Natan Slifkin's new book is out, and I got the first one

I just ran over to Slifkin's house, who lives a couple of blocks away from me and bought his new book, Man and Beast. I got the first copy. We chated a bit about seforim, cheirem and life in general, and he autographed my new book. If you still don't know who I am talking about, it's the Zoo Rabbi. Great guy. Visit his site where you can read about all of his books, the cheirem, and other cool stuff at http://www.zootorah.com/. And if you're in the neighborhood look him up and defintely drop by. You don't get to meet people like him all over the place. Plus you can check out his really cool fish tank. You defintely won't see many like that one around people's homes. Oh, well, and if you are into seforim, it's defintely the right address.

The Red Alert

Soon after September 11, 2001 we moved to Brooklyn, NY. The city was a mess due to all kinds of security implementations. Most bridges between Brooklyn and Manhattan were closed to traffic, and police would make everyone go on the one open bridge. When I drove to work to New Jersey, there were Bradley Fighting Vehicles standing on the side of the road with soldiers in full gear ready to shoot. At who? I am not sure. But they were ready. There were 24 hour patrols of the NYC skies by F-15 fighter jets and you would see a bunch of them fly by every day. On the news they would announce that the alert ahs been raised today due to “chatter”. This was the Red Alert.

I thought to myself, this must be some kind of a joke. What would the National Guard in BFVs do if there was a terrorist attack? Blow off a building? What would an F-15 do? Would the terrorists come to the only bridge that was open to traffic and say hi to the police? How was all of this making us safer and more secure? I don’t know. It did look good though in the press.

And then we moved to Israel where they also apparently have Red Alert. And here is what it is.

On March 21, 2006 I went to my work in Jerusalem as usual - late. I left home at about 10:30 am. When I got to Mevaseret Tzion I noticed that all traffic on Highway 1 (Main Tel Aviv – Jerusalem Highway) has stopped. A few cars were trying to get off the highway and turn off into the Mevaseret exit. At first I thought there was a bad car accident, but then I saw about 10 police cars zooming down the highway in the opposite direction away from Jerusalem. A few ambulances followed.

I thought to myself, that’s weird. They are going the wrong way. I turned on the radio. They were saying that in Jerusalem there was a terrorist on the run who infiltrated Israel and they were trying to catch him. All entrances and exists to Jerusalem were closed by the army. The security alert was raised to Red, the highest.

I figured there is no point in going work anymore and I may as well turn around and go home. The opposite lanes looked empty. By now I was sitting about 50 meters past the Mevaseret exit. I switched over 3 lanes in between standing cars, got to the shoulder and waved to a bunch of cars to start turning around and go back to the exit. People started popping out of their cars and asking what’s happening. I told them there is a terrorist on the run and they should turn on the radio. A bunch of cars turned around and went into the exit. Once I got into the exit it took about 2 minutes to go through the light and back into the opposite direction. But just when I got to the ramp all cars stopped. I got out and what do I see? A police van parked across the ramp and is blocking everyone’s way. The police officer is not in uniform and it’s definitely not the traffic police. Someone came over to him to ask what’s going on, but all he said was that they can’t pass here.

Back on the radio they said that all major highways in central Israel have been closed to traffic and the police are chasing the terrorist. I was stuck in Mevaseret. I figured may be I should go to the mall to eat lunch, but that was a really dumb idea while there is a terrorist on the loose. I decided to just sit in the car and wait. In about 20 minutes the police van moved and a few brave souls decided to go onto the completely empty highway, including me. I got to about 200 meters away from my exit back to Bet Shemesh, when suddenly traffic stopped again. An army helicopter was hovering a bit further down the road.

On the radio they were already announcing that the terrorist was caught near the Latrun Junction (I should have known where it is by now, but I didn’t.) on Highway 1. They announced that the police knew the car make, the color, and the license plate of the van as soon as it infiltrated and chased it down until it stopped. Talk about intelligence.

Then they were interviewing the soldier who made the main arrest. He described how they stopped the van and stood about 100 meters away from it and how he told all the Palestinians inside the van through a loud speaker to stick their hands out the windows and throw the car keys in the middle of the highway in front of them. Then each one of them was told to completely undress down to their underwear and they had to walk out of the van like that and lay on the ground where they were tied up. The bomb was left inside the van in a back pack where it was later detonated by the sappers.

I realized that those police cars speeding in the opposite direction near Mevaseret was the car chase after the terrorist.

I was stuck again right next to the Paz gas station that’s located in front of the exit. I figured instead of waiting in traffic, I’ll drive into the station and use it as short cut to get to my exit. But once I went into the station I realized that it doesn’t connect to the exit and instead puts me back on the highway under the bridge of the exit ramp. At the end of the ramp from the gas station which is about a kilometer long I got stuck again the same jam. I parked my car on the side and decided to walk back to the station to get food. People were piled out of their cars all over the place. Some were talking, a bunch were taking their kids into the woods to pee, someone was saying Tehilim.

