Fears Flare for the Jewish Community as Missiles Fly

For two agonizing months, Shirley Kobernick of San Diego tried in vain to persuade her son, Yair, to return his family to the United States from their home in the Mattersdorf section of Jerusalem.

“At first, I said, ‘Don’t wait too long, that’s what the Jews of Germany did in the Holocaust,” Kobernick said Thursday night, as news of the Iraqi missile attacks on Israel unfolded.

“I used every tactic that I thought I could,” the Del Cerro resident recalled. “Then I said, ‘I don’t have any right to do this.’ You tell him that you love him, you tell him that you’re praying for him, and then you butt out.”

The worst fears of American Jews were realized Thursday night, when Iraqi missiles reportedly landed near the major Israeli cities of Tel Aviv and Haifa.

For the many Jews in San Diego County with relatives in Israel, that meant the beginning of tortured hours waiting for word of precisely where the missiles had landed, how much damage had been done and whether the Persian Gulf war would be dramatically widened as a result.

The mood was one of palpable fear in the home of Dr. Donald G. Byrnes, a San Diego obstetrician, and his wife, Betty, the president of Temple Beth Israel in Hillcrest. Their youngest daughter, Laura, 25, said the family waited anxiously by the phone all day Thursday, hoping it would be Sara, calling from Tel Aviv to assure them she was fine.

“She’s an extremely sensitive and caring person,” an emotional Laura said about her 28-year-old sister, a graduate of Patrick Henry High School and Grossmont College. “She has a generous personality, and she’s very strong . . . She has to be.”

Sara, who has no family in Israel, has lived in Tel Aviv for 2 1/2 years.

The Byrnes family last heard from her Wednesday night, when she sounded “upbeat and very confident,” Laura said, her voice choked with emotion. “But now, we have great concern. We’ve tried all day to reach her. We just can’t get through.”

However, the family received “a miracle” late Thursday night, Laura said, when San Diegan Inge Furmansky, whose sister, Anna, is Sara’s roommate in Tel Aviv, phoned to say he had just gotten an “amazing” call.

“Anna called to say they were going to sleep, and that we should too,” Laura Byrnes said. “She didn’t offer any detail about the bombing, but she didn’t need to. We were so relieved. And apparently, their mood was fine.”

But for most of the day Thursday, San Diego families shared a sense of fear and dread, as each new report painted a grimmer picture than the one before.

“I feel scared. I feel dazed,” said Ellen Fox, an Encinitas resident whose sister lives with her three young children and husband in a section of Jerusalem populated by very religious Jews. “I really didn’t believe this would ever happen at this time in our history. With so much peace around the globe, I thought maybe we didn’t need to worry so much.”

“I’m just really, really distraught,” said 15-year-old Sanda Bailund-Vana, who visited her father’s close relatives living in Israel last summer. “All I can think about is them, and bombs and them wearing gas masks. I think about their dog.

“I envision gas, little gas things killing everything and nothing being left,” she said.

Such fears and concerns were abundantly in evidence at many shops and restaurants Thursday night, among them the Jewish delicatessen D.Z. Akin’s in La Mesa, which was “full of fear, concerns and questions,” said manager Phyllis Blythe.

Morris Casuto, director of the San Diego branch of the Anti-Defamation League, said local Jews were feeling “a great deal of apprehension and fear” in the wake of the Iraqi attack.

“I wish I could tell you I was surprised, but if we had listened closely to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff early Wednesday evening, he told us not to presume anything,” Casuto said.

“Clearly, Hussein was hoping to make this an all-Middle Eastern war. I just pray the Arab members of the Allied coalition would not be so foolish as to do exactly what Hussein wants them to do if and when Israel retaliates.”

“I am devastated for the people of Israel,” added Lenore Bohm, rabbi of Temple Solel in Encinitas, who has cousins living near Haifa. “Even more than that, what I feel is contempt for Hussein and his forces, who would take such a cowardly action.”