While most Americans can watch the ongoing war between Israel and Iran from the safety of their living rooms, there are many U.S. citizens In Israel who find themselves living in daily fear as nightly missile attacks damage civilian areas and the Iron Dome intercepts more rockets.
By some estimates, there are 150,000 Americans in Israel unable to leave because of air travel restrictions. Among those are at least a dozen members of the Colorado Jewish community.
JEWISHcolorado has reached out to Coloradans in Israel to check on their safety and well-being. We talked with four of them: a college student doing research at a university that took a direct hit, a 28-year-old making Aliyah whose visiting parents do not know when they can leave the country, a family of three who are exploring every possible avenue to return to Colorado, and a well-known member of the JEWISHcolorado community who has gathered her family around her to endure the ongoing attacks.
Each tells a different story, stories rich with resilience, determination, fear, and even humor.
Finn Cooper
Since January, Finn Cooper has spent more than five months taking a semester off from college to do physics research at the Weizmann Institute of Science, a prestigious public research university in Rehovot, about 12 miles south of Tel Aviv. The campus dormitory where he lives does not have a safe room in the building, so his only option if sirens sounded was to “hustle” to a shared underground shelter. After the first night of attacks, he decided to move in with his friend Ben who lives in an apartment building directly across the street from the campus.
Ben’s apartment had the great advantage of having a mamad, a safe room inside the apartment. With extra food and an Xbox, Finn and Ben moved into the safe room by Friday night.
“It has a steel plate over the window and thick concrete walls,” Finn says. “But throughout the night, you could still hear large booms through the concrete walls, some of which were the interception of missiles close to you and some were direct hits.”
Finn emerged the next morning to find that a civilian area in Rishon LeZion, an area just 10 minutes away, had sustained heavy damage and casualties. It was a prelude to what would come next.
Around 3:00 a.m. Sunday morning, he awoke in the mamad to alerts from the Israeli government.
“The next boom was the most intense thing I have ever experienced in my life,” he says. “It rattled the steel plate over the window, the whole building swayed, there was a moment of silence, and then I heard a woman’s blood-curdling scream from the street.”
Finn Cooper with Adam, Abigail, and their youngest son Yisrael in their shelter during an attack. Sometimes they do origami in there to pass the time that is what they are holding up.
The Weizmann Institute, just several hundred yards from where Finn had been sleeping, had taken direct hits to buildings, caused by what he describes as “not a little Hamas missile, but a 2,000-pound warhead.” When he walked back to the campus the next day, Finn could see that two buildings had been destroyed, but the blast pressure wave from the bombs had reverberated, causing damage throughout the campus.
“When I got to my dorm room, it was unlivable,” he says. “The windows were blown out, the blast blew a locked door open, the ceiling on the floor above me had fallen. Had someone been there, shards of glass and tile off the walls would act as shrapnel and could kill you.”
It was, Finn decided, “time for a change in location.” Friends of his family from Denver, Abigail and Adam Hirsch who live in Ra’anana, offered him a place to stay. Three hours after he called to ask for help, he was sitting in their home enjoying a family breakfast.
Finn’s lab has closed after the blast. He plans is to leave Israel on the date he was always scheduled to leave, July 2, and not a day sooner because, he says, he “came during war and remains committed.” He is inspired by the attitude he sees among Israelis around him.
“They reflect on what is happening, but they keep moving on,” he says. “They find purpose. They find a way to be of service.”
Finn will return to Pomona College in the fall. It’s certain to be an interesting homecoming. He was “shocked” by overwhelming pro-BDS sentiment among faculty and students after October 7th, and that led to his decision to take time off to live and study in Israel. He brings back to Pomona a “tremendous amount of perspective.”
“At the end of the day, the death of anyone here takes a huge toll on all Israelis,” he says. “No one is talking politics at the moment. They are asking, ‘How can I defend my country? How can I help the injured?’ They are making decisions now that will save millions of lives in the future.”
Stuart, Jill, and Ellie Bombel
Stuart and Jill Bombel left Colorado on June 9 for what they anticipated would be a joyful reunion with their daughter Ellie, a college student who was finishing a trip with Birthright Israel Onward.
They expected to spend 10 days in Israel. Now, they are wondering if they will be able to make it home by July.
“I had an inkling when we left that something could happen,” Stuart says. “I told my business partner I thought there could be a disruption.”
