When rocket sirens have gone off throughout the current war, Razi Tsvong, an 89-year-old from Holon, feels helpless. His apartment has no safe room, and the building’s bomb shelter requires walking down a flight of 21 stairs.
“I need to choose between running to the shelter with the knowledge that I could break my leg in doing so or staying in my apartment and risking being injured by rocket fire and shrapnel,” he told Davar. “Most of the time, I stay in my apartment. And it makes me anxious. You flip flop between the fear of rockets and the fear of getting hurt running away from rockets.”
Tchiya Kreutzmann, a 70-year-old from Ramat Gan, also has to deal with the dilemma. “When there’s a siren, I just sit in the living room,” she told Davar. “I don’t go down to the shelter on the ground floor. There’s a wild rush of all the neighbors with their kids on the stairs. A small, accidental push would be enough for me to end up with broken bones. There’s a higher danger of that than a rocket hitting my home.”
The threat of rocket fire has also made it difficult for Kreutzmann to leave her house. She fears she’ll be on the street when a siren goes off, and the community center near her home where she usually spends time closed due to the lack of any sort of protected space.
“The isolation during this period has been really difficult,” she said. “My family is far away, my children live far away, some of them are working, some of them are serving in the reserves, and I don’t have the community center. So most of the time I’m home alone.”
She said multiple attempts to talk to the municipality haven’t resulted in any changes.
“I pretty quickly understood that the municipality doesn’t really care about it,” she said. “No one’s interested in whether you were able to get groceries, whether you have your medicine, or whether you have someone to take out the trash. Or even to see if we’re alive. When the war began, people from the municipality came and delivered challah for Shabbat. I didn’t need it or anything, but it was nice that someone thought of us. But now—nothing.”
Tsvong and Kreutzmann are not alone in facing this problem. In his time volunteering at the local Pensioners’ Union, Tsvong has received dozens of similar complaints from other elderly people in his area, he said.
“Not a small number of people in my area live in old apartments, where there aren’t safe rooms within the apartments. At best, there’s a shelter on the ground floor of the building. At worst—there’s one down the street,” he said. “Often they live on the third or fourth floor. There’s no chance they can make it down the stairs in 90 seconds. And the isolation is also an issue. In general, the elderly of Israel are not in a good position, and doubly so since the war.”
After receiving the complaints, Tsvong and his colleagues at the Pensioners’ Association tried to contact the local authorities to figure out what could be done. “Until now, no one has given me a response,” he said. “The answer is pretty clear—we need to make sure that every pensioner has access to a shelter, and to make sure that installing safe rooms in elderly people’s apartments is greatly subsidized. The cost of a safe room can reach tens and hundreds of thousands of shekels, and most pensioners don’t have that kind of money. So yes, we need to build safe rooms today in homes, in community centers, in every place. And we need to make sure that the entire population has access, including those who walk slower.”
Tsvong struggles to believe that the state will successfully meet the growing needs of elderly people. In the municipality where his son lives, only 19 social workers serve the entire population, he said.
“There are departments that are missing dozens of workers. So how could they possibly take care of the elderly?” he asked
The Pensioners’ Union told Davar it has received complaints from elderly people all around the country about their lack of access to bomb shelters and trouble getting a response from the authorities. Many say that during a siren, they simply go to the stairwell because they don’t have a safe room and it’s too difficult for them to go all the way down the stairs to the shelter in 90 seconds.
“During the day, many elderly people are forced to stay at home due to physical difficulties such as living on a high floor without an elevator, fear of being outside the house during a siren, or the closing of the community centers due to the lack of protected spaces,” Shmulik Mizrahi, chair of the Pensioners’ Union said. “The war doubled the feeling of isolation for many elderly people.” He noted that even before the war, 25% of Israel’s elderly population are considered to be isolated and cut off from their communities.
The Pensioners’ Union has launched an online campaign encouraging people to check on their elderly neighbors, just as was done during the coronavirus pandemic. Mizrahi called on Haim Bibas, head of the Federation of Local Authorities in Israel, to take action on the issue as well. He said Bibas should direct local authorities to call elderly residents and check on their well-being.
In response to Davar’s inquiry, the Federation of Local Authorities said that local authorities are preparing to meet the needs of elderly residents in the event of an escalating war.
This article was translated from Hebrew and lightly edited for context by Tzivia Gross.
