My bedroom happens to be a bomb shelter.
There are 18 inches of reinforced concrete behind the walls, floor, and ceiling. The door and window are made of steel, to be shock- and shrapnel-proof: Unfortunately, the room is impenetrable to WiFi. Fortunately, it’s also impenetrable to ballistic missiles—or almost impenetrable.
In my world, having a bomb shelter for a bedroom is a privilege. Where I live, in Tel Aviv, every building constructed since 1992 is required to have a safe room like mine—but plenty of people live in apartments without them. When the air-raid sirens go off, they have to run to public shelters. Whereas when missiles came raining down on Tel Aviv last Friday evening, June 13, all I had to do was go to bed.
My roommate and I were in the middle of hosting Shabbat dinner for 11 of our friends and acquaintances. We’d just finished the first course—braised Moroccan fish, burnt eggplant with tahini—when the siren went off. We grabbed our wine glasses and filed into my bedroom.