It took me 15 minutes to walk back in scorching heat to the gas station. Once I got there the place was packed. Everyone was buying sandwiches and all kinds of other food. Some people were already camping around, eating. It was probably their best business day in a long time.

In another 20 minutes I was back in my car which was still surrounded by the same cars, chumping away on my chips and soda. No one moved at all. In another 10 minutes the traffic started to move. Once I pulled back onto the highway I saw the sign – Latrun 500 meters. I never realized that the Latrun junction was the next exit after Bet Shemesh and the reason we were all sitting there because we were waiting for the sappers to blow up the bomb.

By the time I got to Latrun to go back to Bet Shemesh, all the action was over and everyone was gone. Around 3 pm I was back home.

You can read the more official description with pictures of the incident here:
http://web.israelinsider.com/Articles/Politics/8075.htm
and here:
http://web.israelinsider.com/Articles/Security/8077.htm

After this whole adventure I finally realized what Red Alert really is as it should be. Quiet and effective without tanks and planes freaking everyone out and doing nothing. The intelligence is amazing. And they don’t tell on the news that they are raising alerts because they hear “chatter”.

My grandmother passed away

I spent 4 weeks in the US visiting my grandmother, Riva Kipovskaya, who was very sick already for a while. On March 16, two days after Purim, my grandmother passed away. She was 85.

When we were leaving the states for Israel, back in August, she said to me, my wife and my kids, “I just wish I would get to see you all once again one last time.” And she did. The day we came to visit her she was still conscious, and even though she had a stroke a month before that and couldn’t talk very legibly, she recognized all of us and talked a little to the kids. The next day I visited her again, but something happened. She wasn’t really talking any more and didn’t seem to respond much. As time went on she deteriorated and eventually had to be placed on life support. She stayed on it for a week, but being tough as she was, despite all doctors’ predictions she got off and lived for another week on her own. She passed away really quietly in her bed in the nursing home without being hooked up to any machines.

As much as I was prepared before that she is passing it didn’t help at all. It came as a huge shock. I guess there is something inside of us that believes that everything will be ok no matter what, and it keeps us going.

Because her funeral was on a Friday afternoon there were no speeches and almost no prayers. That made me even more upset. But now I can tell the story that I wanted to tell then if I could.

It’s a story that my grandmother told me that happened to her during WWII when she just became a doctor.

She graduated medical school on a sped up program in Leningrad in 1942, in the middle of the blockade and was evacuated out of the city to a small town near by called Budogosh where she was the regional doctor. One day she gets a call from some emergency office that in some village really far away there is a woman who is giving birth and she is bleeding to death and that she is the closest doctor around. She said that she has no way of getting there, but the dispatcher was said that they have a small army fighter plane that will be dispatched to get her and bring her there. When the plane arrived it was a tiny open plane with 2 seats in a row. The front seat was for the pilot and back seat was for the gunner. The pilot told her to get into the gunner’s seat. As they flew, the plane shook like crazy and she became really sick. She vomited all over the side of the plane. The plane landed in the middle of some field. My grandmother didn’t see any village. The pilot said that the village is 10 km (6 miles) away from where they are, but there is no open field there to land and so he had to land here. He kind of showed her where to go through the woods and so she did, for 10 km.

When she got to the village they were already waiting for her. They brought her into a tiny filthy wooden house and there, lying on a bed, was a woman who was screaming her head off. She wasn’t so much in pain, but she was so scared that she was bleeding and was going to die that she was completely freaking out. My grandmother realized that the reason she is bleeding is because there is a piece of the placenta stuck in her womb and never came out. She asked for soap to wash her hands. Everyone around laughed. It’s the middle of the war and they didn’t have any soap anywhere. What about alcohol or vodka? Of course they have that. That’s what they drink all day. So my grandmother washed her hands with vodka, stuck her hand up to her elbow inside her womb and pulled out the placenta. The bleeding stopped.

I don’t know how she got back to where she came from. She said that she thought the woman would for sure die from infection since the house that she was in was filthy and my grandmother’s hands weren’t really properly disinfected. And yet, a couple of months later she gets a phone call from that village that the woman and the baby are fine and that she saved their lives. Talk about tough people, the doctors and the patients.

I told this story to a bunch of doctors and nurses in the ICU while my grandmother was on life support so that they should know what it was like to be a doctor in Russia in the middle of WWII. And when they tell me that there is no point to keep her on life support, because she will die right away anyway, I told them that during her life time she literally saved thousands of lives and all that they want to do is to speed up the road to the cemetery. As I said already, they were wrong. She got off life support and lived without it for another week. When she died she just stopped breathing in her sleep without any agony.

