I’m sitting in the dining hall at Kibbutz Be’eri, as people begin to enter for their Sunday lunch at 11:39am.
Sunday is like Monday here in Israel, the work week being Sunday through Thursday, a fact that surprised me when I immigrated here in my 20s. It also surprised me that Hanukkah was not a big deal holiday and that other holidays were. I got a lot of days off from work and had no idea why. This explains how being Israeli can include the almost total absence of "religious" Judaism or traditional knowledge, even though I've always observed the High Holidays and still fast on Yom Kippur - but I fell in love with Israel because I fell in love with its people.
I never spent time on a Kibbutz until now, with the exception of a few days on my Birthright trip, which was my introduction to Israel, and I was such a naïve fool back then, that I asked our trip leader when I saw our itinerary on the way over, if she was sure we would all “fit” on a Kibbutz – because for some reason I had always been sure that a Kibbutz was a boat.
It might seem odd then, that I now find myself not only on a Kibbutz, but on Kibbutz Be'eri, less than three miles away from Gaza, less than a year after the worst terror attack on Israeli soil. On October 12th, 2023, in The Times of Israel's article, "Be'eri's Residents Are Gone, But Their Homes Attest to the Horrors They Endured," this incredible statement was said by Doron Spielman from the IDF's spokesperson's unit:
"In the same way that Auschwitz is the symbol of the Holocaust, Be’eri is going to become the symbol of the [October 7th] massacre. The level of inhumanity of Hamas fighters surprised even us, Israelis who had no illusions about what Hamas is."
And yet here I am, bearing witness as approximately 200 Kibbutz members of the 1200 total, have already returned to live here. This does not include any children, due to the sounds of war next door in Gaza, and of course, traumatic memories from October 7th. As my recent post explained, the majority of Be'eri's residents have just been moved from the hotel in the Dead Sea area that housed them for the past year over to Kibbutz Hazerim 45 minutes away from Be'eri, a wonderful community who rushed to build a new section of homes to accommodate them in the immediate aftermath of the October 7th massacre. This is where the families with children are now settling in and where school has just begun.
But there are many other Be'eri residents, couples with grown children, or singles without children, who have chosen to come back to Be'eri, at first commuting here only during the week to work, and then back to the Dead Sea hotel on weekends, but who are now choosing to stay in Be'eri full-time, determined to be back at home and establish and maintain their old routines, care for the lovely grounds, hang out at the Be'eri pub and prove to the world and to the enemies who did everything they could to destroy their world and their spirit - that they have done anything but that.
The spirit in Be'eri is hurting, yes, but it is also fierce, and it will not be extinguished.
On Thursday night, Israel's Channel 12 aired a brand-new documentary showing the horror that took place here on that Black Saturday, from cameras all over the Kibbutz, and the camera they kept returning to was right outside the dining hall I am writing from right now.
Though I will freely admit that I have no sense of direction, this vantage point from outside the dining hall was the one place I really knew after spending only 48 hours last week on Kibbutz Be'eri, as it is these benches outside the dining hall that are my landmarks to help me find my way to the house I am staying in.
How different it was to watch this documentary of Be'eri having a sense of my bearings, yet how odd to watch the silent camera footage, albeit chilling, when I knew the reality on October 7th was sirens blaring that entire day due to thousands of rockets overhead, while screams from murder and torture and fear were occurring for so many families all over Be’eri and simultaneously in neighboring communities and all over the desert and forests that surround us, as young adults ran for their lives escaping the Nova Music Festival, barefoot for hours across blazing sand and into shelters where many met their most violent deaths.
Watching the tick…tick…tick…of the digital time in the corner of the TV screen on this documentary as Hamas terrorists calmly and methodically made their way through offices and the Kibbutz's medical center (where at least five workers were massacred), and homes and children’s rooms, trapping people together and smoking people to death and shooting them if they attempted escape, like Narkis Hand was forced to do when an RPG hit her home, setting it instantly on fire.
Narkis was Tom Hand’s ex-wife and the mother of his older children, Natali and Aiden. Tom’s younger daughter, Emily, then age 8, was kidnapped by Hamas terrorists with her friend Hila and Hila’s mother Raya for 50 days, though Tom was originally told she had been killed, a mistake that would take three weeks to sort out – a mistake that sheds light on the mass chaos and confusion that occurs when 100 human beings disappear from one community – out of 1200 people of all ages that disappeared from one country – a number that proportionately in the USA, would be 40,000.
“Narkis fell and died right here,” said the elderly woman who lives a few doors down from Tom, pointing to the ground next to her. She showed me where Tom's house was last week, the day I arrived with my pink backpack, having only been to Be’eri once back in February, when I visited with a different Be'eri resident, Adam Rapoport, whose older brother Yonatan was murdered at some point between “6:29am and the end of day” in that “documentary" as the silent clock in the upper left-hand corner went tick, tick, tick on October 7th, 2023.
