‘If you give up on Nirim, you give up on Israel’
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‘If you give up on Nirim, you give up on Israel’

A kibbutz veteran describes the horror of October 7 – and why she still has hope

Adele Raemer shows off her tattoo. It says “Resilience.”
Adele Raemer shows off her tattoo. It says “Resilience.”

On October 6, 2023, Adele Raemer had been retired from her long-time job as a teacher on her kibbutz, Nirim, for about a month. The idea of retirement was so new and strange to her — and to be fair, she was only partially retired, because she’s also a blogger and a public speaker, among many other things — that she was nowhere near figuring it out. She had just begun playing with the concept.

Adele, a small, trim woman with intense green eyes, told the story of her life before, after, and most particularly during October 7 as we sat in the Chit Chat Diner in West Orange. We met on Monday morning; the tape she wore on her chest said 360, handwritten in marker. That’s the number of days it had been since the hostages were taken.

She was in the area with the Jewish National Fund; on Sunday she spoke at Temple Sholom of West Essex in Cedar Grove.

The view of Manhattan clearly visible through the diner’s big windows occasionally distracted her from the story — a distraction that I, as her audience, needed. The story is hellishly grim. But the way Adele tells it, framed on both sides with hope, also is quintessentially Israeli.

She opened the discussion by showing the cover of her journal; it’s a drawing of flowers blossoming above ground, as their roots anchor them below, along with a quote attributed to Gustav Klimt. “There is always hope,” it says. Adele accompanied that line with another, attributed to Golda Meir. “We always have hope, because we have no other choice,” she said. “And that is our superpower.”

“Do you still have hope?” I asked. “Do I have any other choice?” she answered.

Adele, who was born in 1954, grew up in the Bronx — on Hull Avenue, to be specific, in the neighborhood called Norwood. As an active member of Young Judaea, she fell in love with Israel, spent a gap year there, found herself even more deeply in love, and made aliyah in 1973. She moved to Nirim, less than five miles from the border with Gaza, in 1975, and has lived there ever since. She is a widow and has four children; one of her daughters, Lilach, lives there too.

“If you had told me that one of my kids would come back and raise a family on the kibbutz, I would say okay — but it wouldn’t be Lilach. Because when she was about 9, her grandfather was carrying a gun. It was during Pesach, and we were on high alert. Ever since that day, she was afraid of infiltration.” That is, she worried that enemies might somehow sneak into the kibbutz to harm the people who lived there.

“But I said, ‘Don’t worry. There is nothing to worry about. We are miles away, there is a big fence, there is the army and people all around guarding the kibbutz. We are safe here. You have nothing to worry about.”

Lilach continued to worry.

But she grew up, she got married, the kibbutz was beautiful, it was home, it was safe — and there Lilach was, three small children later, back on Nirim.

“And then we almost lost them all on October 7,” Adele said. “It was her worst nightmare — in spades.”

This is what Kibbutz Nirim looks like today.

Then we get to the nightmare.

“For me, October 7 started on October 6,” Adele said. “That’s when we celebrated Kibbutz Nirim’s 77th anniversary.

“It’s a place that cares about community, about our responsibility for one another. It was founded in 1946, before the state of Israel, and the people who founded it were true pioneers.” Some were native Israelis, others, who had escaped the Holocaust, came from various parts of Europe. Next year will mark Adele’s 50th year there; when she first arrived, many of those pioneers were at Nirim, and even now, decades later, a few of them grace it still.

“The founding ethos was Zionism,” Adele said. “It was about guarding the borders by living there and farming the land. When I got there in 1975, it was not a war zone. We call it 95 percent heaven.

“Ninety-five percent of the time, it is beautiful. It is crime-free. It is pollution-free.” And it is bucolic because it is agricultural. “We never had a factory that was successful, although we tried it a few times,” Adele said. “So we figured it out.

“We grow wheat, lychee, sweet potatoes, wheat, avocados, barley, wheat, banana, and wheat. If you haven’t noticed, lots and lots of wheat. The closest we get to a factory is a packing house for the avocados and sweet potatoes.”

She described her teaching career, which led her to where she is today. “I taught English as a foreign language, and I was a teacher trainer,” she said. “And starting in 2011, I worked on digital pedagogy. So when the pandemic hit, we were ready. My team had been spread out all over the country from way before the pandemic, and we had been using Zoom.

“And since 2019 I have been doing public diplomacy” — what has been called hasbara, a term Adele doesn’t like, because it hasn’t been particularly successful — “for the foreign ministry.” She understates. She’s an influential blogger who has huge followings on Life on the Border and as Zioness on the Border; she’s blogged for CNN and spoken in public, including before the U.N. Security Council. She’s also a photographer. As “someone who lives there, who knows how to tell the story and how to get messages across, who is not a politician but a grandmother and a retired teacher,” as she put it, she is a real presence in Israel and for Israel.

