AP Photo

Lt. Col. (Res) Ori Shahak is not soothed by the silence that descends on Israel’s cities on the eve of Yom Kippur. He is rattled. The dark days of his imprisonment in Damascus as an Israeli prisoner of war are more likely to return to him in flashes: the heavy steps of the approaching guards, the beatings, the torture, the terrible loneliness of solitary confinement and the way it erodes the health of the mind.

“There are scars,” he said, “and sometimes you forget you have them until they start to bleed.”

Shahak, a fighter pilot who fought in the Six-Day War and was shot down over Damascus on the second day of the Yom Kippur War, is a father and a grandfather; his daughter is a major in the air force; and he works for the Israel Air Force...