A Covenant of Earth and Sky

Upon hearing the siren alert, you have 60 seconds to enter the protected space. If you are indoors—enter a bomb shelter (mamad), reinforced security room (mamak), underground shelter, stairwell, or interior room, and close all doors and windows. Important! You must remain in the protected space for 10 minutes. 

Israel’s Home Command, June 13, 2025

In the early hours of June 13 my family and I, like all Israelis, were awakened by the shrill sound of a phone alert. Israel had preemptively attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities. Momentous news, but I promptly put my pillow over my head and went back to sleep. Only when we woke up again later that morning did we realize that something historic had occurred. We also understood that a challenging period lay ahead.

We had only recently moved into a new home and, despite Houthis sporadically firing missiles in our direction, we had grown lax about running to our safe room, what Israelis call a mamad. Ours was filled with dust and leftover construction material. But on the day of the phone alerts—once we’d grasped the gravity of what was happening—we got to work. We spread a plastic mat over the floor, brought in a spare mattress, and set up a pack-and-play crib. The missile fire from Iran began in earnest that evening. 

As the days wore on, we adjusted to the confines of this small space where emotions vacillated between fear, comfort from the presence of those we loved, and occasional irritation by those very same people. One mattress turned into four—each of our seven children laid claim to their own little spot. The more time we spent in our safe room, sometimes joined by friends or near strangers who needed a place to shelter, the more we acclimated ourselves to its deprivations and, occasionally, to its surreal benefits. Sociologists talk about the “third place,” which is an additional living space beyond home or work, like a synagogue, for example. These places expose us to people, ideas, and experiences beyond our immediate family and daily routines. During Israel’s twelve-day war with Iran our safe rooms also became a third place, introducing a new mentality and way of being that removed us from our day-to-day lives.

Refuge & Shelter, Then & Now

Americans of a certain age may recall the yellow and black “Fallout Shelter” signs on apartment buildings at the height of the Cold War. Created to protect against a potential Soviet nuclear attack, they were phased out in the ’70s, making the idea of a bomb shelter unfamiliar to most Americans today. Not so in Israel, where they are a fact of life familiar even to toddlers. Here the need for shelters was understood very early on. 

During World War II, Haifa and Tel Aviv were subject to bombing campaigns by the Nazi-allied Italian air force, who were targeting British assets in the area. A few years later, as Israel prepared for its 1948 War of Independence, kibbutzim and settlements built trenches and fortifications to protect civilians from impending attacks. Since 1951 the “Civil Defense Law” requires all people in Israel to have nearby access to bomb shelters. Yet, despite the threats that Israel faced over the years, the shelters did not get much use, and were typically repurposed for storage and other innocuous uses. That didn’t change until the 1991 Gulf War. When Iraq struck Israel’s residential areas with Scud missiles and threatened to use chemical weapons, more sweeping regulations were passed, requiring that every building and home contain a safe room.

The classic name for an Israeli shelter is a miklat, which translates as “refuge,” rather than protected space. In the Bible the Ir Miklat, or “City of Refuge,” is a place where someone who unintentionally killed another could find sanctuary from those who would avenge the killing. With these new regulations, the term miklat would splinter into several new variations. There is the Merchav Mugan Dirati—also known by its acronym Mamad—which is a safe room that is contained within one’s private home or apartment. By contrast, the Merchav Mugan Komati, or Mamak, is a safe room shared by all the inhabitants of a single floor, popular especially in hotels. There is also the Megunit, a portable concrete shelter that is brought to agricultural areas or other outdoor locations. Tragically, Meguniot became most famous on October 7, when they were sites of slaughter by Hamas terrorists who took advantage of terrified civilians who had gathered there to take shelter from rocket barrages. We soon learned that there are depths of human depravity from which even fortified concrete shelters cannot protect us.

Meeting Places

The new civil defense regulations established after the Gulf War would have a significant impact on Israeli architecture, and also on the public consciousness. 