And that almost gets us to October 7.

“October 6 was a beautiful party celebrating the anniversary,” she said. “My daughter is in charge of culture on the kibbutz” — that’s her job, not a volunteer role — “and Adam, one of my sons, came down for the celebration.” He stayed in Adele’s house that night, and “I said, ‘If you don’t see me in the morning, don’t worry. I am taking my camera and my car and going out to see a field of wild squills.” That’s a plant that blooms with white flowers around Rosh Hashanah, she added; the season is almost over. A friend had “taken a picture of a beautiful field of them at sunrise,” and she wanted to duplicate that experience.

“So I told Adam that I would be going out at 5:30 in the morning to find that field.

“But I was too tired to get up at 5:30 the next day.” That was October 7. “I didn’t oversleep. I woke up, looked at the clock, and said that instead of getting up now, I’d do it tomorrow.

This is a field of squills at daybreak; Judih and Gadi Haggai were slaughtered in a field like this one. (Photograph taken by Yizhar Sha’ar Oct 5th, 2023)

“If I hadn’t been too tired, I wouldn’t be here now in this beautiful restaurant, looking at the New York skyline and telling you this story.

“At 6:29 we started hearing massive incoming rockets.”

Adele heard rockets aimed at the kibbutz all the time. “In 2014, my house was hit with shrapnel from a rocket,” she said. But this sounded different.

“Because we are a mile from the border, that means that depending on where in Gaza the rocket is shot, we have between zero and 10 seconds from the time we hear it being shot to the explosion. That’s how long you have to get somewhere safe.

“Every house within several kilometers of the border has to have a safe room — if you didn’t have one, the government would build it — and I got mine in 2011. It is just a bedroom, with no toilet, no running water, four concrete-reinforced walls, a ceiling, and a special thick window with an iron sleeve that you pull to close. There’s a metal door that you pull to close, and you click it in; there are prongs to keep it from blowing out if there is an explosion.”

As is often the case, Adele’s safe room was a bedroom. Adam was sleeping there.

“I ran into the safe room. The gunfire was so intense that I was scared to stand up and close the window. It had never been that intense before.

“The TV was on. In Israel, you have maps with pop-ups with the names of the communities where the rockets are landing. You could see on the map that the popups went from Tel Aviv, north of us, to south of us.

“We understood that this was something very unusual.

“After a while, we got a message saying that Israel was being invaded, and that we should go outside the safe room, close all the windows, lock all the doors, lock everything we could lock, and then go back to the safe room and lock yourself in.

“However, the safe room does not lock.”

That’s by design; the safe room is conceived of as a place to shelter from rockets and explosives, not from a terrorist invasion. The idea was to keep the door unlocked so that no one suffering a medical emergency inside the room would be out of reach. “It is against the law to put a lock on the safe room,” Adele said. “No one had ever dreamt of the scenario of infiltration, as happened on October 7.” In fact, she added, the kibbutz’s first response team had been trained to hold off terrorists until the army could arrive — but they imagined 10 terrorists at the most, and a short wait. Because the likelihood of invasion seemed too remote — the kibbutz had been protected by the army, by checkpoints, and by all those fences — even that training wasn’t taken particularly seriously.

These three sisters, Adele’s granddaughters, survived October 7.

“We started getting messages on the kibbutz’s internal messaging app on our phones saying, ‘We hear gunfire.’ We are used to hearing mortars and rockets and missiles, but not automatic gunfire. And people were saying that they were hearing gunfire and Arabic being spoken outside their safe rooms.”

Adele reported seeing such messages as “They’re trying to open the safe room, and we are holding onto the door. They are setting our house on fire.” The goal there was to force people to leave their safe rooms, so they could be tortured and murdered, or taken hostage.

“And there were calls for help. People were asking ‘Where is the army? Where are the police? Where are the people who are supposed to be coming to save us?’

“Crickets.

“The only official message that we got from the head of security on the kibbutz was ‘It is going to take the army a while to get here. Every family is on its own.’

“It was the most horrific message. Profound abandonment. What we didn’t understand then but we understand in retrospect is that the soldiers were being slaughtered or kidnapped at the very same time that we were.

“There was one soldier, a southern brigade commander, Asaf Hamami, who understood that something very unusual was going on before 6:30 in the morning,” Adele continued. “He took two soldiers with him in his Jeep — his 6-year-old son was visiting for the weekend, because that’s how safe they thought it was — so he handed his son to another soldier, and they drove out. The terrorists already were in the kibbutz. Those were the first soldiers to engage with the terrorists. They killed a number of them, but then they were killed, they were decapitated, and their bodies were thrown on vehicles and taken back to Gaza by some terrorists who wanted to get credit for the kill.  Those were the first boots on the ground. We didn’t know what happened for weeks.”

