30 hours from home
Manny Klein describes how he and his family made it back from Tel Aviv last week
When Manny Klein of Teaneck, his wife, Pessie, and their daughters, Aliza, 14, and Ariella, 9, went to Israel several days before a cousin got married there on February 24, their plan was to stay a few extra days “to enjoy Israel,” Mr. Klein said. He doesn’t have a big family, he said, but a cousin from Brooklyn and an uncle from New City also went to the wedding.
“The wedding was on a Tuesday, and then on the 28th the war broke out.” That was Saturday, so “we spent Shabbes and Sunday in the hotel shelter in Tel Aviv.”
It wasn’t so bad, he said. “We were on the fifth floor. Every floor had its own shelter, and there was one in the basement, so you didn’t have to run down to the basement every time.”
But, he added, “Tel Aviv was really getting bombarded nonstop, so the majority of Shabbes and Sunday we were in the shelter.
“We had never experienced anything like this. It was a first for us. It was pretty scary at first, but then we adjusted pretty quickly.” Still the situation wasn’t ideal. The Kleins’ daughters had to go back to school, and Mr. and Ms. Klein had to go back to work. (Mr. Klein is managing partner of PEEK Properties in West Orange.) “And then my cousin told me that he was going to go home, and he was going to go back through Egypt,” Mr. Klein said.
Although there were no direct flights from Israel back to the United States, the Israeli tourism ministry was offering bus rides to Taba, at Israel’s border with Egypt. From there, visitors to Israel could get back home.
“But my wife and other people in the hotel were saying that they didn’t want to do that,” Mr. Klein continued. “They said that Egypt is not a safe country, and that women are mistreated there. My wife was scared. She didn’t want to go there.
“So I said no problem.
“We were offered an apartment where we could stay in Jerusalem. So on Sunday we decided that we’d go, and on Monday we got in a taxi to Jerusalem. And then my aunt and uncle called and told us that the hotel that they were supposed to check into in Jerusalem was closed, so they ended up staying with us too.
“And then I started doing research about how to get out. My 9-year-old was getting really bad anxiety whenever the sirens went off, and I said that this is not going to end for a while.
“It’s rough to keep staying here. It’s not good for her. We had to get back to work. So I did more research.”
He decided that, after all, the family would go to Eilat and cross the border to Taba, in Egypt. “People were asking crazy prices to get us to the border; $500, even $1,000 per person. Crazy price-gouging. So I reached out to a lot of my friends,” and they worked together. Eventually, the cab driver who’d taken the family from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem brought them south to Eilat.
“We booked a flight out of Egypt with Arkia,” a small Israeli airline. “It was supposed to go from Egypt to Athens to Newark.”
How to get to the airport in Egypt? “We found a driver, a very honest guy, who took us there from the border in Taba,” Mr. Klein said. By then, “we” was the four Kleins, Mr. Klein’s uncle and cousin, and “another lady who was traveling by herself and asked to join us. So we were seven altogether.”
The road trip was long. First, they had to get through the border into Egypt. The border police “demanded a tip,” Mr. Klein said. “They are very used to getting a tip. I was like, this is crazy. It is not normal. But it is normal for there.
“When we got to Taba, the roads were closed. The roads are closed at night. We couldn’t leave. We had to wait 2 1/2 hours in the car and had to tip a cop to be able to get out. And then, once we got out, those roads were closed, and we had to wait to get on the main road. And then the airport was closed, and we had to wait more, and then once the airport opened, there was a huge line to get into it.”
The adventure — misadventure? — continued; more lines, more rerouted flights, more waiting. “We got to the airport at 12:20 p.m. and we were on line until we got to the actual airplane at 4:40,” Mr. Klein said.
It usually takes about 11 hours to fly from Newark or New York to Israel. It took the Kleins more than 30 white-knuckled hours to make that trip.
There are many stories, he said. Here’s one of them. “You’re not allowed to stand and pray in the airport in Taba. One of the ladies decided to record the cop who was telling the person to stop. They almost locked her up. They took her away and took her passport. They went after her. You can’t record a cop there, the way you can here.” Eventually they let her go, but still.
And there is a message in all this, Mr. Klein said. Actually, two messages.
The first is about America. “You can record a cop here,” among many other things we can do. “That’s a way of saying that the freedom that we have in America is something that there is nowhere else.
And also, Am Yisrael chai, Mr. Klein added. “I would not have been able to figure it out alone. I couldn’t have done it if we didn’t all work together. We got over 40 people over the border that day. Forty American Jews. Because we are one people, and we all worked together.”
comments