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.

Monetary damage was high, with estimates of losses approaching $8 billion.

Omri Shafran, a 32-year-old Israeli resident of Houston with properties throughout the metropolitan area and across Galveston, said that Ike could well end up costing him “tens of millions of dollars.”

“I have insurance for all of the buildings, except for one in Galveston,” he said. “In the southwest part of Houston, 18 town-homes were damaged lightly, while all of the windows in one office building in Humble flew away with the wind.”

At 230 miles southeast of Galveston, Texas, shortly before landfall on Friday, Hurricane Ike packed 105 mph winds, making it a Category 2 storm. (Image: NOAA)

In Houston’s Uptown section, Rabbi Chaim Lazaroff said that he spent Friday night and Saturday morning in a state of disbelief as the winds howled, and his house shook. For the most part, authorities did not order evacuations in Houston, 45 miles inland from Galveston.

“It was pretty wild,” detailed Lazaroff, co-director of Chabad-Lubavitch of Uptown and program director of the Chabad-Lubavitch regional headquarters in Houston. “The whole house was vibrating from the winds. When I looked out the window, I saw heavy debris flying, and water was coming in from around the window frame.

“When I saw that we were losing the siding on one side, I moved my family to the other side of the house.”

The regional headquarters, which recently underwent a massive expansion project, didn’t fare any better. It’s windows, which were designed specifically to sustain 120 mph winds, were unharmed, but the sun screen of the building’s signature rooftop pavilion was ripped off. A menorah on the building’s roof was similarly torn from its supports, and a perimeter fence costing $10,000 was toppled by the winds.

Rabbi Chaim and Chanie Lazaroff, co-directors of Chabad-Lubavitch of Uptown, hold an impromptu barbeque for the residents of the B’nai B’rith Goldberg Towers senior citizens home after Hurricane Ike knocked out power in Houston.

On Sunday, Lazaroff was without power. He and his wife, fellow co-director Chanie Lazaroff, spent the afternoon unloading their freezer – which was just stocked with kosher chickens in advance of Rosh Hashanah – and holding a barbeque for the residents of the B’nai B’rith Goldberg Towers senior citizens home across the street.

One of the home’s residents, 71-year-old Moshe Gelrud, said that weathering the storm wasn’t that bad, although his building lost its roof.

“This is a pretty safe building,” he said. “Some people lost the glass in their windows, and some apartments were flooded. We’re still waiting here for the electricity.”

Frightened Guests

On Saturday afternoon, Eliezer Lazaroff “waded through the water” to check in on the frightened guests of the Aishel House, none of whom were used to tropical weather.

“I was concerned, because they’re all not from Houston,” said Lazaroff. “During Tropical Storm Allison in 2001, the apartments there were flooded. Some of the people were quite terrified, but thank G‑d, we were spared.

“Right now, there’s no electricity, so the primary concern is food spoiling in their freezers,” he continued. “We’re still checking in on them periodically and making sure they have plenty to eat.”

Among the damage sustained by the newly expanded Chabad-Lubavitch regional headquarters in Houston was a downed fence valued at $10,000.

Rabbi Yitzchok Schmukler, associate director of the Chabad House at Texas Medical Center and one of the few residents who still had power after the hurricane, said that he lost a few shingles from his roof. He was taking advantage of the electrical situation and storing frozen kosher food that Eliezer Lazaroff had ordered in advance of a planned community concert. The concert, which was scheduled for Sunday, was postponed until November.

One Houston resident, Dr. Julius Danziger, said that an e-mail sent by the Aishel House before the storm hit helped put things into perspective.

“Many times, when I first meet patients and their families, they too seem like they were hit with a hurricane,” wrote Lazaroff in the e-mail. “We feel grateful to be able to be the calm in these families’ storms. As you ‘hunker down’ in your homes or as you evacuate, know that the Aishel House is giving these patients a place to ‘hunker down’ not just in their virtual storms, but also in hurricanes like Ike.”

After receiving the e-mail, “my wife and I went to the rabbi before Shabbat,” said Danziger, a radiologist who likely lost a vacation home in Galveston. “We went through Hurricane Alicia in 1983, too. That e-mail drew our attention to life, and away from the material aspect of the hurricane.

“People go though real hurricanes in life,” he added. “This is only a house.”