We got the text message fifteen minutes before the first missile strike.

“All students, please do not leave the center for any reason this morning, we will be staying inside today due to security precautions.”

A little late for that. The text detailed the measures being taken to keep students secure but was calm in tone.

The problem: we were already out of the Brigham Young University Jerusalem Center. Some friends and fellow students of mine, Emma, and David, and I, had woken up at 6 a.m. on Saturday, the day we observed the Sabbath while in Israel, to attend church services at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. It took only a few seconds for us to decide it likely wasn’t a big deal and that we would finish up and then head directly back to the center. The security briefing we had endured at the start of the study abroad program warned us that there could be days we would need to stay inside due to potential security threats.

At that moment standing in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher on Oct. 7, we nearly believed that since we were in the old city, nothing could happen — a naive assumption given the history. It was too valuable for the conflicting parties to target and risk destroying sites of extreme religious significance to both sides.

After the second text we knew we had to get out of there, and fast.

“EVERYONE GET IN THE BOMB SHELTERS NOW.”

I showed it to my classmates, and we briskly made our way out of the church. The sun was bright; it felt fitting for a sabbath morning. We were walking up the steps out of the courtyard and onto the street when we felt the first two missiles hit.

Two subtle vibrations shook the ground, and I could faintly hear the explosions somewhere south of us. David, Emma and I stepped off to the side of the street, and I stilled my shaky hands enough to dial the Jerusalem Center’s security number.

One of the security personnel answered immediately. “Hello?” I was about 15-seconds into explaining our situation when a man began walking towards us from the opposite side of the street. My tension was turning to apprehension until he showed us his identification card.

“Hello, I work for BYU security, how can I help you,?” the man asked.

We explained the situation and he called the same man I was currently on the phone with. I was put on hold while they spoke a few words in Arabic.

After they hung up, the man turned to us and said, “You will be fine, just walk directly back to the center and don’t leave the road.”

When they had told us security was good, I had no idea it was that good. This guy had gotten to us before we could even tell them where we were.

Cat Menlove, front, with Emma Harline, left, and David Wilcox. This picture was taken the morning of Oct. 7 while walking to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, just before the missile launches. Photo credit: Caleb Herrick

We didn’t see a soul when we got back to the center. The white marble stairs had no students running up and down, lamenting the lack of elevators like usual. As we made our way up to the cafeteria on the fifth floor we finally began to see other students.

Trays of food were scattered around on the tables, and students were gradually appearing to reclaim their breakfast. We asked what had happened and learned that the missile sirens had gone off during breakfast. The students left their food behind and had been in the bomb shelters for about a half hour. They had just gotten out. I got my breakfast and sat down. Everything felt weirdly normal.

Before I could finish my food, I learned what bomb sirens sounded like. We all hurriedly filed into the center’s two bomb shelters, rooms with white walls, toilets, sinks, a few tables and a seemingly out of place ping pong table in one shelter and foosball in the other.

One of our professors and his family of three young children were sitting in a corner of the shelter. He and his wife were trying to calm them down. Most of the students talked loudly and snapped selfies. Others seemed annoyed with the noisy confinement and sat slumped up against some spare wall space. Little did we know , we would spend much of our next week in and out of those rooms before evacuating Israel.

The bomb shelter's atmosphere was a contradictory mixture of concern and joviality. Photo credit: Hanieh Malcolm

Before the war

I vividly remember the plane touching down as we first arrived in Israel. It felt surreal reading the letters on the side of the building, “Ben Gurion Airport.” The pink sunset filtered through what looked, to me, like palm trees. My jaw had to be nearly touching the floor. Signs in Hebrew and English directed me down to the baggage claim and large stainless-steel letters spelling out in English, “Welcome to Israel.” A cat sat cleaning itself on top of the stopped conveyor belt. I found it funny then. I would soon find how appropriate of a welcome to Jerusalem that had been, given the boundless number of stray cats.

A Jerusalem-style welcome by a cat in the Ben Gurion International Airport. Photo credit: Cat Menlove

I found a seat on the bus taking us from the airport in Tel Aviv to the center in Jerusalem. As I waited for the rest of the students to join, I saw our driver kneeling on the ground performing the “Salah,” or Muslim prayer. This was my first glimpse at the faiths in Jerusalem.

4:55 am. The call to prayer was sounding loud and clear outside the class door in my three roommates and my room. Probably the effects of the nine-hour time difference and jet lag, but for whatever reason, I was up almost instantly. After enduring more orientation, security briefings, and a small tour, we finally got to go out to the city in our own small groups.

I’m going to give it to you straight. For me at least, the many smells, people} and lack of space was overwhelming.

It was hot, foreign, and loud. I felt the constant need to be on guard. Our dress code was extremely strict, by American standards. Loose pants to the ankle, sleeves halfway to the elbow, necklines above the collar bone. Did I mention it was hot? They passed out mini backpack coolers for us to tote around giant water bottles each time we went into the city, and they were needed.

