I made it back to Israel, despite the constant warnings on my phone of escalations with Hezbollah, and now a declaration of a Third Lebanon War.
I made it back despite threats of a different kind, from the soul-sucking job I despise in the US, who has cared nothing about the four months I spent in Israel since this war began before I accepted said job - a war I traveled to on my own in November in order to write about the hostages and their families, which led me to a different kind of family, the larger family of Kibbutz Be'eri, which is where I now find myself.
Well - sort of.
I am writing from Kibbutz Hazerim, which is the third home in the past year for the residents of Be'eri, whose peaceful lives and beautiful families were shredded into bits, some literally and all figuratively, in what will be one year in just 17 days. First, they were taken to the Hotel David in the Dead Sea area in the wee hours of the morning on October 8th, after 10 to 20 to 30 hours in their "safe" rooms as Be'eri burned, and this hotel is where many learned the fate of their loved ones, after days of uncertainty and tears and frantic questioning of friends and authorities.
This is where the interviews we watched abroad occurred, including the now infamous one I'd seen of Tom Hand with Clarissa Ward on CNN before arriving in Israel, and now, after ten months for most of them, and in another two months for still others, they are being "transferred" into makeshift homes on Kibbutz Hazerim, ten minutes outside of Be'ersheva and about 45 minutes from Kibbutz Be'eri. This Kibbutz began building a separate wing to accommodate the survivors of Be'eri eleven months ago.
Here they will spend at least two years, possibly more, as Be'eri is rebuilt, but before it can be rebuilt, much of it must be torn down.
And where am I writing from? From the home of Tom and Emily Hand, where I am housesitting, and yes - I remembered to water the plants. (Today anyway.)
On November 6th, 2023, from Charlotte, North Carolina, I posted the following on Facebook:
Ten days later, I flew to Israel alone, with the crazy idea of starting a website and interviewing the families of hostages.
By the end of November, I was in "Hostage Square," with the families of hostages (all strangers in a large city square), as names were read during the short hostage release that accompanied the short ceasefire, during which time Emily Hand along with 49 other women and children were released over a five-day period. That week, I decided to focus my writing on the young male hostages after hearing they would be the last released during any future deals (little did we know at that time there would be no more formal "deals" at all), and I selected Itay Svirsky from Be'eri as my first feature, which was an easy decision as his familiar face and beautiful smile kept jumping off his poster to me (read his story here). By the time I wrote about him, I had met his aunt and his best friend Adam Rapoport, but then Itay was murdered in Gaza on January 16th, after Hamas played an evil game with his picture on their social media page, along with Yossi Sharabi, also of Be'eri.
When I sent my article about Itay to Adam, my phone sent me a notification that my website had a click from "Be'eri," and this was how I learned that Adam was himself a survivor, and not from Tel Aviv as I'd previously assumed. This meant he knew far more people than Itay that had been kidnapped and killed. In fact, he knew close to 100 people, a number that only recently grew to 102, with the murder of Carmel Gat, one of the six murdered in Gaza alongside Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Alex Lobanov and Almog Sarusi, whose murders were announced over Labor Day weekend.
Carmel Gat was well-known after the children were released from Gaza at the end of November, as she had taught the kids held hostage with her yoga and meditation to help them cope with the trauma of captivity. This is who she was, both in her life, and apparently inside of the worst hell imaginable for eleven months in a tunnel, so the grief for the Be'eri community has only continued to pile on, seeming to promise nothing but relentlessness.
With Adam's help however, back in February, my goal to get out of Tel Aviv to meet the survivors of the war who were evacuated to the Dead Sea hotels, actually came to fruition.
I rented a car and made the trip to the hotel to meet Tom and Emily. I conducted a six-hour interview with Tom, then formally interviewed Adam about the murder of his older brother Yoni, who instructed his nine-year-old Yosef and seven-year-old Aluma to hide under the bed as he left the house with Hamas terrorists and said he was going to get them money from the ATM, only to never come home again. His kids remained under that bed for eleven hours, as Adam stayed in his safe room in his own home across the Kibbutz for twenty hours and learned the terrorists had entered his brother's home from Be'eri's communication app.