The Bombels spent three calm nights in a hotel in Tel Aviv, but by night four, they were forced to shelter in stairwells during attack alerts. Sticking with their original itinerary, they have now moved to Herzliya where they are staying in a hotel for the foreseeable future. They have a safe room on the same floor as their hotel room.
“There are about 15 of us who gather there two or three times a night when the sirens go off,” Stuart says. “All you can hear is the Iron Dome intercepting rockets. But in that space, we are a mishpacha because we have been together for so much time.”
Stuart Bombel (second from left)
He cannot imagine another one or two weeks of life with nightly attack alerts, but his options are few. He jokes that he is “considering a cargo ship for passage to Cyprus—and I don’t like boats.”
A more realistic plan would be for the family to travel to Amman, Jordan, and try to book a flight on Royal Jordanian Airlines to Rome, Paris, or Athens, where they could find a connecting flight on a U.S. carrier. Stuart has already discovered that there is not much availability of flights out of Amman, and of course, he is competing with hundreds, even thousands of other travelers trying to leave Israel.
During the daytime, the family leaves the hotel long enough to check out the shops that have stayed open—about 75 percent of local businesses are closed, Stuart says.
Talk to Stuart Bombel, and his anxiety, frustration, and sense of powerlessness are palpable. “I have to get home, I have a business to run,” he says. But in the meantime, he will continue to explore every option to get his family out of Israel. And he has not lost his self-deprecating sense of humor, confessing that “even if I am stuck here in Israel for a year, I could never learn Hebrew!”
Diana Zeff Anderson
On her most recent trip to Israel, Diana Zeff Anderson hardly had time to unpack her suitcase before she had to seek shelter. Her account of experiencing Israel and Iran attacks and counterattacks is one that reinforces the importance of family in a crisis.
Diana landed on June 12 at 4:30 p.m. to attend a Shalom Hartman Institute board meeting. By 3:00 a.m. the next morning, Israeli government alerts had started, warning of a possible attack. Diana lives in the same apartment building in Ramat HaSharon as her son and daughter-in-law and their two children. The group decided it would be safest to drive to Haifa to the home of her daughter-in-law’s parents, so at 3:30 a.m., eleven hours after Diana had landed, they set out for Haifa.
“Where I live is near an intelligence facility that we thought could be targeted,” Diana says. “We felt it would be safer to get away from a very clear target for Iran.”
But by the second night they spent in Haifa, it was obvious that Haifa was not safe.
“We could feel the booms and the house was shaking,” Diana says. “We returned to Ramat HaSharon.”
Diana’s nephew who is in the Masa Israel Journey program left his high-rise apartment in Tel Aviv to join the family. (Her son is serving in the Israeli Reserves in Gaza, and her daughter is getting a master’s degree at Tel Aviv University.) In her apartment, Diana has a mamad, a safe room, for the family to share. She stayed up Sunday night watching the news.
“The biggest news they repeat is to get to a safe room because that is what saves lives,” she says. “That is what you hear every other sentence. People can walk out of multi-story buildings that have been wrecked, but if they stay in their safe room, they are secure.”
The night stayed quiet until 4:20 a.m. when the alerts sent them into the mamad.
Diana Zeff Anderson (center)
“The booms are very real,” she says. “It was horrible and scary. I started to think that I should have planned better and brought clothes, shoes, water and my passport with me into the mamad in case the whole apartment got blown up, and I had to walk out through broken glass to get out.”
By the next morning, the news was broadcasting images of blast damage and fires.
“I realized then that I really cannot become complacent,” Diana says. “This was happening in Tel Aviv, and this is a very serious threat. Iran is sending missiles that are much more lethal than the ones from Gaza, and they are not all getting intercepted.”
Diana has lived in Israel long enough to put this current attack into historical perspective. It reminds her of the country’s experience during the Gulf War in 1991 when safe rooms were just starting to be built. What has not changed through the years is the sense of community during a crisis.
“I feel very Israeli because I have my family around me,” she says. “That is why Israel is so resilient—that feeling of family coming together. It makes a huge difference in our ability to handle these days.”
While Diana is safe and surrounded by family, she emphasizes that there are other people in difficult predicaments. By some estimates, there are 150,000 Israelis trying to get back into the country with no way to arrange travel.