The other girls in my group and I were approaching one of several major entrances into the old city, Lion’s Gate, when we heard yelling. Remembering warnings of how the various city gates had a higher potential for violence, we quickly ducked into a church to wait for the tension to pass and then kept walking. After my first few visits to the old city, the paranoia from hours of security briefing on how to not get stolen from, assaulted or blown up, eventually wore off and was replaced with curiosity and excitement. But the tension in the air never did ware off. Jerusalem is a tense city. There was not just religious friction between Jews, Muslims and Christians, but also there were political rifts between Palestinians and Israelis and the division within Israeli circles.

Our group walks along a street lined with Israeli flags. Photo credit: Cat Menlove

In contrast to the tension was the wonder. I sat near the wall where Pontius Pilote Pilate condemned Christ. We lived less than a mile aways from the Garden of Gethsemane. We took the sacrament every week overlooking the path where Christ carried the cross. When we sang the song, “How Far is it to Bethlehem,” the answer was six miles. To me, it can be no accident that the Savior of the world was born in such a dry, hostile place. I think there is something more comforting about that. He understands hard. He understands barren. He understands me.

The Garden of Gethsemane, just a mile from the Jerusalem Center. Photo credit: Cat Menlove

The next few weeks I felt my mortality acutely. Our instructors told us the course work was front loaded, and that while we would have some time to explore the city, it may be wise to focus on schoolwork now and dedicate more time to exploring later in the semester when we would have both more time and a greater capacity to understand and appreciate what we were seeing.

For one class, we had over 200 pages of reading assigned for one week, not to mention other course work with similar assignments. Our schedule was fluid and changed to accommodate field trips and our Israeli and Palestinian professors’ schedules. Sometimes we had up to 8 hours of classes back-to-back, with only lunch and 10-minute breaks in between.

The social situation didn’t help. Imagine living in one large house with the same 100 people, literally eating breakfast, lunch and dinner together, most of whom are stressed out of their minds about maintaining their GPA to keep their scholarships.

I heard one student describe it as, “ the Bachelor in Paradise mixed with Lord of the Flies.”

Because of the extreme time difference and extensive classes, it was difficult to talk to people from home. I often found myself holing away in one of the extremely coveted, secluded corners of the center or out on the beautifully landscaped grounds.

Grounds at the Jerusalem Center overlooking the city. Photo credit: Cat Menlove

After one especially late night of homework, I was walking back to my room, lonely, discouraged and frustrated. I had an incredible opportunity. I was studying in the Holy Land. Why wasn’t I more grateful? Why was this so hard? That’s when the thought opened my perspective and soothed my mind— wasn’t what the Savior did hard? You can’t expect to know Christ without experiencing just a little bit of what He went through. Wouldn’t it be a disappointment if you came all this way to learn of Christ and never experienced anything like He did?

It didn’t get easier after that. In fact, I think it actually got a lot harder. But I kept holding onto that thought. And now I am grateful, even if it took a long time to get there.

My next cross to bear, aside from schoolwork and other humans, was the restrictions. It wasn’t a huge deal. I understood they intended to keep us safe. In this Middle Eastern culture, modesty was a form of protection and a way of showing respect to our Palestinian neighbors, whose culture was extremely modest. The standards helped us to look less like tourists and more like students.

The rule to travel in a group of three students minimum, and that after sunset one of them must be male, made coordinating outings inconvenient. One standard was harder than the others for my recently-returned missionary self — the idea of maintaining the non-proselyting agreement.

No, you can’t pass out church materials, no you can’t refer them to the Church website and no, you certainly may not baptize someone. It makes sense. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints signed a legally binding document to allow them to stay in the Holy Land. But just because you can’t proselyte doesn’t mean you can’t share the gospel. After all, it is Jerusalem.

On that first trip into the city, a kind, Muslim man pulled us into his “tourist-friendly mosque” and gave us the Muslim edition of what the first lesson the missionaries teach to potential members in our church. While visiting the Church of the Ascension, a beautiful Basilica owned by the Russian Orthodox church, our class sang, “I am a Child of God.” The building’s caretaker, an older French woman, was standing nearby during our song, and afterwards commented with tears in her eyes, “I wish you could all come and sing every day.” These experiences and others during the study abroad developed my testimony of feeling the Spirit through music, something I hadn’t felt as personally before.

Another popular activity was karaoke night, specifically, screaming Taylor Swift lyrics at the top of your lungs. One night the students put on a talent show. There was a lot of talent displayed that night, but one student’s performance was particularly memorable. He walked out onto the stage carrying a baby blue electric guitar, wearing a white T-shirt and slacks, rolled up just above his ankles and hot pink crocs. His music and colors were loud. It screamed obnoxious American, and I loved it. I forgot how loud and open we are, and I missed it. It was like taking a big gulp of fresh air compared to the breath-holding and walking-on-eggshells type of sensitivity I sometimes felt being in Jerusalem.