A day after learning this story, I visited Kibbutz Be'eri with Adam, where I saw the destruction first-hand, including the home of his brother Yoni, as well as the home of Raya Rotem, where Emily Hand spent the night with her friend Hila before all three were kidnapped to Gaza, and finally the home of Itay Svirsky, which broke me completely, with the front door blown out all the way to where I stood.
I stared at Itay's house, paralyzed, imagining him witnessing the murder of his mom, before they dragged him out, and couldn't even envision a path for him to have been dragged, since the entire place was burned.
The impact of this day has not left my heart or mind for one moment, and when I was forced to return to the US in March because I had spent a small fortune, all I did was begin to immediately seek ways to return to Israel in a completely new way: to find a way to live within the community of Be'eri to tell the stories of the residents from within the Kibbutz as they work to process all they have been through, begin to recover and hopefully to heal, and ultimately rebuild their Kibbutz, despite all that happened there and of course, where it is located - only four kilometers (less than 2.5 miles) - from Gaza.
I arrived in Israel on Monday, far before I'd saved enough to move back, but it was too difficult to figure out a job on a Kibbutz from America and I was impatient to get back here and figure it out. I was also tremendously affected by the murders of the hostages and couldn't imagine being alone in the US for the one-year anniversary of October 7th.
Tom and Emily picked me up from the airport on Monday, and I was thrilled that Emily was excited to see me. I got to know her better in May, as I flew to Orlando to meet a group of Israelis (most of whom were released hostages from Gaza). They had been brought to Disney World for a trip by a large Jewish organization, so I got to ride Space Mountain and Thunder Mountain with Tom and Emily as well as my childhood favorites like "It's a Small World" and "Peter Pan," the former which bored Emily completely and the latter which froze during 'the flight' over England, which I personally found pretty exciting and I have a feeling Tom at least did as well.
My bag didn't make the fast connection in Paris even though I miraculously did, so my first few days here have been just a tad frustrating, but today I ventured out into the sand (literally) and tried to find Emily's friend Hila. Before I could find her house, I saw her and a lady I figured was her mom Raya on bikes, so I said hello and followed them into a home that I assumed was theirs, but it was a home packed with baked goods and stuffed animals with letters and cards.
The residents from nearby communities have been bringing the new Be'eri residents here things to welcome them and help in any way they can (and what can you do for a community that has lost so much?)
But everybody loves cake and so this is what they are doing.
Following stocking up at this "baked goods house," I joined Raya and Hila to their home and sat and talked with "mom," and then I wandered "home" through Hazerim and for the remainder of my Friday, I've been lost in thought over things she shared.
Throughout the day, my phone continued to ding, ding, ding until the sun went down with announcements of all the terrible things that would likely happen over the weekend, and the warnings and the dangers of this, that and the other.
And Tom texted from wherever he and Emily finally landed...they are headed to Canada for a couple of weeks and...the PLANTS!
And I remembered to water the plants outside that he said dry up within hours in this dry heat (and one of them is his ex-wife's Narkis's and very important. Narkis is the mother of his two older children, Natali and Aiden, and a second Mom to Emily and was murdered on October 7th when an RPG hit her home, so she was forced to exit during the attack and was shot on the path just steps before reaching her mother's house).
Yet, instead of regretting coming to Israel during this time of "increased escalation and danger, danger, danger," I'm incredibly grateful to be back here, and contacted Delta to try to find out if I could stay any longer, but that is tough with the kind of ticket I have and all of the October holidays. I'll have to leave October 8th as planned or stay until November 1st.
Hmmmmm.....
And this is my quiet, subdued, first Shabbat in this house on a Kibbutz all by myself on this return to Israel I've been desperately craving, as I eat the fresh cake that I knew I shouldn't have brought home from that "cake house," right out of the tin with a fork.
#BRINGTHEMHOME #BRINGTHEMHOMENOW This is a labor of love, and I feel called to do it, but admit it has started to cost a small fortune, between flights, rent in the US and accommodation in Israel. I have therefore started a GoFundMe in the hopes of getting a little bit of help to stay here another month or two to conduct these interviews with families of hostages and cover the war from the ground. Any donation, no matter how small, will go toward accommodation and bare bone travel expenses. Anything at all will be tremendously helpful and very much appreciated. With gratitude, Melanie
Comments