Stuck! A conversation with Shimon Dahan, who is quarantined on the Diamond Princess cruise ship at the port in Yokohama, Japan, due to fears of the coronavirus

One of the people who has been quarantined on the cruise ship currently docked off the coast of Japan because of the coronavirus is 69-year-old Shimon Dahan, a resident of Mevaseret Tzion, Israel. “He’s a very special person,” Rabbi Yaakov Koenig told me. “We know him for close to ten years, and he was slowly miskarev. We met him through his son, who started coming to our shiurim and to daven with us, and then he started coming along as well. Now he hosts a shiur in his house every week.”

Rabbi Koenig described his community in Mevaseret Tzion as consisting primarily of returnees. “It’s mostly baalei teshuvah, or to be more accurate, mitchazkim. For example, Shimon Dahan was born into a traditional family. Then he lost his connection to Yiddishkeit and we brought it back, but there was something there beforehand. There are a lot of people like that in Eretz Yisrael, probably almost a million Jews who are neither frum nor not frum. We try to reach out to them. Two months ago Shimon made a siyum on a masechta of Mishnayos, and the mashgiach, Rav Chaim Walkin, came for the celebration and stayed for almost two hours.

“Although I’m the rav, our community center is under the leadership of Rav Chaim Walkin and Rav Shlomo Busso, who’s the grandson of the Baba Sali. Rav Walkin is older, bli ayin hara, and he has a lot of obligations, so he can’t make it here every day, but he comes around once a month, and we bring a group of talmidim to his house every week.

“We have two centers in Mevaseret Tzion in two separate neighborhoods, serving a few hundred families and growing, baruch Hashem. We also have a school and a high school. Shimon’s sons are all part of our community and attend our night programs. And it’s not just for davening, it’s a whole system of shiurim. Shimon really experienced a lot of growth over the past few years, and he did it at an older age, which is much harder.”
I spoke to Shimon Dahan via telephone on Sunday.

Tell me about your trip to East Asia.
I left my home in Mevaseret Tzion, Israel, on January 16. We are a group of two brothers and three sisters and our spouses; this trip was a 70th-birthday celebration for one of my sisters. After spending four days in Tokyo we drove to Yokohama and boarded the ship. We visited Hong Kong, a couple of islands in Vietnam, as well as Taipei and Okinawa, and then we went back to Yokohama. The whole cruise was supposed to last 15 days. On the last day, eight hours before we were scheduled to disembark and were already packing our suitcases, we were informed that the Japanese authorities suspected an outbreak of coronavirus onboard.

How many people are on the ship?
Thirty-seven hundred, including 15 Israelis. There are other Jews here as well, one from Argentina and one from Australia, and I’m sure that some of the Americans are Jewish.

I understand that the Americans were allowed to leave.
Yes. They began to disembark yesterday, at around 7:00 p.m. Japanese time. It took until 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. until they were all evacuated, put on buses and sent back to the United States.

Why aren’t they allowing the Israelis to leave?
I have the same question, which I posed to the Israeli government. It’s possible that they let the Americans leave because the United States has an army base in Japan where they can care for them. We’re only 15 people, and the Japanese government wants us to remain in quarantine for the full two weeks that it originally demanded, which will end in three days on February 19.

Did you get any reply from the Israeli government?
Yes, but it was very evasive: “We’re in touch with the Japanese government, but it’s going to take some time because you have to remain in quarantine…” The bottom line is that the Israeli Foreign Ministry doesn’t have the same clout as the Americans to get something like this done.

How long have you been in quarantine?
Eleven days. I hope they’re going to let us leave right away on February 19 so we can return home.

Do you think that will happen?
From what we’ve been told, anyone who passes a battery of medical tests and comes up negative will be approved to leave, but each country will have to take care of its own citizens and find a way to get them home. Japan has said that it will help, but the responsibility is on the other countries. The cruise line has also said it will do everything it can to help. As far as we’re concerned, we’d be happy to be in quarantine in Israel, where we could at least be close to our children and grandchildren.

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