Zach McDougal shredding it on his guitar. Photo credit: Aidan Straight

In contrast to the piety of Jerusalem is Tel Aviv. One weekend — for us, Sunday and Monday — a bunch of the students took a day trip to one of Tel Aviv’s beaches. It is less than an hour’s bus ride away but seemed like a whole different world. I overheard one student comment that it felt more like the beaches in France than Israel. Tel Aviv has modern skyscrapers and destination beaches.

I didn’t see a single Hijab or anyone in orthodox Jewish dress. All the students from the center were scattered around the beach or roving through the city in swimsuits and other non-Jerusalem friendly clothing, like shorts. Several boys were in the ocean throwing other students into back flips. One mom brought her 5- or 6-year-old daughter up to them and asked if they could throw her too. I could just see the headlines, “American BYU students injure Israeli child,” but everything went fine.

Tel Aviv beaches give a much more European feel in contrast to the more conservative and religious city of Jerusalem. Photo credit: Cat Menlove

The area south of Jerusalem is a vast desert called the Negev. It receives an average of less than one inch of rain per year. Negev comes from the Hebrew word for, “dry.”

We were on one field trip visiting Old Testament era and other historic sites in the Negev. One settlement was inhabited before cuneiform, a precursory form of writing. At one archeological site, our professor gathered all of us around a few stones that had been defaced and explained how, even though these were historic sites under national legal protection, individuals had read in the Old Testament how there should be no idols in all the land of Israel and taken it upon themselves to destroy the pieces of history. Our professor explained how this was an example of religious extremism and that we need to be self-aware to not allow that type of destructive or devise behavior in our own worship and interactions with others.

An Israeli flag waves over the Negev, marking a historically relevant site. Orchards grown with special irrigation techniques thrive in the background. Photo credit: Cat Menlove

One evening, all of the students went to visit the Western Wall, one of the holiest sites in Judaism. It was during “Sukkot,” a religiously significant Jewish Holiday, and the area was packed with individuals praying, singing and reading Torah. The wall is a retaining wall for the temple mount that once held Solom’s temple and currently holds the Dome of the Rock. It is Israel, so you frequently see Israeli Defense Force soldiers patrolling busy streets, and it was expected that security would be thick around this significant area, but what I saw caught my American eyes off guard.

At the wall, a divider separates men and women worshiping. I was surrounded by women and girls, most wearing what I considered Sunday-best, or something even more formal. My eyes widened when I saw girls my age in full military uniform, machine guns slung over their backs reading the Torah, praying and singing along with everyone else.

Coming from America, where we are hyper-focused on, nearly to the point of obsession, the principles of separation between church and state, this was mind-boggling. It impacted me so much that I bought a painting from a local artist depicting Israeli soldiers praying in front of the Western wall with the Israeli flag draped over their backs as a reminder of the experience. While at the wall, I had the thought: God doesn’t care about the stones, the ruins or even the temple. All of that is for us. What He cares about is the people. It is in others that we come to see the face of God. As I heard one fellow student say after the visit, “God put us all on this perfectly balanced rock out in space just to learn to be nice.” It really is all about people.

Women worshipping at the Western Wall during to week of Sukkot, a harvest festival commemorating the ancient Israelite exodus from Egypt. Photo credit: Cat Menlove

One thing I learned is that not everything is how it looks. For part of our study, we spent a few nights in the neighboring country of Jordan. While there, we toured the largest mosque in the country. Inside the mosque, the religious leader was teaching us about a specific aspect of the worship performed there, that the women worshiped behind the men — and he had us sit according to this pattern.

My western mind was already making assumptions about the sexist implications of the ritual, when I turned back in to hear the speaker continuing his explanation. He asked about threats in the desert. The wind blowing the sand in your face, the sun bearing down on you and potential attackers. A man being in the front was symbolic of sheltering the woman from the sun, the sand and any potential threats. The positioning was meant as a reminder of his duty.

The King Hussein Bin Talal Mosque in Jordan allows tourists to enter by meeting certain dress standards, such as those worn by the BYU Jerusalem students here.

Our bus rolled up to exit the Jordanian border crossing at approximately 4:30 p.m. to see a long line of tour buses. We were running far behind our planned departure time. The Israeli border was scheduled to close in 30 minutes. Our professors were frantically trying to communicate with Jordanian border patrol to find out what was happening. Nothing certain was coming from the conversation, except for the mounting concern about what to do with nearly 100 students and no place to spend the night in the desert. I was sitting near the front of the bus, close enough to hear the deliberations. One professor had called the Israeli border, and they had agreed to hold it open for us. Now we just had to get out of Jordan.

“Well, let’s see if speaking their language doesn’t speed things up.”