My grandparents were married for 58 years and 28 of them, spent raising me. Just like my grandfather’s, all her wishes came true. She got to see all of us one last time.

Is driving in Israel really that more dangerous than in the US?

As soon as we mentioned to our friends that we were making aliyah most people mentioned that driving in Israel is very crazy and dangerous. People would say “Israeli drivers are just crazy.” I never really believed it, especially after my first visit to Israel in 2003 where my very first experience was renting the car straight out of the airport and driving to a hotel in Haifa across half of Israel, at night, during which I realized that Israeli roads and signs are really well marked, nice, and visible. So I started to wonder is driving in Israel really that crazy? So far that I lived in Israel for 7 months and drove literally to every part of the country, I have to say that overall driving in Israel is the same as driving anywhere in the US. In comparison to driving in New York City Israeli driving here is really really nice. Except for in the center of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv most people don’t honk and yield to pedestrians just like in most parts of the US. Most people drive around the speed limit and observe the signs. Every once in a while you will meet a crazy nut who is cutting everyone off and speeding, but that happens everywhere. The roads themselves are much better than most of American and Western European roads (in my humble opinion, having driven across half of Europe and half of America).

So it made me wonder why do people, both new olim and natives, keep saying that Israeli drivers are crazy and how dangerous it is to drive in Israel. However no one that I have ever spoken to even knew what the statistics were. So I decided to do some math for myself.

The Israeli Car Accident statistics can be obtained from the National Road Safety Authority at this web site: http://pasimlev.mot.gov.il/RoadSafety/English/Statistics.htm

The US statistics can be obtained here: http://www.bts.gov/publications/ ...

All of the data is from 2004. Also, to be generally fair, I am comparing all of Israel to all of the US, even though Israel is really small and most of its population is concentrated in large cities, so it’s probably more accurate to compare it to a place in the US with a similar density, such as the NY/NJ area. But be that as it may I discovered that once again we were told a bunch of twisted information.

Here is what I found.

In 2004, in Israel:
1) There were 2.04 million registered motor vehicles
2) 428 fatal crashes
3) 480 fatalities
4) Estimated number of lives saved by the use of safety belts: 30
5) Population of Israel was 6,869,500

In 2004, in the US:
1) There were 243.24 million registered motor vehicles
2) 38,253 fatal crashes
3) 42,643 fatalities
4) Estimated number of lives saved by the use of safety belts: 15,434
5) Population of the US was 294,941,471

In order to compare the statistics I analyzed a few important ratios:

Vehicles / Population:
Israel: 0.296964845
US: 0.824705997

There are 2.77 times more cars in the US than in Israel relative to the population.

Fatal Crashes / Vehicles:
Israel: 0.000209804
US: 0.000157264

There were 1.334 times more Fatal Crashes in Israel than in the US relative to the number of vehicles on the road.

Fatalities / Vehicles:
Israel: 0.000235294
US: 0.000175312

There were 1.342 times more Fatalities in Israel than in the US relative to the number of vehicles on the road.

Vehicles / Fatality:
Israel: 4250
US: 5704

There are 25% more vehicles in the US that drive around without causing fatalities.

Estimated Safety Belts Saves / Fatalities:
Israel: 0.0625
US: 0.361935136

Strangely enough, only 6.25% of the fatalities in Israel could have been saved by the use of seat belts, where as over 30% of fatalities could have been saved in the US. This statistic is really strange. Either a lot more Americans don’t use seat belts or the way they estimate this number is really different and therefore it’s not a direct comparison.

Fatalities / Population:
Israel: 6.98741E-05
US: 0.000144581

There were 2.069 times more fatalities in the US than in Israel relative to the total population.

Another way of saying that is that overall you are twice as likely to be killed in a traffic related accident in the US than in Israel. Now you may say that more Americans have cars than Israelis, which is true (see ratio #1), however that doesn’t mean anything since many of the fatalities were pedestrians, bus riders (of which there are a lot more in Israel), bike riders, etc… And then keep in mind the population density issue that I mentioned in the beginning which makes this type of a comparison not totally fair. And finally the fact that there are less accidents in America per unit of cars completely makes no difference to your chance of being killed by one. What it does show that a lot less drivers of vehicles in the US create accidents, because there are 2.77 times more vehicles there and yet there are 25% less Vehicles per Fatality. But like I said that doesn’t affect your chances much. It is a sign to the Israeli driver that overall they create more fatal accidents than Americans do.

I think it’s worthwhile to compare the Israeli statistics to the NYC/NJ Area, but I am just too lazy to do it. May be someone who is that interested can post a comment here with their data for that area.

However, in general, I think that I made my point clear. Statistically, it’s not any more dangerous to drive or be driven over in Israel than in America. It’s roughly the same, if not safer in Israel (since so many people don’t drive). So feel free to come and drive.