As a teenager in a New Jersey suburb, Jonathan Feldstein heard about a program to “twin” young American Jews with Soviet Jews of the same age, but was disappointed to learn he was too old to participate. Already devoted to the cause of aiding the Jews of the USSR, he contacted the program’s sponsoring organization and soon found himself corresponding with a young Muscovite named Kate (Katya) Shtein whose parents were refuseniks. Feldstein recounts his quest to get Shtein—and those like her—to America:

While others spent early adult years focusing their spare time on far more mundane things, my life revolved more and more around freeing Soviet Jews. I read [Leon Uris’s novel] Exodus around the time of my becoming a bar mitzvah, and it moved and inspired me. But preparing for my bar mitzvah, and reading from the Torah about the Exodus of our people from Egypt, stirred something deeper in me. As I got to know more about the plight of Soviet Jews, all these came together. . . .

In my first letter [to Kate], I wrote about mutual friends who told me about [her and her family], of wanting to correspond and learn about their lives, and my interest in the Soviet Union. All things tame enough, and the first letter was able to pass the extensive Soviet censorship. After a while, it became hard to tell which letters had arrived and which letters had not. But at the same time, as much as it would have been nice for all the letters to arrive, the Shteins knew I was writing, and the people charged with stopping the letters from getting through knew as well. . . .

I [soon] took a page out of my own family history, in which relatives would leave Eastern Europe through the “legal” means of a fictitious marriage; my grandmother and two of her siblings owed their escape from Hitler’s inferno to such marriages. If it was good enough for them, it was good enough for me. I planned to marry Kate in a Soviet civil ceremony, and then do whatever necessary to free “my wife” from the USSR, taking her case to the highest legal, diplomatic, and political spheres possible.

Although the two pen-pals finally met in Moscow in 1985 (Friedland had arranged a trip there on the occasion of the International Youth Festival), no marriage took place. And in 1987 the Shteins were granted the freedom to emigrate.

On Tuesday, a Hizballah drone attack injured three people in northern Israel. The next day, another attack, targeting an IDF base, injured eighteen people, six of them seriously, in Arab al-Amshe, also in the north. This second attack involved the simultaneous use of drones carrying explosives and guided antitank missiles. In both cases, the defensive systems that performed so successfully last weekend failed to stop the drones and missiles. Ron Ben-Yishai has a straightforward explanation as to why: the Lebanon-backed terrorist group is getting better at evading Israel defenses. He explains the three basis systems used to pilot these unmanned aircraft, and their practical effects:

These systems allow drones to act similarly to fighter jets, using “dead zones”—areas not visible to radar or other optical detection—to approach targets. They fly low initially, then ascend just before crashing and detonating on the target. The terrain of southern Lebanon is particularly conducive to such attacks.

But this requires skills that the terror group has honed over months of fighting against Israel. The latest attacks involved a large drone capable of carrying over 50 kg (110 lbs.) of explosives. The terrorists have likely analyzed Israel’s alert and interception systems, recognizing that shooting down their drones requires early detection to allow sufficient time for launching interceptors.

The IDF tries to detect any incoming drones on its radar, as it had done prior to the war. Despite Hizballah’s learning curve, the IDF’s technological edge offers an advantage. However, the military must recognize that any measure it takes is quickly observed and analyzed, and even the most effective defenses can be incomplete. The terrain near the Lebanon-Israel border continues to pose a challenge, necessitating technological solutions and significant financial investment.