Whispers of an amount started snaking through the bus. Most agreed they heard $500. Our professor made his way off the bus and toward the border office with a manila envelope in his hands. He came back just a few minutes later, a jubilant grin on his face.

“Yallah Yallah!”

“Come on, Come on,} in Arabic. For ‘some reason,’ the delay had been suddenly resolved, and the border patrol wanted to scan our bags through security ASAP. We all ran and began chucking bags out of the bus, through the security line, and back on. Israeli security was holding the door open for us just as they said they would.

The King Hussein border crossing going into Jordan from Israel. Photo credit: Cat Menlove

Studying in a war

Classes didn’t stop just because there was a war. A few days following the first missile launches, I was sitting in my room working on flashcards for my Jewish Civilization class. We gained a lot more information since the initial attacks. Some comforting, some less . I had learned that the massive booms we had heard the first morning and in the past few days were not the sounds of missiles striking, but of Israel’s anti-missile defense system, the Iron Dome, intercepting Hamas missiles and blowing them up in the air.

Like any intelligent person, most of us were filming or taking pictures, instead of seeking cover away from the entire wall of windows behind us that made up one wall of the cafeteria. I now have a missile warning app on my phone. There really is an app for everything.

Turns out, you typically have 90 seconds from when the sirens start before they hit their intended target if they weren’t intercepted by the Iron Dome first. Sirens started going off again. They had become common enough to be an irritation, as insensitive as that might sound. I gathered up my homework and headed to the shelter, just down the hall from my room, and found a spot on the floor to keep doing homework.

Faint white lines in the sky above Jerusalem are the trails left by Iron Dome interceptor missiles chasing down Hamas's rockets as seen from the Jerusalem center cafeteria patio. Photo credit: Cat Menlove

Restrictions evolved with our knowledge of the conflict. At first, we were told to stay out of rooms with many windows and completely off the balconies. Soon, we were allowed out onto the center’s grounds again. Specified rooms in the center without windows were allowed to substitute for the bomb shelters in case sirens went off. This meant class could continue. Ophir Yarden, our Jewish Civilizations teacher, taught through the entire class period hardly mentioning the conflict. At the end of the class, as he always did, he asked if there were any questions.

One student hesitantly raised his hand and asked, “Is your family ok?”

The dignity remained but his professional tone was replaced with a tremor. Our teacher began recounting his experience of dropping his recently drafted 18-year-old son off at base after the IDF required him and a few friends to report there.

“I couldn’t help but feel like I was saying a final goodbye. I don’t know if he will make it back,” Yarden expressed.

He feared that a northern front in Lebanon with Hezbollah would open up and his son would have to be sent there. He explained how this wasn’t like any other attack in Israel’s history. It wasn’t like the Second Intifada, and it wasn’t like the Yom Kippur War. He said the best comparison was America’s 9/11. They were caught completely off guard. It is a small country. Every Israeli either knew someone or knew someone who knew someone who had been either killed or captured.

The border was breached in over 30 different places. Some videos showed horses pulling down the barrier next to heavy equipment, trucks and motorcycles. Others were more gruesome. Footage showed militants dragging Israeli soldiers into Gaza or standing on the bodies of dead Israeli soldiers, some stripped to their underwear. This was 40 miles away from where we were. That is comparable to a massive armed insurgency being launched from Shelley if you were in Rexburg.

Students say goodbye to Professor Ophir Yarden after their last zoom class at a hotel conference room in Nafplio, Greece. Photo credit: Cat Menlove

After the update on his family, Yarden’s face lit up. With a grin, he asked us to recall a Hebrew poem we had studied earlier in the semester. I quickly googled the poem. It was called, “In the City of Slaughter.” Written in 1904, the poem recounted the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 where many Jewish men hid while their wives and daughters were killed or assaulted. It called the Jews to action at a time when defeat was pervasive. It asked them not to stand for this treatment any longer and to fight back. You could see the pride in Yarden’s voice as he recounted hearing this poem all over the radio waves on his drive to work, but instead saying how this time the Jews weren’t running but fighting back en masse. We heard about reports stating 300% more of the reserves than had been drafted showed up. After class and the update on his family, students gathered around Yarden to offer support for him and his loved ones in a touching moment of solidarity.

Following Yarden’s class was Arab and Islamic Civilization taught by our Palestinian professor, Bashir Bashir. He expressed how he had Israeli friends calling to check in on him and his family, even offering him a safe place to stay if he needed it. Thankfully, his family was safe.

One night, I was alone working on homework in our room. My eyes rested on the large sliding glass door. Initially, it had been my favorite feature of our room. It led onto a nice terrace overlooking the surrounding city and the homes of our Palestinian neighbors. Now, all I could think about was the 800-1,000 armed insurgents loose in Israel that I had read about who crossed the southern border only 40 miles away.

