For many Jewish residents of southeast Texas, Hurricane Ike amounted to several heart-pounding hours of blasting 100 mph winds and driving rain smack dab in the middle of Shabbat.
Southeast Texas Emerges From Hurricane Ike With Costly Property Damage
For many Jewish residents of southeast Texas, Hurricane Ike amounted to several heart-pounding hours of blasting 100 mph winds and driving rain smack dab in the middle of Shabbat.
On Sunday, after the weakened tropical cyclone pushed farther up the Mississippi valley, those same residents were thanking G-d that it hadn’t been any worse.
“People are for the most part doing okay,” reported Rabbi Eliezer Lazaroff, executive director of the Chabad-Lubavitch center serving the Texas Medical Center in Houston, which runs an apartment complex for patients and their families known as Aishel House and coordinates programming for Jewish students at Rice University, two local medical schools and a law school.
When it made landfall in the predawn hours of Sept. 13, Ike slammed into the barrier island of Galveston, Texas, with 110 mph winds. According to news reports, flooding from the hurricane’s storm surge and a larger-than-usual wind field had already inundated most of the island, which underwent mandatory evacuations on Friday. Casualties remained low, with no fatalities recorded as of Sunday morning, The New York Times reported. Thousands of people along the Texas coast were stranded, awaiting rescue.
