"Adam's brother Yoni has the most interesting story on the Kibbutz," I was told last week at lunch, in the dining hall at Kibbutz Be'eri.
"I'm writing about him, and have heard a lot about him," I replied. "But what specifically makes you say that?"
"Because he saved his children," said Meirav Arieli, matter-of-factly.
Sometimes things are very simple.
--
Yonatan...a lover of football (soccer for us dumb North Americans), and obsessed with the team Manchester United of England, in a way I was told I could not understand by his younger brother Adam, (only I could understand it, because my brother is obsessed with the Montreal Canadiens of hockey, in as fanatical a way as Yoni was, and it seems Adam is, and it seems his entire family is...and as an original Canadian - I get it, as do most Canadians.)
Yonatan...a lover of plants and trees and a gardener of such tremendous skill, that it was his job to take care of the breathtaking grounds of Kibbutz Be'eri, grounds I am sitting in now, writing this article in, grounds which know horror, but which are still gorgeous after nearly a year of not being overly cared for, since for the better part of this past year its residents have been evacuated to a hotel in the Dead Sea area following the October 7th massacre, so I can only imagine how lush these grounds were before that Black Saturday one year ago that took so many wonderful people away from this place of paradise, and away from their families and friends and communities that loved them dearly.
Yonatan..."A naughty boy - (but not in a bad way)," Adam was quick to clarify. "Just for fun, but it made him get in trouble with teachers all of the time," Adam told me, in a novel of a text, sent after I asked him to please tell me about his brother, a delicate exchange as Adam has become a friend since helping me in Israel, when I arrived last November to write about the hostages and met him writing about his friend, but he does not disclose things easily, and does not consider himself a storyteller, until all at once - he became one.
He wrote about his brother.
"He loved to go to parties out in nature, like in the desert for example, and loved the sea and surfed from time to time...and after the army he traveled to India many times. He was extremely influenced by India's culture and became very close friends with a family there. My sister Natasha and brother Dan even went to visit this family in India because of Yoni's special connection with them."
I wondered...how did this family in India feel when they heard the news from Israel on its darkest day in modern history? How long did it take for them to learn what happened to their dear friend Yonatan? How are they doing one year later?
--
Adam was awoken at 6:29am with the rest of Kibbutz Be'eri by thousands of rockets shooting into the country, accompanied by the blaring and repetitive statement in a man's low voice saying, "Tzeva Adom" via loudspeaker, meaning "CODE RED." His bedroom is the "safe room" in his small house on Kibbutz Be'eri, a room in every home designated as a safe place to go in the case of missile attacks, so he just needed to stay put, but leaving to use a rest room or get water or food or anything else was out of the question.
"I knew from the beginning that this wasn't a 'normal rocket attack' - I knew that this was something else."
'Normal rocket attacks' are unfortunately the case in this part of Israel, known as the Gaza Envelope, the small Kibbutzim (small agricultural communities and neighborhoods) that in this case border Gaza. Of all Israelis, people who choose to live here are the most left-wing peace-minded individuals. They want nothing more than peace with their Palestinian neighbors, who are just 2.4 miles away, and many have dedicated their lives to volunteer missions bringing Gazans in for superior medical treatment in Israel, have fought to get them work permits, and various other wonderful initiatives promoting coexistence.
However, when there are rockets that shoot into Israel from Gaza, people in Kibbutz Be'eri have only 15 seconds to get to a shelter, not the 90 seconds granted in Tel Aviv.
The minutes and hours began to pass for Adam in his safe room/bedroom, all by himself, as unspeakable horrors were occurring in other sections of his beloved neighborhood community, and he had to rely on the Kibbutz's application on his phone and a WhatsApp group for information about what was going on - and this was how he learned that Hamas terrorists had entered his brother Yonatan's home across the Kibbutz.
--
He was a great father to his children...full of sense of humor...
"Get under the bed and hide and don't come out no matter what," Yonatan told his six-year-old daughter Aluma and nine-year-old son Yosef.
He played and trained Yosef in football and helped him with Legos...and was full of joy and laughs from Aluma's dancing and singing...
And the kids got under that bed, as their father said something else...about how he was just going out with "these men," [Hamas terrorists] - to get them some money from an ATM.
At least this is what they would later tell their Uncle Dan, Adam's younger brother.
The kids would tell Dan this, but only after they could come out from under that bed, which was eleven hours later, after listening to g-d only knows what for those eleven hours.
We weren't that similar...both of us were quiet and shy, but we were very different...
--
And Adam was alone, across the Kibbutz, knowing the terrorists had gone into his brother's house.
I asked him silly questions about that day in the safe room, when I formally interviewed him in the Dead Sea hotel back in February.
I asked if he was sitting in his room? Standing? Pacing? Hiding?
I asked what he was wearing. I asked if he had shoes on.
Did he have any kind of plan? If there was a camera on his wall, what would it show? What was he doing in that room?
And I asked him these questions because for Adam it was 19 hours of not eating or drinking or peeing or anything. Of not knowing what was happening or what was going to happen.
I was asking because at home I live alone, and so I could relate to being alone more than I could relate to the families being locked in rooms together...so I could imagine it better, yet I could not imagine it. I wanted to know stupid things. Really stupid things.
