “We’ve achieved a temporary truce in the city,” he jokes. “Israeli unity until the next explosion.” He adds, more seriously, that while there are extremists on both sides, the city is not governed by its radicals.

One recent point of contention has been the Arad Mall, located directly opposite the missile impact site and struck by the blast, which damaged its ceiling and shattered its windows. Recent ownership changes had already created cultural tensions: new owners, affiliated with the Gur community, began playing Chassidic music, covered images of women, and pushed to close the supermarket on Shabbat, alarming secular residents. The city’s legal advisor sent a warning letter demanding the changes be reversed. Ma’ayan negotiated with the owners to stop the music and the harassment, and the mall has since continued to operate for all residents.

Not just walls

On Monday morning, the mall’s parking lot was filled with hundreds of volunteers from across the country, helping clear glass and seal windows in the surrounding streets. Organizations involved included Lev Echad, HaShomer HaChadash, Bnei Akiva’s “Hineini” operations center, and the Fourth Quarter youth movement.

Social workers, municipal engineers, psychologists, and property representatives assisted residents at the Levaot School, which was converted into an information and aid center for those whose homes were damaged. About twenty people remained hospitalized as of Monday, including children in intensive care.

Leah Hershkovitz later described what she had gathered from her parents’ destroyed apartment: traditional Ethiopian clothing, prayer books, and other items of personal significance. Although her parents are staying temporarily in her home, she and her brother found a small apartment nearby to minimize the disruption of such a drastic change at their age. She was clear that the family’s grief is not over material possessions, but over the loss of a home and forty years of memory.

Originally published in Makor Rishon.

Elyashiv Raichner is a resident of Yerucham, and a journalist at Makor Rishon newspaper.