While I had once slightly resented the strict particularity of the standards, even if I had understood their necessity, I was now very grateful I adhered to them.

Mohammed Deif, the Palestinian military commander and major planner in the attack, went on television and urged Palestinians in Israel to rise up and join the militant fighters. The center is situated in a Palestinian neighborhood. Many of our neighbors were setting off green fireworks in celebration of the resistance but, because of the reputation built up by students and faculty before us, we had the respect of our neighbors in a time where that may have directly translated into our safety as well. It is astonishing how secure the BYU Jerusalem Center really is.

The view off of the Jerusalem center terrace of surrounding Palestinian neighborhoods the city of Jerusalem. Photo credit: Cat Menlove

For the safety concerns of future students, I won’t go into too much detail about the center’s security measures, but I’ll briefly outline a few. First, it’s strategic location. The center is located in a Palestinian neighborhood, two miles from the Dome of the Rock. This is an extremely unlikely place for an Islam-affiliated group to strike near. The center goes to great measures to maintain a good reputation with our neighbors. A majority of the awesome security, staff, administration and professors are Palestinian. We had 24-hour security that was in contact with the U.S. embassy, infrared barrier sensors and enough food storage for everyone in the center to last for a substantial amount of time.

Our Jewish-Israeli professor, Yarden, put it this way, “This whole building is basically a bomb shelter.”

Our Israeli co-administer of the program said that the center might very well be one of the safest places in the country right now. Because of the extensive safety measures and unknown duration of the conflict, it was unknown if we were going to stay in Israel or not. Several students speculated that we would only evacuate if a northern front were to open up on the Israeli-Syrian border from the terrorist group Hezbollah. This was before anyone grasped the full scale of the conflict. We were told that the program administrators had been working closely with BYU’s president, the Quorum of the Twelve, and the First Presidency. Church security had said every means was available to get us out if needed.

Arches are the most recognizable feature of the Jerusalem Center's architecture, as seen in this phot of main entrance gate. Photo credit: Cat Menlove

Tension was high among students and faculty. Some students were angry that the administration wasn’t giving more frequent updates on the decision-making process, but I didn’t feel that way. The administration had no way of knowing anything more than we did from the news. It was becoming clear the conflict would continue escalating nearly a week after the initial barrage of rockets. Most of us were being constantly bombarded in our news feeds with horrifying reports of the deaths happening just down the road in Gaza. A student would mention a new article during lunch, and I would go scan the internet for the newest update. Some students had decided for their mental well-being to stop looking at the news.

We were in the midst of finals for our first-block classes and midterms for the rest. I have never felt like I was doing something more pointless than when I was sitting in a large lecture hall just before my Ancient Near East midterm. As I sat there and watched the stack of tests getting passed down the row, I just couldn’t help thinking how pointless a test seemed right now with thousands of people getting slaughtered just 50 miles away. It was depressing. I think most everyone felt this frustration of wanting to do something to help but having no way to do so. The studies we worked on so diligently just days ago suddenly seemed incredibly meaningless. Many of us felt conflicted about how to act. On one hand, we were cooped up inside the center all day with nothing but homework and wanted to do something fun, and on the other, it almost felt disrespectful to throw a party or fun activity with the intense despair and suffering nearby.

My parents were handling everything surprisingly well, or at least from what they let me see. I found out later that the turning point had been when I was on the phone talking to my mom on the terrace when I had to hang up and go to the bomb shelter because missile sirens were going off. I didn’t know until after I got home and was at a stake conference that the stake had been praying for our safety. A woman I didn’t even know, but turned out to be a friend’s mom, came to give me a hug and tell me how their family had prayed for my safety and how glad they were that I was back.

Entrance to one of the bomb shelters. Photo credit: Cat Menlove

Evacuation

Finally, something to break the waiting. It was about a week after the initial attack when we got the announcement that everyone was to meet in the forum. Faculty, faculty’s families, students, staff — everyone. We normally had class in the forum. It was considered safe to stay in during missile warnings because it was located in the center of the building, which was partially underground and had no windows. This was the most crowded I had seen it.

One of our academic directors approached the podium with a grave expression and dark circles under his eyes. I couldn’t even imagine the pressure he had been under during the past week. In a somber tone, he announced that due to the increasing instability and unpredictable nature of the conflict, we would be leaving for Greece in 24 hours.

We had a planned week-long field trip to Greece on our itinerary already, but we would now have an additional week in the country for the program directors to assess the situation. If after our week in Greece, things in Israel began to cool down, we would return. If not, we would all be flying back to the States. He then debunked some myths.

No, the U.S. aircraft carrier that the news had said was coming to Israel would not be in any of our evacuation contingency plans. My fellow students and I released a collective groan of disappointment. The current plan was to go in two buses to the airport in Tel Aviv, fly to Athens and then travel by bus to the small countryside port town of Nafplio to stay until our scheduled tour of Greece began. There were several contingency plans in place if the bus ride to Tel Aviv became too dangerous between now and then or if there were any issues at the Tel Aviv airport.