Like many others from these communities, Adam will never know what happened to his brother that day, other than that he saved his kids' lives by ordering them under the bed, where they would spend eleven hours listening to the horrors taking place in the peaceful community they'd grown up in. Six-year-old Aluma and nine-year-old Yosef would later tell their uncles that Dad had said he was going out to get the [terrorists] money at the ATM.
“There were just too many…bodies...to learn what happened, and that was just at Be’eri,” Adam told me back in February at the Dead Sea hotel that he and the rest of this community were evacuated to for most of the past year, the day before he took me here to bear witness to the aftermath of the horrors myself for the first time.
If there was a comparison to be made, and there really isn’t, then what happened in Israel last October 7th, was about fifteen September 11ths, but the reason I say it is not comparable is that this was a violence on a scale unseen on American soil and so it cannot be understood.
This was an invasion into homes that lasted an entire day and involved details of such gore that I hesitate to go into detail.
It involved shooting a three-month old baby in the head from this very community, right in front of her mother, and burning an entire family alive from neighboring Kibbutz Nir Oz, including all three young children.
It involved murdering elderly parents and then dragging their sons and daughters into Gaza after witnessing these murders – and these sons and daughters have still not returned home to Israel.
Some are confirmed dead in Gaza and are just bodies waiting to be brought back, like Adam's best friend Itay Svirsky, which was how I initially met him and began learning about this community, while others are likely still alive and sitting in there, like Tal Shoham, whose wife Adi and young children were released from hell alongside Emily, Hila and Raya at the end of November, but whose agony is ongoing as they await Tal and the rest of the hostages, who are starving and suffering in ways human beings should not be permitted to suffer, not even during war, but the Red Cross has done nothing for our hostages since the very beginning. Quite the opposite – in some cases, they have challenged the parents of hostages by asking them why they don't care more about the plight of the people in Gaza.
Here in Israel, it has seemed like we have just waited, and prayed, and hoped, and fought, and gone to weekly rallies in Tel Aviv and Kiryat Gat, saying their names and counting the days and chanting Achshav, achshav, achshav. (Now, now, now.)
It has seemed like we just wear our “Bring Them Home Now” shirts and our multiple colorful bracelets and our dog tags around our necks, and like I'll now wear my new bright yellow shirt with lots of Hebrew on it and a tallied day count with angrier and angrier statements like “DEAL NOW OR ELSE—”
Like we just silence our phones as the constant notifications appear from the top down, notifying us of the non-stop rockets entering our airspace and our cities from Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and other groups in Iraq and Syria, while the ongoing predictions on whether Iran will or won’t do something big (and when they will or when they won’t) is discussed and analyzed, and round and round it goes.
But since arriving on Kibbutz Be'eri last week, I have felt a shift, like a turn of the dial on an old TV when you actually changed the channel into a new position with a click.
It's a mood.
It's a mindset.
It's a unique kind of optimism I have never quite seen, but it's wonderfully contagious and dangerously addictive, and it makes you want to settle in just a little bit closer and see if you can catch it, too, and you can, because it's pride.
It's pride and it's love and it's grit and it's strength and it's resolve and it's balls and it's "F&$% you - we're not leaving," and it's coming from more than just Be'eri people who are back after their year at the Dead Sea hotel; it's coming from people who have come to Be'eri like myself, people who have come since October 7th to help with the land and to work at the printing factory and to add to life being rebuilt here and help heal the collective broken heart of this community.
It's coming from people who want to be a part of its heart...and I fell in love with Israel because I fell in love with its people...
And so when I then saw a Facebook post calling to flood the streets of New York City FOR PALESTINE – ON OCTOBER 7TH – and got sick to my stomach, it was only for a second, because I could close my eyes and smell the fresh oranges and eucalyptus and remember why I came to Israel last November, to help the families by telling the stories of their loved ones who were taken hostage...and why I was afraid to leave Israel (not stay), and so extended and extended and extended my stay...
And then I could rejoice that I came here two weeks ago, because it really wasn't a choice. It was a must-do for my own heart and my own soul, and a calling from above to return to my mission.
I am here in Israel to tell the stories of what happened on October 7th, 2023, and is still happening, at every moment of every day for these people, these incredible people, these people of Kibbutz Be’eri, who have come back to their lives of work and attempted “normality” on their beautiful land, which is evident when you walk the grounds, the grounds I now know are under surveillance from many angles, as I walk around in my new yellow t-shirt, a t-shirt that says a lot of really tough stuff in Hebrew, to help get the hostages back, past those benches outside the dining hall, that help me find my way home.
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Melanie Preston is a writer who took herself by herself to Israel in the days following October 7th and began this project to write about the hostages. To support her work, please share her posts with your communities, and become a member of her website or subscribe. If called to do so, you can also donate which will help her stay in Israel longer with the survivors of October 7th. With much gratitude, Shalom and L'Shana Tova.
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