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Home for the holidays
By Tamar Wisemon
'Home' for the holidays
Rosh Hashana 2000. The Torah scroll had just been removed from the Ark when men unexpectedly began to filter out of the synagogue in Neveh Dekalim.
Rabbi Yigal Kaminetsky, chief rabbi of Gush Katif and a resident of Neveh Dekalim, halted the Torah reading and ordered everyone to go straight home and arm themselves with their weapons. The community loudspeakers announced that everyone should remain indoors.
Roberta Bienenfeld, a long-time resident of the evacuated Gush Katif settlement, recalls, "My husband was out on the sand dunes with a patrol. I took out the gun that I had purchased at the beginning of the previous intifada. My daughters were smarter. They began to pray. All four of them. It seemed like an eternity until the ’all clear’ announcement filled the air."
It was the start of the second intifada and terrorists had infiltrated Neveh Dekalim, but the attack was thwarted.
"We all traipsed back to the synagogue,"Bienenfeld continued. Every man carried his rifle. We continued the prayer service… Rabbi Kaminetsky is always the [reader] for Musaf on the High Holy Days. He has a beautiful voice and always davens with much concentration. But this time, there was so much feeling… we all felt our prayers were going straight up to God."
Five years on, Bienenfeld’s home in Neveh Dekalim has been destroyed, the synagogue set aflame by jubilant Palestinians and the 600 families dispersed throughout Jerusalem, Ashkelon and elsewhere.
Bienenfeld herself has just moved to Ramat Bet Shemesh, where she will live and work until she is able to rejoin her community in a permanent home. Physically apart, but emotionally very connected, Bienenfeld says that she received an SMS message (the information carrier of choice for a dispersed population that currently lacks its own landlines, local mailboxes and e-mail access) announcing that this year, the Neveh Dekalim Sephardic Rosh Hashana service would be held in Ashkelon and the Ashkenazi service in Jerusalem. Those wishing to attend were asked to contact their community representative.
Bienenfeld says wistfully, "I will really miss Rabbi Kaminetsky’s davening."
This Rosh Hashana, while Bienenfeld is returning from services to her new, albeit temporary, modern apartment, Arik Harpaz, of Elei Sinai, will move from one large tent to another in the sweltering encampment dubbed "Ohalei Sinai" (Tents of Sinai) situated on a vacant plot of land near Yad Mordechai.
"Elei Sinai wants to remain together as a community,"says Harpaz, explaining the decision of more than half of the settlement’s 85 families to erect the tent city in which they have lived ever since their evacuation."On Shabbat we are joined by other communities such as Ramat Hagolan and Mitzpe Netofa and secular and religious people from all over the country. We will spend Rosh Hashana together too. People will bring tents to join us, or we’ll make room for them to sleep somewhere. We’ll eat, as we have been doing, in the communal dining room we have set up in a large tent. People bring ready-made dishes, we also cook here and we work things out.
"We are a mixed secular-religious community and we have continued to remain this way. In Elei Sinai, the religious would go to the synagogue… also some of the secular and other families would take hikes and relax. Then many of the families would get together in the community hall to share a festive meal."
Harpaz, who is secular, continues, "It is incredible to see how the religious and secular, right-wing and left-wing have come together to visit us since our move here — all joined together as one people."
He notes that Ohalei Sinai recently received a visit from Orna Shimroni, one of the Four Mothers who campaigned for withdrawal from Lebanon after their sons were killed there. She told them she was "a bereaved parent just like us."
Harpaz is not talking metaphorically. Nearly four years ago, his middle daughter, Liron, was shot at close range and murdered by terrorists in Elei Sinai, together with her boyfriend Assaf Yitzhaki.
After her death the family established a Web site at www.lironi.org at which Harpaz asks people to "light‘ a virtual candle in Liron’s memory. Ironically, it is the only memorial that has remained in place. A huge rock which Harpaz inscribed at the site of her murder is now a somber feature of the tent city. ’The government forced me to pull my daughter’s memorial out of the ground and now it is here," explains Harpaz bitterly.
Harpaz is also fuming about claims made on Army Radio by the Yonatan Bassi, head of the Disengagement Authority, that the Ohalei Sinai families have been sleeping in hotels and coming to the tent city only during the daytime.
"That is an outright lie!‘ snaps Harpaz. ’Bassi is slandering us to discredit us in the eyes of the Israeli public. We have mothers of young babies and people in their fifties sleeping on the ground, without beds or showers. Of course there a few people who cannot live like this and have to sleep in a hotel, but over 45 families such as mine do sleep here every night and we will continue to live here until the government provides us with an acceptable community solution as close as possible to what we have lost."
Asked to respond, SELA spokesman Haim Altman retorts, "Have you been there at midnight?" Altman adds that SELA’s figures show that 49 Elei Sinai families are housed in some form of SELA accommodation — including rental properties and hotels. Thus there is little discrepancy between Harpaz’s and SELA’s numbers — but a large gap in how each side interprets them.
Deborah Buckman, a US attorney living in Bet Shemesh for the past ten years, recently visited the tent city to see the situation with her own eyes, and weighs in firmly against SELA.