Some of those included going by bus across the border to Amman and flying out from the airport there or busing down and flying out from Cairo. The Amman option was unsavory because of understandably tense border relations and the Cairo option was even less desirable because it would bring us closer to the conflict. A detailed email was sent to our parents announcing our plans to leave for Greece; however, none of the details or times of our evacuation could be discussed with family or friends over the phone until all of us were safely in Greece.

Jerusalem center students loading onto the buses headed for the Ben Gurion Airport and to Greece. Photo credit: Cat Menlove

At some time in the week following the attacks, I had been talking to a few of the other students. One of them mentioned the recently increased need they had felt for spiritual nourishment with everything going on. I had noticed in myself that too — a hunger for reading the scriptures more. A need, more intense than before, to be filled after feeling so emptied by the violence, destruction and suffering.

Now, we were leaving Israel, and I felt such a relief at the news. Some students were heartbroken to leave, but as the faculty had pointed out, even though it might be safe enough to stay, many of the places we were planning on visiting were either close to the conflict or in rural places the Iron Dome didn’t cover.

On Oct. 15, we loaded all our luggage into the bottom of the tour buses and drove to the Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv. We were told to expect 6-hour lines and each carried a pack lunch for the wait.

Despite some of the sad goodbyes to the Holy City earlier that morning, students now spread around the airport laughing, snacking and playing games. I was in line for the baggage check sitting in a circle of students. One student was going around and telling everyone who he thought they would be in high school — a band kid, cheerleader or student body president. I was munching on a star fruit and laughing about his predictions along with the others when a siren suddenly started going off.

In between the sirens, an automated voice was speaking over the intercoms — first in Hebrew and then in English. Luggage rolling, people yelling to find family members and plane engines outside muffled the announcement, so I couldn’t quite tell what was being said.

A bright orange vest caught my eye. Several airport employees were moving throughout the people and screaming in Hebrew, making big waving motions with their hands. I saw everyone sink down to their knees and finally heard the airport employees in English, “Everyone sit down and remain seated.” I was still straining to understand the instructions coming from the intercom. I wasn’t sure, but it seemed to be saying that there had been a security breach.

I instantly remembered the estimated 1,000 missing armed insurgents who had entered Israel. As my mind jumped from one conclusion to the next, my thoughts rested on the chilling possibility that this could be an active shooter situation. My eyes raced around the building, searching over all the people seated on the concrete floor, looking for anyone who might be holding a weapon. Even as I looked, I thought it was useless, as they had obviously blended in enough to enter the airport and could be any of these hundreds of people.

Suddenly, I heard massive booms outside, directly above the airport, closer than any of the other Iron Dome missile interceptions we had heard before. I turned my head to see the entire wall of windows shaking from the noise.

Students and other individuals in the airport sit on the floor while explosions from Iron Dome intercepting Hamas's missals sound with enough force to shake the wall of windows shown in the background. Photo credit: Cat Menlove

The floor was a rug of people, many with their knees pulled up to their chests, some with hands clasped covering their necks, seeking scant refuge behind large suitcases. Since I couldn’t understand the emergency personnel’s instructions, I assumed I would just get up when I saw everyone also getting up.

I saw one couple, probably in their 60s, standing, and I wondered if we were allowed to stand yet. I’m glad I didn’t. It wasn’t long after I noticed them that a security guard did too, and began yelling for them to get back down. Tense minutes ticked by. Heads craned around to see if there were any immediate threats. Then the intercom came on again. Everyone was directed to the airport’s basement for shelter until otherwise directed.

It felt like every dystopian fantasy novel I had ever read. The massive concrete walls of the airport were filled with people, all making their way down stairs and frozen escalators as sirens and instructions to head to the airport’s lower levels repeated in the background.

Just as I was beginning to see the entrance to the bomb sheIter, another announcement stated that the airport would be resuming normal operations and that people may continue to their boarding gate.

Making our way to shelter through the packed escalators and hallways in the lower levels of the airport felt like being in a dystopian fiction novel. Photo credit: Cat Menlove

That phrase from the intercom kept repeating in my head: The airport will now be returning to “normal operations.” Normal operations? They acted like everything was just fine, and I had just experienced the scariest moment of my life. What did “normal” even mean at this point?

And everyone was acting normal! The airport personnel and most of the people I saw around me continued like nothing had happened. I know that Israelis were, to some extent, used to being under constant threat, but the last time my country had an armed conflict on its soil was the civil war.

It reminded me of an interview I did with a classmate. He had been a missionary in Ukraine when Russia attacked and said you just can’t describe the feeling of entire cities being destroyed where you used to walk on the sidewalks to your typical student living in Rexburg. It is quite literally a foreign idea.

