The Most Peaceful Place

The only people now present in the once-thriving kibbutz, which is now a closed military zone, are IDF soldiers, members of the emergency squad, and some residents who come during the week to tend to the 750-cow dairy and the remaining agricultural industries. Near the parks, amid the trees, in the various kibbutz facilities — wherever you look, you see olive-green jeeps. Near the dining room, soldiers are tending to their weapons. In another corner, under a gazebo, sits the control team of one of the surveillance balloons hovering overhead. Despite the winding green paths, this feels more like an army base more than a kibbutz.

I meet Eitan Sabag at the electronic yellow gate at the kibbutz’s main entrance. He’s a resident of the kibbutz and in normal times, he manages a packaging factory. He also moonlights as a member of the kibbutz’s emergency response team, and that’s how he found himself battling for the lives of his fellow residents on October 7 along with seven other members of the volunteer squad, known in Hebrew vernacular as the kitat konenut.

Now he is armed and dressed in the squad uniform. Along with his fellow squad members Zevik Beigel and Kobi Beeri, who are working in shifts to secure the empty kibbutz, he barely seems to notice the thunderous cannon fire from the battlefront in Gaza, just a few kilometers away — it’s just part of the background noise in their new reality, as their once-peaceful home has become for all intents and purposes an army camp.

It’s a far cry from the kibbutz he knew and loved just a few months ago. Kibbutz Alumim was established in 1966, under the auspices of the religious kibbutz movement. Over the years, in light of the diminishing concept of the original kibbutz philosophy, this kibbutz slowly underwent privatization, and today, aside from a few collective elements — such as the school system, the shared dining room, joint simchos and administrative events — the kibbutz collective ethos of the past is no longer.

“The socialist kibbutz concept hardly exists today,” Eitan explains. “There are still a few kibbutzim that maintain the collective system, but their number is dwindling. At the end of the day, the concept of ‘all for one and one for all’ — everyone working at different jobs but getting an identical stipend — doesn’t really fly in 2023.”

 Outsiders might imagine that only a very ideologically motivated person — a “flaming settler” stereotype — would choose to live in the Gaza Envelope, so close to our sworn enemies, but Kobi says that’s not necessarily so. “I personally had always been looking for a pleasant, quiet place to live, far away from the big city feel. It’s true that there are more sirens here, but 95 percent of the time, it’s a flowering, pastoral haven that provides a quality of life at a level that you won’t find anywhere else.”

“I have little kids at home,” Eitan says, “and during normal times, the children of the kibbutz, even those who are no older than three, can go to and from playgroup on their own. After school, they can go to a friend, or to play on the grass unsupervised, and it’s all normal. And even during school hours, their teachers can take them outside for lessons in the orchards, the fields, the barn, or the animal pens. The kids who grow up here get to experience the changing seasons and see plant life unfold before their eyes.

“And when there’s a wedding of a kibbutz family, the big lawn becomes an outdoor wedding hall, and everyone’s invited. Overall, it’s very calm and quiet. As believing Jews, we know that HaKadosh Baruch Hu watches over us and over the soldiers on the borders who are the barricade between us and our enemies. So the security aspect never really was a big factor. We were just grateful to be living in such a beautiful part of Eretz Yisrael.”

But on Simchas Torah morning, that dream was shattered.

Where Is the Key?

The kitat konenut, or the emergency response squad, served as the earthly emissary of Divine salvation for Kibbutz Alumim.

“These emergency squads have been around since the early days of the State,” Zevik explains. “Today, some of the squads — primarily in Yehuda and Shomron — are manned by police, while in the border towns in the north and south, they are usually under the command of the IDF. That’s the way it was in Alumim — we had an IDF supervisor, and it was the IDF who set in place our protocol.”

But part of that reality is that in recent years, the IDF grew to view emergency squads more of a burden than an asset. The weapons provided to them were outdated, less professional, and there was some talk of completely taking the squads out of service.

Some of the disputes between the kitot konenut and their IDF superiors revolved around where the weapons should be stored. Logically, it would make sense for the team members to keep their arms close by. However, due to a spate of weapons thefts in recent years, the IDF preferred to store the weapons on nearby army bases. The residents, in contrast, pleaded that the weapons stay within easy reach.

