Working around the blare of sirens

Stephanie Hausner of Bergen County, the chief operating officer of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, had been in Israel since the beginning of February, preparing for the group’s annual conference.

Her husband, Josh Lipowsky, joined her about a week later. He’s the Counter Extremism Project’s senior research analyst, but although he worked from their Tel Aviv hotel room at the beginning of their stay, he was there less to work than for a week of vacation, culminating in the Tel Aviv Marathon on February 27.

The marathon was massive. More than 50,000 runners plodded and thudded through the city. It was Mr. Lipowsky’s third marathon, and the first that wasn’t the New York City race.

The couple had tickets for El Al’s 12:30 a.m. flight back home on March 1. “While I was in the middle of running, the State Department issued its call for employees and their families to leave,” Mr. Lipowsky said. “At that point it was too late for us to get out.”

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“The first siren went off at about 8 a.m. on Saturday,” Mr. Lipowsky said. Later, after Shabbat, they saw an email from El Al telling them that their flight was canceled.

That siren “was a test. And that’s when we learned that the war had begun.

“We decided to stay close and went to shul in the hotel,” he continued. “I was called up for the Levi aliyah. I read the bracha, and the baal koreh was reading the parsha when the siren went off. Everybody went downstairs to the shelter until the alert cleared. Steph and I stayed behind to make sure an older couple was okay.

“By the time we got back to the shul, they had moved on to the third aliyah. The Kohen said he finished the aliyah for me.”

Ms. Hausner and Mr. Lipowsky were in Israel for another week. During that time, they got emails from the U.S. State Department and from El Al; “sometimes customer service was very helpful, and sometimes it wasn’t,” Ms. Hausner said. El Al told them that they’d be rebooked; they were, but not until a week and a half after their original flight.

The State Department told Americans to shelter in place, but also that they should feel free to get on the buses that Israel’s tourism ministry was providing to take them to Taba, in Egypt, or to Jordan. From there, they could more easily get home.

But there were two possible problems with that, Ms. Hausner said. For one thing, it was hard to know if it would be safe, given how quickly the situation was changing. For another, all this is expensive. At first, the couple extended their stay, but after the first few days, they asked if there was any kind of wartime rate. As it turns out, there is, and that helped.

“Our calculus was that we were safer being in Israel, surrounded by people we know, a wonderful hotel staff that went above and beyond, and also because I have family living nearby,” Mr. Lipowsky said. “If we went to Taba or to Jordan, we’d be on our own.”

What did they do all day? “We worked,” Mr. Lipowsky said. Remote work is hardly novel any more, and certainly Israel has all the technology anyone could need. “We would also try to take a walk on the beach every day.” They learned where the local shelters were, and they always stayed close to them. “Once, when we were feeling a little daring, we met Josh’s cousin for coffee,” Ms. Hausner said. “There were four alerts while we were trying to drink our coffee. But there was a shelter right there, so it was okay.”

The alerts were constant. It wasn’t really frightening, Mr. Lipowsky said, “but it was nerve-wracking. We definitely felt safe where we were, in the hotel. People there were prepared, and the shelter was in the basement of the hotel. You went straight down into it.”

Their room was on the 11th floor, and they took the stairs down. “You could take the elevator when the 10-minute warning would go off, but when the 1 1/2-minute warning goes off, you have to take the stairs,” Ms. Hausner said.

“The staircase is reinforced,” she added. And it’s entirely okay to take the elevator back up to your room once the situation is over.

It’s hard on people in wheelchairs or who have other physical problems, and on people with small children, they added.

“It is a significant problem in general for people with mobility issues,” Ms. Hausner said. “They have to stay closer to the shelters, because they can’t take any chances.”

Morale seemed fairly high, the couple said. “People were trying to make the best of a difficult situation. People who tell jokes in the mamad” — the shelter — “to try to keep everyone’s spirits up.”

They’re not sure what it’s like now, they added. “We were among the first Americans to leave,” Mr. Lipowsky said. They were given seats on a State Department flight that was filled, as far as they can tell, about evenly by other visiting Americans and by State Department employees and dependents.

“The State Department flew us to Athens on Friday,” Mr. Lipowsky said. “The State Department and embassy staff were incredibly helpful during the flight, making sure everybody was taken care of.

“By the time we landed, it was too late to get a flight home, so we ended up spending Shabbat in Athens. We went to Chabad, and there were a few dozen other people who had either been on the flight or gotten out through Egypt or were trying to get back to Israel there. And on Shabbat morning I got to finish my aliyah.

“Chabad of Athens was incredibly welcoming and did a tremendous job making sure people had a place for Shabbat.”

“By now I think that most of the people we were with in Israel have been able to go home, but I think that some haven’t heard from El Al yet, and they’re feeling some concern,” Ms. Hausner said. “We know that there still are people who would like to come back to the United States who haven’t figured out how yet. I know that there is some frustration on their part.

“But from the Israelis’ perspective — unlike Americans, they see the long game — they understand the significance of the ayatollahs falling.”

“Over the past week or two we have seen a significant blow to the Iranian influence on the region,” Mr. Lipowsky said. “Look at Lebanon. The Lebanese prime minister, Nawaf Salam, declared last week that all of Hezbollah’s military activity was illegal. A few days after that, he called for the arrest of all IRCG officers operating in Lebanon.” The IRCG is the Iranian Islamic Military Guard. “These are steps that would have been unthinkable just last year.

“With the fall of the Assad regime” in Syria in 2024, “the removal of Nasrallah,” who had led Hezbollah in Lebanon until Israel killed him and other terrorist commanders in 2024, “and other leaders in the region, we have seen a significant drop in Iran’s influence,” Mr. Lipowsky said. “And with Iran’s striking other countries in the region beside Israel, we are seeing a growing regional response to it, and a willingness to push back. We see UAE air strikes, Qatar and Turkey issuing very strong warnings to Iran, and Saudi Arabia starting to get involved.

“Really, the tide is turning.”