A former Golani solider who sails for fun Tayar who davens with Gonik at Houston’s Torah Vachesed shul set out to rescue his friend in his canoe.

A lex Gonik a resident of the Meyerland neighborhood of Houston — one of the city’s Orthodox hubs — will never forget the night that Hurricane Harvey came knocking.

“I thought I was going to die” Gonik told Mishpacha. “I was driving home and the water began to rise. I thought to myself that I’d wait in the highest area there and everything would be fine because I had enough gas and it would be better to stay inside with the air conditioning.”

But as the hours passed the water kept rising. When morning came and the water started to cover the wheels of Gonik’s car he could feel his vehicle being pulled into the current. He knew he was in trouble so he abandoned his car and floated in the surging floodwaters until he bumped into a tree. He hung on for dear life.

“Suddenly you feel like you’re in the middle of the Kinneret ” Gonik explains. “[The water level] just went up and up until I didn’t see any ground anymore. It was very scary.”

Meanwhile across town Gonik’s wife and daughters were facing their own nightmare. They were at home but the rising water was slowly making things uncomfortable. As Gonik clung to that tree for dear life he called his friend Hilell Tayar who at the time was coincidentally rescuing Gonik’s family.

A former Golani solider who sails for fun Tayar who davens with Gonik at Houston’s Torah Vachesed shul set out to rescue his friend in his canoe.

Tayar says he screamed his friend’s name for “a long time” without hearing any reply. Then finally he heard his friend’s voice. “The current was wild very high and very fast ” Tayar explains. “I tried to stay in one place but the water just carried me along. Somehow I was able to reach him. We tried to grab onto bars or anything we could so as not to get swept away.”

“After 20 minutes I heard him calling to me ” Gonik remembers. “He was a real angel.”

Gonik says that he was most impressed by his friend’s levelheadedness. “I’m a big guy ” says Gonik a former yeshivah bochur who also served in the Marines. “But Hilell who served in Golani showed me that the quality of the Israeli army is beyond imagination. He was so focused. He calmed me down and told me everything would be fine. He was able to navigate the crazy current and reach me. If the water would have taken me to the nearby sewer canal I wouldn’t be here. It’s like getting stuck in a river.”

The pair eventually paddled into a garden of someone’s home and set out on foot. Along the way they helped other people trapped by the flood waters.