50 years later: Shedding new light on the politics and players of a war whose stakes were nothing short of survival

Book excerpts by Uri Kaufman
Photos: Government Press Office

ON Yom Kippur afternoon in 1973, Uri Kaufman, today a lawyer, writer, and award-winning real estate developer from Lawrence, New York, was a nine-year-old boy running around in the Connecticut shul where his father was the rav. Outside in the lobby, far from where his father could see, he noticed a group of men huddled around a transistor radio, as another group of men screamed at them for bringing a radio into shul on Yom Kippur.

“It was the first time I ever saw anyone bring a radio into a shul on Shabbos or Yom Tov,” says Kaufman, whose new book, Eighteen Days in October, tells the heart-stopping tale of the Yom Kippur War from the perspective of half a century. “A week later, during Succos, my father broke down and cried as he stood before the kehillah reading the tefillah for Israeli soldiers. It was the first time I ever saw him cry.”

Exactly 50 years ago, on October 6, Yom Kippur of 1973, the armies of Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack against the State of Israel, and the ensuing 18 days of bitter fighting would become known as the Yom Kippur War. The cause of the onslaught was rooted in the lingering wounds and shame inflicted on the Arabs by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War, shadowed by the refusal of Arab countries to accept the presence of a Jewish state in the Middle East.

The war began badly for Israel, as thousands of reservists were pulled out of shul in their talleisim and headed for the front. The fighting was some of the fiercest in the post-WW II era; ultimately, over 2,600 Israeli soldiers would be killed. The Egyptians crossed the Suez Canal and advanced into the Sinai Peninsula, while the Syrians penetrated deep into the Golan Heights and headed for the Kinneret. Worse still was a devastating loss of IDF equipment.

But the Israelis soon recovered and made a startling comeback. They pushed the Syrians back beyond their original ceasefire line and advanced within artillery range of Damascus suburbs, while in the south, they crossed the Suez Canal and managed to surround the Egyptian Third Army, less than 60 miles from Cairo.

“The Yom Kippur War has always fascinated me,” Kaufman says. “It’s a story that exceeds anything a novelist could have ever contrived. After nearly being routed, the IDF clawed its way back to threaten Cairo and Damascus. I started researching it over 20 years ago, reviewing thousands of pages of old records and documents, traveling to the Sinai Peninsula, visiting battlefields, and talking to the people who experienced it first-hand — although my wife Esther would probably have preferred that I join a daf yomi shiur instead.”