Rav Tzvi Gombo shlit”a of Bnei Brak related the following incredible story:
It was Shabbos afternoon, and I was sitting and learning tranquilly in my room on the Eastern side of our apartment on Donolo Street in Bnei Brak. All was peaceful – the unique quiet and peace of a Shabbos afternoon.
It was the Shabbos before Purim, and the war between Israel and Iran had broken out that morning, but at that moment, nothing about the atmosphere indicated that anything was amiss.
Then, suddenly, the peace was abruptly shattered.
At 4:30 p.m. I heard a huge boom. Too loud to be dismissed as another successful missile interception, I knew this was a direct missile hit, and if the sound was any indication, it was close by, very close.
I opened the door of the room and met a cloud of smoke.
I was shocked. My house had taken a direct hit. I held my breath to prevent the smoke from entering my lungs and tried to find a way to the porch door. Stumbling through the darkness in confusion, I found myself instead in the hallway near the dining room.
Suddenly, I saw my son Yaakov covered from head to toe in a white film of dust.
To put it very simply, our home was destroyed. Utter destruction. And in the midst of crumbling walls, overturned furniture, and total chaos, stood my son, my grandson, and I, alive and well. How had this obvious miracle occurred?! All of us were in an apartment that was totally destroyed, and none of us was hurt.
I stand before you now, whole and healthy, and I would like to give praise to the One Above, Who revealed Himself to us with overflowing compassion at a time of what seemed like severe tragedy. Thank you Hashem! Shlomo Hamelech said that You dwell where there is fog and concealment, and I found You there in countless ways.
Several moments before the missile landed in our dining room, my son Yaakov and his son were sitting and learning at the table. One of the over twenty pieces of the Iranian missile that flew into our home was 20 cm. wide and half a meter long. It landed in the room a half meter away from them!!
My daughter and son-in-law live in the apartment above ours. Between our two dining rooms there are ten windows in all, and the adjacent porches are enclosed by glass as well. All of this glass shattered completely. The glass encasing where we keep our leichter shattered to the ground, along with shards from the windows and the heavy plastic divider between the kitchen and dining room.
The ceiling caved in. Heavy pieces of cement crashed to the ground. One of the pieces weighed 10 kilo, and it landed right near my grandson’s arm, but it left him with only a slight graze, which formed a black-and-blue mark to commemorate the miracle! The fact that my son and grandson emerged from this destroyed room alive is miracle enough; the fact that they were completely unhurt is unfathomable.
There were only two windows in the whole apartment that did not shatter. One of them is the window directly above where I was sitting and learning in the inner room. I shudder to think of what could have happened had the window shattered and the shards hit my face.
We have two doors leading into our apartment – an inner door made of heavy metal, which was open, and an outer door made of wood, which was closed. When the siren sounded, our upstairs neighbors came down into the stairwell right near our home. Although the wooden door fell apart completely, and pieces of it flew in all directions, not one of the twenty people standing there was hurt in the least. Not one.
The fact that they all came down into the stairwell was a miracle in itself. In my daughter’s home, if someone is sleeping when a siren goes off, they don’t usually wake them up. My son-in-law, having stayed up late learning the night before, should have been napping. For some reason, he awoke with the siren and decided to go out into the stairwell. Later, he discovered that the force of the hit had caused the movable metal ceiling above his bed to fall right on top of it, the heavy armoire near the bed turned over onto it as well, and the door of the room flew off its hinges. Had he remained in the room sleeping he would certainly have been crushed beneath the rubble.
Their toddler was sleeping in his stroller in the exact place where the missile fell, but they had moved him into a side room just several minutes earlier so the noise of the children playing in the main room would not wake him. He continued sleeping peacefully right through the ensuing chaos.
My son Yaakov’s wife, who had just given birth, was resting with the newborn in a room in our home. When the siren sounded she remained lying in bed, since she didn’t have the strength to get up. Her sweet little son Nosson had decided that his mother and the baby needed fresh air, and he opened the window. This is a small window, and the glass panels slide into the wall when opened. When all the glass in the house shattered, these panels were encased by the brick wall and remained whole, sparing both mother and baby.
Two granddaughters were sitting in a room on the Western side of the house, each on a bed that was under a window. At one point one of them left the house to visit a friend and the other remained in the room, reading a book on the bed. After the crash, we saw how the window above the bed that was empty shattered completely, and even its disjointed frame landed heavily on the bed, along with countless shards of glass, but the window above the other bed, where my granddaughter was sitting and reading, remained completely whole.
I’ve just recounted the open miracles of Hashem that we saw with our own eyes on Shabbos Parshas Zachor, 11 Adar 5786. At our Purim seudah this year, our entire family said Nishmas aloud, word for word, thanking our Father and King for His great mercies. May we and all of Am Yisrael always see them!