Signs around the airport directed the way to shelters. Photo credit: Cat Menlove

I found one of my professors asking students how they were doing while he waited with his wife and children sitting near the gate to board. He had already gotten past security when the missile sirens began. He picked up a child in each arm and he and his wife began to run for the shelters. He said that airport security had been running beside him and yelling in Hebrew for him to stop and stay where he was, up against the wall in the hallway. He assumed it was because the other wall comprising the large hallway was made of glass windows, but they kept running for the shelters. He figured they knew where it was safest, and that’s where he was going to take his family.

We still had an hour or more to wait before our flight left. I wandered around, eyes wide and brain on edge, ears nearly tingling waiting to catch the first wail of more missile sirens. We boarded without incident. I settled into my seat, on aisle one luckily, and a heavy realization settled on me.

I was currently in the most vulnerable position I had been in since coming to Israel. The airport was one of Hamas’s declared targets, and I was in a stalled plane. If missiles were detected, there would never be enough time for everyone to get off the plane and into the bomb shelters. The only thing between me and Hamas’s rockets was the Iron Dome. The pilot announced that if air raid sirens went off we were all to remain seated. He also announced that because of the “heavy air traffic,” the plane would first be heading east and then north to Athens.

Jerusalem students boarding onto an Israir plane bound for Greece. At the time, Israir Airlines was the only airline flying in or out of Israel. Photo credit: Cat Menlove

As we flew, I could see the lights of Israeli cities below us, but, over Gaza, there was just a patch of darkness.

I know it might be an overreaction, but every muscle in my body was bracing for the impact of a missile slamming into the plane. Logically, I knew it was unlikely we would be hit. I didn’t even know if the missiles had the capability to hit the plane. But still, that heavy air traffic sure wasn’t just from the Tel Aviv airport. I didn’t know the exact protocol for if a missile intercepted our plane, but I was nearly holding my breath because I knew it couldn’t be good.

Life-threatening situations have a way of putting things into perspective. All I could think about was the covenants I had made — or hadn’t made. My fiancé had been waiting for me at home, and we were going to get married a few months after I was scheduled to get home in December. Right then, I made a promise to God to never take living for granted again. These thoughts all raced in circles inside my head as we flew towards Greece. Sighs of relief and some small cheers were audible throughout the plane once we were out of Israeli airspace. A short hour and a half later we were landing in Athens. We later found out that the day after we left Jerusalem, it became targeted by missiles.

As we flew, I could see the lights of Israeli cities below us, but over Gaza there was just a patch of darkness. Photo credit: Cat Menlove

I’m sure the Athens airport isn’t that complicated, but, to my tired mind, it felt like a maze. We all crashed near the baggage claim. I foraged around and found a charger, plugged in my European outlet converter and called my family to let them know we were ok. We still had a two-hour bus ride to the coastal city of Nafplio where we would be staying to finish up our first block classes remotely before beginning our official scheduled tour of Greece the following week. We finally got into bed at our hotel at 4 a.m.

It had always been my dream to visit Athens, but at the time I felt more relief than anticipation. Snapping this picture was my tired mind's small token of celebration. Photo credit: Cat Menlove

The long journey home

When Brigham Young said, “this is the place,” he was wrong. It’s Greece. I woke up at noon the next day and walked out onto the small porch off our room and saw paradise. Blue skies, palm trees, perfect weather and the ocean in the distance. No bomb sirens, no smoke on the horizon and no sign of armed militants. It was beautiful. We spent the next week absolutely torn. On one hand, some of our classes were finishing up, on the other, the entire countryside and coastline of Greece called to us.

We sat in hot hotel conference rooms watching our Israeli and Palestinian professors on the projector screen for long hours. During one of our classes, Professor Yardin stopped teaching, looked away, and said, “Ah, no missile sirens, just an ambulance,” and continued teaching.

One of our professors, however, took sympathy on our fried minds and implemented what he called, “the War Curve,” on our exam grades. It may have been the greatest blessing of our whole trip, besides making it out of Israel safely, but close. It was hard to believe that so much violence was happening just a two-hour plane ride away. I felt almost guilty for enjoying myself so much. We stayed in Thessaloniki and Athens. There seemed to be a religious famine in Europe compared to the submersion in other faiths I experienced in Jerusalem.

The Jerusalem center student's first outing onto the coast of Nafplio, Greece.

I began to gain the perspective that, although everyday life can seem messy and overwhelming, I really only need to do one thing — love God, in whatever form that took. True joy comes when remembering to do that during all of the chaos. It is kind of like the old city of Jerusalem. You see the skyline, and it looks beautiful, pristine and regal. But you zoom in, get closer, and the streets are loud, crowded and smelly. But within that mess, you see acts of devotion, and they are some of the greatest examples of faith I have ever seen. Some of that noise is the Muslim call to prayer. The crowded buildings are mosques, synagogues and churches. There are Ultra-Orthodox Jews and Muslim women, continuing to wear their religiously significant clothing even though it makes them more of a target. It is a beautiful myriad of faith.