The compromise came in the form of an armory — a weapons storage room located in the center of the kibbutz or town, with the key is in the possession of the “ravshatz,” an acronym for rakaz bitachon shotef tzva’i, the local IDF security coordinator. In case of a terror attack, the ravshatz would unlock the armory, and all the squad members were to quickly grab arms and get to work defending their communities.

Yet how does this help in an emergency situation, when a terrorist has infiltrated and the weapons are locked away in the armory? The official answer to this question was that Hamas wouldn’t ever succeed in invading Israeli territory anyway, so the whole squad apparatus was just a token gesture. Unfortunately, October 7 proved that assumption dead wrong.

In Kfar Azah and Be’eri, the vaunted ravshatz with his vital ring of keys was the first to be killed. The weapons remained locked in the armories, and the emergency response team had no realistic way to prevail against their invaders.

“We’ve seen how important the squads are, and we’ve reached the point where we no longer blindly rely on the IDF system,” my hosts tell me. “We have begun to raise our own funds in order to purchase state-of-the-art weapons for self-defense. We hope that in the post-war period, there will a real turnabout on this issue.

They’re not the only ones who are disillusioned. Since October 7, hundreds of new emergency response squads have been formed on yishuvim and communities across the country.

Hours of Terror

On that Simchas Torah morning, the kibbutz residents awoke at 6:29 a.m.

“We always wake up when the Iron Dome interceptors are released from their batteries, even before the sirens are activated — the noise is very loud,” Eitan says. “In fact, our area has two batteries of interceptors, which makes sense considering how close the rocket launchers are. But both batteries were empty within few minutes. We quickly realized that something was very wrong, and we had to daven hard.”

After a few minutes in the reinforced room, with nonstop rocket fire, the emergency response team turned on their mobile phones to make sure everything was all right, in keeping with the halachos of pikuach nefesh.

And nothing was all right.

“At 6:50 we already heard rounds of gunfire,” Eitan says. “I messaged to the security coordinator on the kibbutz and asked if everything was okay. He wasn’t able to answer until a few minutes later, when the gunfire already sounded very close. This wasn’t smelling good.”

At seven, they received the message that made their stomachs churn: “Terrorists on the kibbutz.”

They still had no knowledge of the bigger picture, but they slipped on their shoes, left their homes, ran to the armory with the hope of finding available weapons, and went out to fight. No one anticipated the dimensions of the waiting disaster.

“You can’t process the fuller picture when so many things happen at once,” Zevik says. “You get reports from here and there, you run from place to place, and whenever you see a neutralized terrorist, you think that the incident is over. We didn’t dream that our specific scenario was in fact multiplied many times over. Who could imagine dozens — if not hundreds, or thousands — more terrorists attacking the region?”

During those moments when they had just about left their houses, the squad members experienced what they can only describe as a miracle. There are two ways to enter Kibbutz Alumim: the electric gate in front, which was closed due to Shabbos, and a back entrance near the agricultural structures, which was padlocked. Once the lock was shot off, the terrorists were in.

Eitan takes me to the back entrance of the kibbutz and shows me the burnt-out barns and agricultural buildings. Alumim is surrounded by avocado orchards and fields of vegetables. It is also known for its state-of-the-art dairy farm, with hundreds of cows and advanced technology. The terrorists arrived on motorcycles just as the morning milking was being completed by the Thai and Nepalese workers. They immediately began killing and destroying, burning the haylofts and feed trucks, throwing burning torches into the offices, and shooting everywhere. In that initial attack, they tragically murdered 16 Thai workers and kidnapped eight others.

Then they headed to the main entrance of the kibbutz which abuts a main road. They began shooting at cars and those fleeing on foot from unfolding massacre at the nearby Re’im music festival, slaughtering people in their cars and on the street. But for some reason that no one can quite fathom, the terrorists didn’t proceed just a few yards away to the kibbutz’s residential area, home to some 450 residents. Knowing now what they perpetrated in other kibbutzim — and knowing how close they were to the vulnerable residents — it’s clear they could have carried out a massacre undisturbed.

The fact that the terrorists focused on the main entrance gave the emergency squad those critical moments they needed to get to the armory and grab heavy weapons, in contrast to what happened on Kibbutz Be’eri and Kfar Azah. Those weapons allowed them to ward off the murderers and keep them from the kibbutz residents.