I didn't really get answers, because what can you do in an almost empty room for 19 hours alone during a terror attack?
He didn't hide or have a plan, because he couldn't have defended himself, he said.
He said the "Shema," a lot, over and over again.
I don't know if he paced. I don't know what he was wearing.
It was harder not to drink, than not to pee, and he left the room only once - to get his charger, because he had lent his second charger to his best friend the night before, the friend he didn't yet know had been taken hostage by Hamas.
--
At midnight or 1am the soldiers called Adam and said they were coming to get him, but the one who knocked had an Arabic accent, so Adam had to call the soldier back, but he was told he was "Druze," and so Adam opened his door, and standing in the middle of a circle of soldiers, he was led out of his house into what had been the beautiful grounds that his brother had cared for, only now they were smoldering, burning to the ground, with smoke rising to the heavens, coming from the burning of bodies of people he knew. And the shootouts were everywhere and would continue for days. And his father was outside the Kibbutz waiting for Yonatan's children to be brought out from under that damn bed. And he and his mom, who had spent the entire day alone in her safe room as well, would get onto a bus in the middle of the night, and be brought to Ein Gedi, but there was not enough space for them, as too many others had already been brought there in the middle of that night between October 7th and October 8th.
So, they were brought to another hotel, where people he had known all of his life were just like him, having arrived after hours or days holed up in a room, many having fought the terrorists themselves, many having witnessed a family member's murder, all searching for somebody, or several somebodies, all frantic with questions, nobody dressed. Nobody with anything. And this would go on for days. The questions, the questions, the questions. And Adam would see people alive that he had been sure were dead, based on some of the messages he had read from his safe room that day, and others he would start learning were dead. Dead or missing. Dead or taken hostage, like the best friend he had lent his charger to.
And after three days, Adam and his father Omer, his brother Dan, his mother Noelle and his sister Natasha in Spain, would learn with absolute certainty, that his dear brother Yonatan, the oldest of four, the one who walked out of his house with the terrorists to save his beautiful and precious Yosef and Aluma, would not be coming back to them.
--
Yonatan is the second brother that Adam, Dan, and Natasha have lost, as their younger brother Kenny died of natural causes when he was 23, and he is therefore the second son that Noelle and Omer have lost.
"When Kenny died, Yoni was the living spirit behind the idea that we'd go every year to see Manchester United play in Manchester, for Kenny's memorial," Adam explained, and this is something the brothers and their father have been doing for years.
This trip had been booked last year with the game booked for November 11th, 2023, and would have been the first trip with Yoni's son Yosef.
A UK citizen, Yonatan's death was mourned by the team Manchester United, who commemorated him.
On Saturday, May 25th, Adam's family, friends from Be'eri and Manchester United fans who had not previously met in person but had become acquainted through a facebook group, all gathered at the Kibbutz Be'eri Pub to watch the English Cup final between Manchester United and Manchester City, as a tribute to Yonatan.
For the first time in the five months that I'd known Adam, I saw a post that gave me joy on Facebook about this in-person event at his beloved pub. It stated:
"Unexpectedly, we won the game and also won the cup, after a less-than-perfect season. We met a little before 5pm, we ate, and we drank a lot of beer. We cheered, we got nervous, and we celebrated the sweet victory at the end and the title, and for a fleeting moment...we disconnected from what happened and is happening in Israel.
We were of course thrilled with the win, but mainly we were moved by everyone who came and got to meet wonderful people, who since the news of Yonatan's murder have given us great support and great love, who we hadn't even met before this night, yet who were all there for us during our most difficult moments.
We were married to the beer and this great victory for a while, but of course we returned to the hard reality afterwards, of war, the kidnapped and soldiers who die every day, but we gained new friends and had an exciting evening that we won't forget for a long time, and we came to know that there are a lot of people who identify with and feel our pain."
A lifelong friend of Yoni's, Roni Barmak, posted this tribute to him on May 12th, which says it all and that much more.
In closing...
Before I received Adam's "novel" about his older brother, and was asking around about him, Tom Hand said, "He was a lot like Adam. Quiet, shy..."
Although Adam later said they were not so similar, Tom's saying this really resonated with me, as for most of 2024, I have had the rare and somewhat unusual experience of feeling like I am on a bit of a spiritual path, like I took the pain and trauma of my own horrific decade which culminated in watching the October 7th disaster alone on TV from Charlotte, NC...and like this got me to travel by myself to Israel to help the families...which in turn helped me heal, which hadn't been possible for ten years in North America...
...because there's something about Israel...where people don't look away...
And then writing about hostage Itay Svirsky led me to his best friend Adam Rapoport, who led me to Be'eri residents Tom and Emily Hand and the hotel full of survivors, and this opened my heart to the entire community of Kibbutz Be'eri, which was so far away from the world of Tel Aviv and the Israel I knew before...and without getting any sappier...
It wouldn't have been possible without Adam's help, who in his darkest hour during unthinkable circumstances, took the time and made the effort to help this broken writer girl with her very big project about the hostages in Israel during the war all by herself.
I feel like...one thing I think I know for sure...is that there were two kind and gentle shy brothers walking around Be'eri, and now there is only one.
Rest In Peace - Yonatan Rapoport - may your memory be a blessing for all who knew and loved you.
***
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 subscribe to her website. 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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