New Orleans Hunkers Down as Hurricane Looms

New Orleans resident Jill Halpern raced home to do her laundry and bring her lawn art inside last night. She wanted to clean her clothes before the power went out, and to make sure there wasn’t anything in the yard that could go flying through the air and break through the glass.

All around the city, fellow residents – memories of the destructive power unleashed exactly seven years ago by Hurricane Katrina fresh in their minds – were getting ready to hunker down, emptying store shelves and buying up batteries ahead of Hurricane Isaac, which is slated to hit the New Orleans as a slow-moving cyclone on Wednesday. Shelters opened up Monday, flights were cancelled for Tuesday, and news stations began pumping out headlines about various areas with high risk of floods.

“Significant storm surge,” warned the National Weather Service. “Flood threat from rainfall expected along the northern Gulf Coast.”

But Halpern, who evacuated to Houston after Katrina struck in 2005, was not nervous. She echoed a determined, but upbeat chorus of other members of the Jewish community, including Chabad-Lubavitch emissaries throughout the area.

“You take it all in stride,” she said.

Sarah Rivkin, program director at the Rohr Chabad Jewish Student Center serving Tulane University, was busy Monday taking the ordinary precautions, filling the house with bottles of water and making sure flashlights, non-perishable food and a battery-powered radio were on hand. The university was scheduled to close Tuesday and Wednesday, and student had largely left on what they called a “hurrication.”

As for Rivkin and her husband, Rabbi Yochanan Rivkin, they contacted Jewish students’ parents to give out their cell numbers in case anyone needed help. They also reached out to their constituents via Facebook and telephone.

“We put out the offer, in case anyone wants to stay with us,” said Rivkin, whose plans included heading out to deliver pillows and blankets to a Tulane alum who will be waiting out the storm in the hospital with his brother. “We don’t know what’s going to be, but nobody wanted to leave it to the last minute.”

The fact that it’s near the anniversary of Katrina is only adding to people’s anxiety, and news reports showed streams of people leaving New Orleans.

“Hopefully it’ll just be a scare and it won’t be another Katrina repeat,” said Rivkin.

Rabbi Yossi Nemes, who lives in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, was on his way to Atlanta for a wedding after closing the hurricane shutters and covering the Torah scrolls in his Chabad-Lubavitch center with waterproof jackets. He checked in with the elderly residents in the community to make sure they had a plan, and noted that overall, people were prepared. Most he came in contact with were staying.

“People aren’t panicking,” he said. “They’re in a good state of mind.”

Katrina was traumatic for Halpern, who recalled not being able to locate her husband and one of her daughters. As Friday night approached in Houston that year, she felt the familiar pull of lighting the Sabbath candles, but wasn’t sure where she’d find them.

She and her hostess, a woman she didn’t know, entered a warehouse stocked with donations for those who’d fled with the shirts on their backs, and her eyes locked on a box of Sabbath candles someone had given.

“I knew G-d put those there for me,” she said. “We, my daughter and I and the woman, we lit them in the kitchen.”

Following the hurricane, people saw G-d everywhere, related Halpern. Their lives clearly out of their own hands, they banded together for home-cooked Sabbath meals at a water-damaged area Chabad House, and celebrated the chance to connect with their Judaism.

“It was a meeting place for people – everybody was so traumatized,” she said.

Offering a prayer, Nemes said he hoped the city’s new post-Katrina levee system would spare everyone the trauma.

“We’ll see if it’ll hold,” he said.