"Anyone who visits the encampment and sees the dozens of tents, masses of drying clothing and the family pets,‘ says Buckman, ’and hears the women grumbling about tiny details they couldn’t possibly have thought of unless they were sleeping rough, will understand that it is a preposterous claim for SELA to make."
One of the day-to-day problems in the encampment is the absence of shower facilities, says Harpaz. "The massive amount of waste water produced by showers would require a complicated drainage system to avoid damaging the land of our hosts in Yad Mordechai. So our families are reliant upon the wonderful local residents who have opened their homes to us. Now I have to drive to the showers!" quips Harpaz.
But he maintains a surprisingly positive outlook. "Despite the physical difficulties, we feel ourselves surrounded by love. People have come from all over the country to be with us and share our pain. People from the Golan Heights arrived here before us and greeted us with such understanding and compassion. How can we not look forward with hope when we are surrounded with such love?"
Harpaz’s sentiments are echoed by Arik Yefet, administrative director of the Netzarim Yeshiva.
"It’s a complex feeling,‘ says Yefet. ’I feel the terrible destruction, yet at the same time it has spurred us on to continue with the same energy and dedication. They destroyed our physical reality but they could not destroy our spirit. Although we are displaced people… we have seen so many people, secular and religious coming to be with us in our pain. We are tremendously grateful to the mayor of Ariel and the administration of Ariel College for opening their hearts to us with true hospitality."
Netzarim, whose students were pictured carrying the huge menora of their synagogue with them — an image has become a symbol of the destruction of Gush Katif — was the last community to be expelled. Today, all eighty families and fifty-five yeshiva students are housed temporarily in mobile caravans that comprise the dormitory of Ariel College.
"Netzarim is planning to move to Halutza in the Negev, to build a new, pioneering settlement there,‘ says Yefet, looking to the future. ’Some people wish to remain in Ariel, myself included. And we plan to attend Rosh Hashana services together with the residents of Ariel, our exceptional hosts."
Another group that found itself welcomed by open arms are eighteen of Morag’s thirty-eight families, who are temporarily living in a girls high school dormitory in the settlement of Ofra. Haim Gross, a young father of "four-and-a-half children — my wife is expecting, which makes things harder" — explains how over half of Morag ended up there.
"We stayed until they forced us out,"explains Gross who was a resident of Morag for five years."They wanted to send us to the Paradise Hotel in Beersheba but we knew that it would be impractical to take care of our children in the tiny rooms and limited facilities of a hotel setting.
"The expulsion was already upon us and we didn’t know what to do. Even as soldiers were breaking down doors, I called my rabbi who advised us to search for an institution prepared to house us. I asked a friend to call around and within ten minutes he called back to say that six different institutions had offered to take us in!"
According to Gross, some Morag residents accepted the invitation of Ulpanat Ofra, while the others decided to try the hotel.
The evacuees who arrived at the hotel received a less-than-inspiring welcome. When they requested cold drinks to quench their thirst after their traumatic journey, they were told to purchase their own drinks from vending machines.
By contrast, the families who drove to Ofra received a welcome fit for the heroes the locals consider them to be."When we pulled up our car, we were immediately enveloped in love,"recalls Gross."Each family was brought to a dormitory room that had been specially prepared for them, with a personalized welcome sign on the door and the exact number of beds for the family. They wouldn’t even let us bring our bags up ourselves, they did it for us.
"Even now, a month later, when I describe it to you, tears come to my eyes. After the terrible, anguished expulsion we had just experienced, and weeks of being treated like sub-humans by the authorities, it was incredibly uplifting to receive so much love and warmth and concern for us." The evacuees in Ofra were soon joined by those fleeing from the Paradise Hotel.
As Gross describes the tribulations of living as a family in a dormitory, he constantly adds his gratitude for the kindness of Ofra residents and the school administration.
"We are looked after very well, but it is not a home. We do not have a Shabbat table, my wife cannot cook for the children. We eat in the dining room, but in order to fit in with the high school schedule, we must eat lunch at 12 o’clock and save the children’s food in plastic containers for them to eat when they return from school an hour or so later."
As Rosh Hashana approaches and the weather cools, the evacuees are feeling the inadequacy of their meager wardrobes.
"We were expelled from Morag in the heat of summer,‘ says Gross, ’and we lack warm clothing and shoes. It’s expensive to purchase a new wardrobe, and we already have these clothes sealed away in our containers so it would be a pity to buy new clothes, so once again tzaddikim have brought us clothes. It is humiliating to have to accept charity, but we were pushed into this situation against our will."
The Morag evacuees are currently trying to organize a temporary living solution in Teneh Omarim, a secular community of 110 families in the southern Hebron Hills that has a sufficient number of vacant apartments — and one that overwhelmingly voted to accept these religious evacuees.
Gross charges SELA with intentionally delaying meeting with Morag’s leadership, despite their desire to move in before Rosh Hashana. SELA denies the charge. Gross says that this Rosh Hashana will not be easy,"In Morag we sang many special tunes on Shabbat and the holidays.
I was sitting with my son during the Sabbath prayers recently and he didn’t want to sing with me. Suddenly it dawned on me and I asked him if he would like to sing the words to the Morag melody. He smiled and began to sing.
This is what is missing it is very difficult to be cut off like this, from our community’s way of doing things.
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