We all have a certain sense of what a house must contain in order to be habitable: a kitchen, living room, bedrooms, bathrooms, and the like. The addition of a safe room complicates this picture. Safe rooms have very rigid parameters—walls and ceiling must be built from reinforced concrete; each safe room must have only two access points, a door and a window, and the size and shapes of these are highly regulated. The heavy-duty metal doors are openable only outwards, and the threshold is raised to seal the area from the outside. The heavy bar which pulls the door shut from the inside usually does not lock (as we discovered, with devastating consequences, on October 7). 

Yehuda Pereg, a Jerusalem-based architect, told me that since the walls of a safe room are required to reach a building’s foundation, mamadim in an apartment building must be stacked in a line, one on top of the other. Public shelters—in contrast to the trend toward private in-home shelters—have real value on both practical and spiritual levels. The urban landscape of Israel is punctuated with such public safe rooms, especially in areas that were built before 1991. 

Allen Cohl, an architect and interior designer who lectures at Ariel University, explains that although private shelters have significant benefits in terms of convenience and accessibility, his preference is for installing one mamak-style shelter on each floor, which residents share, where “the bomb shelter is a community concept.” 

Typically located at the core of a building, where the emergency stairs are, these shelters become a meeting place for people during stressful times. “When the shelters brought people together, the nation was brought together,” Cohl observes. Such a shelter allows neighbors to meet each other, and allows those who live alone to take comfort in the presence of others. 

During the twelve-day war with Iran, a volunteer organization was formed in Dimona to make birthday parties in safe rooms for children who would have otherwise had to cancel because of the war. In Tel Aviv, a young man with autism refused to go into the shelter at night until a neighbor offered to play the beloved Israeli game shesh-besh (backgammon) with him each time they went down, even at 3:00 am. When sirens rang out across the country during Friday night dinner, dozens, maybe even hundreds, of scenes took place of religious and secular neighbors singing Shabbat songs like Shalom Aleichem together. 

Spiritual Haven

In the midst of the recent onslaught, the National Library of Israel shared a poem, “Our Shelter,” written in 1948 by poet Fania Bergstein. The poem was intended to reassure children who were sheltering in safe rooms during Israel’s War of Independence:

In our shelter we see everything,

From the depths of the earth to heavenly heights,

From the roots of the grass to the top of the poplar,

Its beautiful crown reaches from afar.

In our shelter we hear everything:

The drone of the plane and the hum of the grasshopper,

The song of the bird and the cry of the baby

And the voice of the reapers in the distant field.

And therefore the shelter is doubly safe,

Because of its covenant with the earth and sky.

The kind of shelter Bergstein is sitting in is different from the highly regulated, hermetically sealed safe rooms in contemporary Israel. It’s a makeshift miklat. Even so, one cannot see and hear “everything,” or much of anything, there. A shelter is, by nature, cut off, buried in the ground. Rather, Bergstein’s point is that, in protecting us, shelters offer protection for the things we hold dear. We bury ourselves in them not only to escape danger, but also to strengthen our connection with everything we love on the outside. 

It’s no accident that Bergstein invokes covenant, brit, in her conclusion. The protection that the shelter affords is not merely the product of its reinforced walls. The Hebrew term for sky, shamayim, also refers to heaven. By playing on this double meaning, Bergstein suggests that while planes and missiles in the skies may present a danger to us here on earth, there is a promise of heavenly redemption through the nation of Israel’s covenant with G-d. We do what we can to protect ourselves from danger, including sheltering in fortified rooms, and we pray that these efforts will be accompanied by protection from the One Above as well.

In Jewish tradition, safe havens like the cities of refuge are often a symbol for something much larger than the physical sanctuary they offer. The Talmud (Makkot 10a) suggests that the Torah itself may be likened to a city of refuge, and in his Likkutei Sichot, the Lubavitcher Rebbe connected the Ir Miklat to the broader mission of Chabad emissaries, who are required to stand at figurative crossroads and shout “Miklat! Miklat!” thus guiding other Jews to the safe space of Torah and mitzvot. A shelter, then, doesn’t merely shield us from something dangerous on the outside. It is a meeting place between our human efforts—the “covenant of earth”—and our commitment to higher values—the “covenant of sky.” The spiritual potential of shelters to strengthen our bonds with each other and with G-d may constitute the strongest form of protection that these spaces can provide. 

This article appears in the Autumn-Winter 2025 issue of Lubavitch International, to subscribe to the magazine, click here.