It was a reunion of sorts. These three diverse busy kiruv personalities don’t usually have time to get together but the Yom Kippur War is such a sensitive subject for this group that they agreed to our invitation. Inspirational lecturer RabbiNoachHertz ShvutAmi founder RabbiShimonGrilius and Arachim headRabbiYosefWallis sat down together for an intimate nostalgic conversation — painful and heartwarming at the same time. Forty-two years ago this week their paths crossed for the first time — but at that point who would have thought one day they’d be sitting together full beards and black yarmulkes attesting to a lifestyle so foreign then? On the eve of Yom Kippur 1973 NoachHertz was an IDF fighter pilot with an expectant wife and young child; when the alarm sounded he scrambled to the nearest air force base. The next day he was in the cockpit flying his Skyhawk toward Damascus. At the same time YosefWallis an electrical engineer held a senior position in the military’s emerging division of electronic warfare. His job was to counter the threat of antiaircraft missiles and to give backup protection to Israel’s air offensive.NoachHertz was one of the pilots he was supposed to safeguard. AndShimonGrilius? At the time he hadn’t even arrived in Israel. In 1973 he was languishing in a Siberian prison serving the fourth year of a brutal five-year term for “anti-Soviet activities” — in other words learning Hebrew and trying to connect to his essential identity as a Jew. Yet Grilius was the third leg of this unlikely triangle: as an engineering student with military clearance his job was to develop the missiles that the Soviet Union provided to Syria and Egypt and to find ways of preventing those missiles from being electronically disrupted. One of those missiles brought down Hertz’s plane destroyed his leg and sent him into Syrian captivity.