The working assumption of the squad was that the IDF would arrive soon with reinforcements — but instead, the squad found themselves alone, fighting off wave after wave of terrorists. Additional terror cells got into the kibbutz, but somehow, the few fighters of the civil defense squad managed to hold them off. As hour followed fateful hour — nearly eight hours in all — the members of the security team, carrying outdated M-16 rifles, waged battles against dozens of fighters armed with machine guns, grenades, and RPGs. Some of squad members were injured during the battle — one of them continued to fight for another four hours after taking three bullets in his leg, before being evacuated.

But the miracles kept happening too. After receiving reports that the terrorists were stationed in various positions, the team split up and created a sort of defense line between the residential area of the kibbutz and the terrorists, who were scattered mostly in the farming area.

“While you’re fighting, there’s no time to think, to consider what went wrong and why this was happening,” Eitan says. “Every so often, we’d catch ourselves and think about what was happening with our families or our friends in different clash points — but there was no time or space to start processing what we were feeling. We just davened that Hashem continue to fight for us.”

The turning point came in the early afternoon, when military reinforcements finally arrived, including a Yahalom special forces unit, troops from the Shaldag air support unit, and a Paratroopers force. The paratroopers arrived by military helicopter, which was shot down by an RPG just as the troops had alighted.

Two soldiers, brothers Yishai and Noam Slotki from Be’er Sheva, came to the area on their own initiative to take part in the defense of Alumim, but were killed during the fighting, as was a Yahalom officer.

But by nightfall, between the backup troops and the emergency squad fighters, the dozens of terrorists who had infiltrated in groups all through the day were neutralized.

Eitan, Kobi and Zevik were reunited with their families only at nine o’clock that night.

But not a single member of the emergency squad lost their life. They all ultimately came home to their families. Not quite whole, but alive.

Living with Questions

The next morning, all 450 residents of the kibbutz were evacuated to hotels in Netanya. When I ask if anyone resisted the evacuation, Eitan replies with a bitter smile: “A day after Simchas Torah, you didn’t have to persuade people who live three kilometers from Gaza to flee for their lives.”

Now, however, it’s been two long months away from home. Are they ready to come back?

“There are two parts to that question,” Zevik says. “First is the therapeutic aspect. Healing trauma, especially for children, is a long process and requires time.

“The second part is the security-political situation. We need to see real proof that our kibbutz is safe before we bring our families back. The era of vague assurances and empty promises is over. Only when the threat from Gaza is truly gone will people be able to overcome the crisis of basic trust, as well as the shattered sense of security, and think of it as home again.”

“People are traumatized,” Eitan says. “Many residents still don’t feel ready to return, and as Zevik said — that attitude will only change when there’s a drastic change in the facts on the ground.”

And every child takes it differently, Kobi says. “There are children who are constantly on edge — they get irritated easily and they are fragile and tense. Some of the children have become more withdrawn. Among the adults, as well, you can see that many are on edge. But you can’t blame them, especially when you add the fact that they have been living in a hotel for two months with no end in sight to the mix.

“And besides the trauma, there’s also the uncertainty,” Eitan adds. “We keep wondering, are we going back or not? When? And the news is far from reassuring — we keep hearing reports on hostages, soldiers falling in battle, and so many other awful things. An adult can barely handle it all. So what can we realistically expect from our kids?”

Despite the uncertainty and the deeply disturbing questions about the terrible mistakes that left them so vulnerable that day, my hosts leave me with two scenes of hope.

If there are two images that seem to tell the story of Kibbutz Alumim, one is near the blackened cowshed, and the other in the shul. Alongside the residences of the Thai workers who were brutally slaughtered is a dystopian collection of mangled steel and scorched wood. But in one of the burned-out structures, on a wall covered with black soot, I see huge letters spelling out “Am Yisrael Chai.”

In peaceful times, the kibbutz shul is a vibrant place. Now, the beautiful structure is empty, desolate. The only guest there is a menorah, standing proudly as it looks over the avocado orchards through which the terrorists tried to enter the kibbutz, and with siyata d’Shmaya were pushed back.

We part ways with a tefillah in our hearts. On my next visit, may Kibbutz Alumim be filled with elderly residents sitting on benches basking in the sunshine, taking in the sight of young  families and happy children frolicking in the grass, instead of dismal reinforced shelters, jeeps, and guns.

A miracle happened here just two months ago. Surely it can happen again.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 992)