“Some people just went away for the weekend and left their children with their grandparents,” she says. “Now they cannot get back and they are stranded without anything they need for a prolonged stay, like clothes or medicine.”
For her part, Diana says she is content to “stay put.” She feels fortunate to be in a relatively safe situation with a level of comfort that she knows not everyone has. It does not, however, make the situation any less scary.
“I am Israeli, and I have connections,” she says. “This is where I want to be, and I know that is not the case for all Coloradans and that is legitimate. For one or two nights, this felt like any other rocket fire that Israelis experience in daily life. It only got through to me later that this is a full-scale war and isn’t close to being over.”
Talia Reynolds
Talia Reynolds has a perfect term for what she and her parents have been doing for the past several days—“shelter shopping.”
But she has also seen the terrible evidence of what can happen if you do not seek shelter.
Talia, who is making Aliyah, had just finished a six-month Masa internship, and her parents, Chuck and Ofra Reynolds, had come for a visit. It was the first time they had been to Israel since their last trip—which, in an unbelievable twist of fate, was on October 7, 2023.
Talia sleeps through her alarm for work, but she never sleeps through an Israeli siren. At 3:00 a.m. on the morning of June 13, the siren sent her running for shelter to the miklat, a communal shelter in the basement of her apartment building.
“The joke that people tell is that this is how you meet your neighbors,” Talia says. “Dressed in your pajamas in the miklat.”
She called her parents at their Airbnb and they raced to join her at her apartment so they could all be together. Her mother Ofra is Israeli.
“She has wartime memories of taping windows to mitigate the shattering of glass,” Talia says. “That was a fun tip from my mother pulled from her own childhood growing up in Israel.”
By Friday evening, the family had gathered at Ofra’s brother’s house for Shabbat, where, Talia says, “Nothing was normal. You could feel it in the air.”
Talia Reynolds with her parents in a public shelter near their Airbnb
“My uncle spent his career at a high level in homeland security and his mantra is echoed by many Israelis,” Talia says. “‘Focus on what you can control, or you will spiral.’ There is joking even at the same time everyone is tense because if we don’t laugh, we will drown in this.”
During the night, the sirens again sound and the family takes shelter in their mamad. They watch Channel 12 news and see missiles hit areas in the city, hear the booms, and feel the impact. It was the moment, Talia says, where “things got real.”
Later that night, they make a quick drive to Talia’s aunt’s house where the mamad is larger and they can stay the night. Now the booms are feeling much stronger.
By morning, the family is on the move again, this time back to the Airbnb where they will stay together, but the only shelter is public underground space. Twice during the next night, they race to the miklat, and even there, Talia finds a silver lining.
“There is such a sense of solidarity with the other people in the miklat,” she says. “Everyone brings their dogs, so there are puppies everywhere!”
On Monday, Talia walked the streets. What she saw were shops that had opened, even though their windows were shattered and their doors had been blown off their hinges. A friend called to tell her that a missile had hit the parking area behind her building and destroyed a chunk of the concrete building across the street.
“I walked to her apartment and there was water from broken pipes, they had put out fires from gas leaks, and walls were caved in,” she says. “There was debris everywhere. I have never experienced anything like it. In the apartment, the roommate’s bedroom was destroyed. But my friend’s bedroom, which was in the mamad, the safe room, was pristine—untouched.”
Talia and her parents are now staying in a hotel. The best way she can describe her parents’ plan to return to the U.S. is “To Be Determined.”
“My mom is Israeli,” Talia says. “She knows that you can never take anything for granted here in Israel. Since they were both here on October 7th, my dad really came to understand that as well. Now this is a new chapter and the only thing you can do is adapt.”
As for Talia, she has no regrets about making Aliyah. Every time she realizes that she is now in a war zone, she reminds herself why she decided to come to Israel.
“When my parents were here on October 7th, I remember how alone I felt in the U.S.,” she says. “I remember the antisemitism and isolation I experienced after October 7th in contrast to the sense of community I feel here now.”
Talia thinks of the years she spent at the University of Denver studying international relations as “the prologue.” Now, she says, she is living the actual story. She finds the resilience of people in Israel to be “mind-blowing.”
“You see people having breakfast at a café,” she says. “They are not disregarding the seriousness of the situation, but there is a remarkable commitment here to continue living.”