As one makes their way towards the Western Wall, the dome of the near-by Al Aqsa Mosque is clearly visible, an example of the proximity of Jerusalem's various faiths. Photo credit: Cat Menlove

The contrast of Greece made me appreciate Jerusalem more. Greece might be a whole lot more like paradise, and there was immense philosophical and historical depth, but the lack of religion made it feel emptier to me. I didn’t miss Israel yet. I didn’t think anyone could pay me to go back, but maybe that would change. I understand that my feelings about the experience may be different from many of my classmates, but, for me, Jerusalem was hard, and I didn’t know when I would be ready to go back, if ever.

Our time in Greece had been refreshing, a chance to recharge, but that was about to end. The Jerusalem Center administration announced that we would be flying back to the States. It must have taken an extreme effort on behalf of the travel coordinators to find that many plane tickets. The first thing I did after the announcement was submit my application to work at Amazon. I had an interview scheduled for 8 a.m., the morning after my flight was to arrive in Boise. I was banking on not having any major hiccups on the way home.

My flight was scheduled to go from Athens to Frankfurt, to San Francisco and then to Boise. I didn’t look at the news much during those two weeks. It felt irresponsible but more peaceful too. I was more grateful than I had ever been that I had a safe home to go to when, for many people, their home was now a battle ground.

For many students, our time in Greece had been a chance to recharge, have fun and enjoy the study abroad. Photo credit: Cat Menlove

I had never been more grateful to be on U.S. soil than when I landed in San Francisco. The other students and I who were traveling back to Boise kept repeating how glad we were to be back. It was the safest I had felt in months. Even though we were exhausted from traveling for over 24 hours straight, the mood was light. We walked through the security gates into the tiny Boise airport on Halloween night to our families’ holding signs that said stuff like, “We’re glad you’re alive!” We were too.

Students returning home pose in the Boise airport together for one last picture. Photo credit: Cat Menlove

Life became normal again. I was working overtime at Amazon, up to 60 hours a week and still finishing up my Ancient Near Eastern History class online, doing as much homework as I could on break and during lunch. My first day working, two weeks after getting home, they took us on a tour of the building. I froze in my tracks, eyes bulging out of my head when I heard it. Then I realized — it was just one of the machines. It sounded just like the bomb sirens. I laughed at myself and hoped I wouldn’t have to work next to it. The sound eventually blended in with all the other machinery.

One of my coworkers was talking about her job at McDonalds before Amazon when she asked me, “What were you doing before working here?” I thought for a moment about how to explain it, then replied, “This probably wasn’t the answer you were expecting, but I was studying in Jerusalem when Hamas began bombing, and I had to come home.”

Like many Americans, she hadn’t heard about the war. I didn’t blame her; it could seem really far away from our little worlds. I found myself hesitant to bring up my time in Jerusalem. I think because I didn’t want to make it seem like I took it lightly or was flaunting my traveling to say, “look at me.” The more time that passes, the more I cherish and see how critical the lessons I learned there were. Now it is July, ten months later, and I am processing the experience, only beginning to understand what I learned. And the war continues.

I bought a new journal before I left for Jerusalem. I journaled nearly every night and expected to completely fill it before coming home. It was one of the big hardcover ones with the built-in bookmark and little stretchy strap to keep the cover from flapping open that you can get for cheap at Walmart. I had written inside the front cover, “September 4, 2023 – December 21, 2023,” the dates we were supposed to be gone. Only a small chunk of pages near the front were filled. I’m still using it, just like the missile app on my phone. I didn’t get around to deleting it for a while and then decided to keep it. I still check it sometimes, I guess to not forget that people’s suffering, fear and loss are real. Now most of the warnings are for the area surrounding Gaza.

A few months later, I was sitting in my International Law and Organizations class in the Thomas E. Ricks building when my professor walked in, eyes downcast and his mouth pressed in a firm line. He told the class that he had been looking at the news and had seen some images of children injured in Gaza from the war, and it had affected him more than he had expected. He wanted to take a minute to talk about it.

I had this professor previously and a tradition in his classroom was, when giving the opening prayer, to pray for the people specifically suffering from the conflicts we were discussing in class that day. It helped us to humanize them instead of judging them. To recognize these were lives, not just case studies. As he shared his feelings and reminded us how these were real people suffering, I realized that I felt this now. I knew what he meant, and I actually felt for these people too, on both sides of the conflict. People’s suffering on the other side of the world was something that saddened me. It wasn’t simply because war is bad and the shock of those atrocities, but because each and every one of those lives was affected. Whether they had lost all of their family or were just scared from the commotion, they were children of God, and I had come to take a small part in His love for them.