Iowa City, IA – Jewish Community Minimally Affected by Historic Flooding

Iowa City, IA – “Nearly one third of Iowa is already under water and water levels continue to rise,” said U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Waters are still rising in many parts of the state and the president responded.

As the Cedar River overflowed its banks Thursday, sending thousands of residents in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, scurrying to higher ground, those in Iowa City to the south began to grasp the full implications of what meteorologists are terming a hundred-year flood.

According to Rabbi Avrohom Blesofsky, co-director of Chabad-Lubavitch of Iowa City and its Chabad House serving the University of Iowa, as of mid-week the town was already “very hard hit” from days of unrelenting rain. Although his home is “not in danger at all,” he joined the hundreds of other residents who fanned out across the Midwestern city to shore up neighborhoods against the rising waters of the Iowa River.

“They told us that on one day alone, they ordered 11 million sandbags,” said Blesofsky, who moved to Iowa in 2002, nine years after the great flood of 1993 left swaths of land up and down the Mississippi River and its tributaries in ruins. “We spent hours filling them and loading them into trucks. The rest of the time, we built a six-foot wall near the new commerce center.”

Thankfully, said Blesofsky, most of the university’s students have gone home for the summer. The campus itself, however, will likely suffer some of the worst damage, officials predicted.

The rabbi noted that a sense of unity now pervades the town in the face of impending disaster.

“There’s a helpful camaraderie among everyone,” said Blesofsky. “People from all different walks of life are coming to give an extra hand.”