Amid Gaza war, a US-born Jewish woman mans a Christian Arab town’s bike shop
The tiny 56-year-old grandmother, daughter of an Orthodox rabbi from Chicago, is learning on the job while the shop’s owners are serving in reserves
Reporter at The Times of Israel
MAILIYA, Western Galilee — Mechanic Zippy Schrager examines a customer’s problematic bicycle with the gravitas of a doctor, pointing out the loose chain, the crooked wheel rim, the flat tire.
On a recent drizzly morning, Schrager, who has shoulder-length brown hair and wears black pants and laced work boots, works on a bike in between helping Arab and Jewish customers who come into Ran O’Fan. The bike store stands at the entrance of Mailiya, a Christian Arab village in the hills of Western Galilee.
Schrager — a 56-year-old grandmother and the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi — immigrated to Israel from Chicago in 2012. And although a comforting Fleetwood Mac song plays in the bike shop’s background, Hamas’s deadly October 7 onslaught on Israel and the war in Gaza looms large.
In fact, in the immediate two weeks after October 7, Schrager was too frightened to come to the store, which is about 20 kilometers (12 miles) from Israel’s northern border with Lebanon and Hezbollah’s terrorist army, where skirmishes are a near-daily occurrence and a second battlefront could open up at any time.
Northern Israel and Western Galilee communities are under constant fire from Hezbollah-led attacks; seven soldiers and four civilians have been killed. Schrager says she now feels safe; she’s gotten used to the booms of outgoing Israeli artillery, and she’s prepared to take shelter in the shop’s protected room. So far that hasn’t happened.
Not much more than five feet tall—“I used to be 5’2,” she says wistfully –Schrager whizzes around the bike shop with the energy of a triathlete and a marathon runner — which she used to be. (Best marathon time, 3:13.) She pauses for a moment to tell a customer she’d have his bicycle fixed in two days.
After the customer leaves, she admits, “I could have fixed his bicycle on the spot but sometimes customers stand over me. Sometimes they argue. They give me tools to use. They don’t think I know what I’m doing.”
But she does.
According to Ron Boutillier, who owns the store with his partner, Ran Gefen, “Zippy does all the basic — and not so basic — mechanical repairs.”
Schrager claims she didn’t know how to change a flat tire before she started to work there, and Boutillier has taught her “everything except fixing electric bikes” in the past three years. With Boutillier now on reserve duty during the war against Hamas which began on October 7, Schrager is on her own in the shop.
While tightening some bicycle bolts, Schrager looks down at her incredibly sturdy fingers. They’re like built-in personal tools.
“I have man’s hands,” she says. “No, I have garage mechanic hands. My nails are nice and filed but they do get dirty.”
Some people comment that it’s not nice for a grandmother to have hands like hers. Or they ask if her husband minds.
“He doesn’t mind,” she tells them. “I can still scratch his back.”
Schrager was always rebellious. She grew up in Chicago where her father, Joseph Deitcher, was the rabbi of Anshe Sholom Bnei Israel, a Modern Orthodox Synagogue. Her father was a “tzaddik and a teacher, a gentle, kind soul who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr.”
Schrager attended a private Jewish school until sixth grade. She loved playing outside and excelled at swimming, and her father agreed to let her attend a public high school so she could compete on the swim team. She made it to the state championship but didn’t attend because it was held on Friday night, the start of the Sabbath.
Schrager, who now has three daughters and two granddaughters, is still a Sabbath observer, but says, “Religion is something anybody can do — you just follow the rules. But you also need heart.”
When she and her husband, Robert Schrager, who works in a hi-tech company in Haifa, moved to Israel in 2012, they chose to live in the nearby mixed Arab-Jewish town of Maalot-Tarshiha because it’s in the hills and a 10-minute drive to the sea. When the couple arrived, they attended a Hebrew-language ulpan course.
“The most amazing thing I learned was that I could sit still for five hours a day for five months,” Schrager says. She can get by in Hebrew but prefers to speak English, which “everyone understands, anyway.”
After ulpan, she worked as a personal trainer and then at Curves, an all-female physical fitness gym. Both Arab and Jewish religious women feel more relaxed working out only with other women, Schrager says. When Curves closed, her husband, who is also a bicyclist, told her that Boutillier was looking for an employee.
Schrager says that mostly men come into the shop; she gets excited when there’s a woman who wants to buy a bicycle or accessories. Most of the customers are “good people,” she says, but it’s challenging to deal with what she called Middle East mentality, when customers try to “price me down,” or return bicycles they’ve already used.
“If you eat half a hamburger, can you return it?” she asks rhetorically.
Schrager says she never experienced antisemitism in Chicago. She says she wasn’t really sure why her family moved to Israel. That is, until October 7, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists swarmed over the border with Israel, killing 1,200 people — most of them civilians — amid shocking acts of brutality, and kidnapping another 240 to the Gaza Strip, where they are being held hostage.
“That changed everything,” she says. “I still can’t speak about what happened without crying. Now I get it. I understand why we’re here.”
“I have a girlfriend who’s a school teacher,” Schrager says, as she looks around the colorful bicycle shop. “She wants my job but she can’t have it because I have it. I’m very lucky.”