Meanwhile, in Adele’s safe room, “we are watching as the cries for help come nearer and nearer.”

She worried about her daughter Lilach. Because Lilach was separated from her husband, Alon, and because she had been busy with the kibbutz celebrations, he was with their three children that night, and she was alone. “She hid under the bed,” Adele said.

“When I was a kid, I used to watch ‘Hogan’s Heroes’” — a TV series about heroic but funny Allied prisoners of war and their bumbling, often moronic German captors — “and I used to play being in that camp, and I wondered where I would hide if the Nazis came to get me. In the closet? Under the bed? Never in my life did I imagine that I would be hiding from the Nazis of 2023 in my own home, in my own kibbutz, in my own country, but that’s what I was doing.” And her daughter was literally hiding under her bed.

“Then we started hearing shooting and Arabic outside.” Right outside the safe room, that is. “My son understands a little bit of Arabic, and he heard them being called away.” They didn’t know what that meant. But “we looked at each other, and told each other that we loved each other, and then we said goodbye. We were waiting for them to burst into the room.

“We were sitting on the floor, pulling down the handle. And we just waited. After about an hour, it quieted down. And I had to go to the bathroom. I opened the door as quietly as I could, and I saw that the slats on the window opposite me had been broken. That’s what we’d heard.

Adele went to the White House Correspondents Dinner this year. This is the dress she wore that night; she’s standing in front of a demolished house on her kibbutz. She feels the contradiction deeply.

“We realized that they had started to try to open the door, but it was locked. They started breaking through the window, but then they got pulled away. Was that our dumb luck? Was it divine intervention? Was it my dead husband watching over us?”

Meanwhile, they stayed in the safe room, holding the door shut. Later, Adele said, they heard reports of clever things that other people in similar situations had done to keep the door handle down without having to hold onto it, but neither she nor Adam has the engineering gene. They just kept holding on.

“We were sitting there, in the heat — we’d turned off the air conditioner so the sound of the motor wouldn’t betray us — as silently as possible. I was getting calls from media — radio, other media, because people knew me. There were some international media that said they talked to me, but I don’t remember it. And I was also doing Facebook Live.”

Later, she heard about what her son-in-law, Alon, and her three granddaughters, who were 8, 6, and 2 at the time, had endured.

“Terrorists entered Alon’s house,” Adele said. “Because he is one of the kibbutz’s first responders, he has a gun. He hears the terrorists breaking down the door and entering the house, and he hears them breaking things. He hears them shouting Allahu Akbar.

“He tells the children to cover themselves with blanket, and not to make a sound. Don’t come out from under the blanket. I’m here.

“And then he raises his gun, points it at the door, waits until he sees the handle move. Then he kicks open the door and shoots the terrorist, right in front of the girls.

“He sends out three calls for help to three responders. He says ‘Mayday Mayday Mayday. I have killed one terrorist. I am ready for more.’

“The other two terrorists run away. He starts running after them, and then he realizes that there are other terrorists outside. So he runs back into the room, and he holds his gun up, and he waits for the next terrorist.

“He waits that way for hours.”

Eventually the girls fell asleep, Adele said. Now, a year later, the youngest is fine. “She didn’t understand what was going on. The 7-year-old, who was 6 then, goes and hides under the bed when she’s upset. She never did that before. And the oldest one, who is 9 now, won’t go into the house unless somebody checks it for terrorists first. Somebody always has to go into the house before she does.

“My daughter is looking into getting an emotional support dog for them,” she added.

This is a field at Kibbutz Nirim.

Back at Adele’s house, the first IDF soldiers, “the first real boots on the ground, who were reservists who came from their homes, arrived at 1:30 in the afternoon, about seven hours after the nightmare began.

“They went first to the corner of the kibbutz that was on fire.”

It wasn’t only Hamas terrorists who invaded the kibbutz, she said; once the assault began, and seemed to be going well for the terrorists, they called their friends to come join the fun. They rampaged, destroying things and people with apparent glee. Among other things, they set the western part of Nirim ablaze.

“On their way in, the soldiers heard the cries of parents of a 10-day-old baby, who said that terrorists were setting the house on fire.” How do you keep a newborn from inhaling smoke? “They were on the phone with paramedics, who told them that if it is relatively quiet outside, they should open the window just a bit and put the baby near the windowsill. But if they hear any terrorists, they should put the baby below the open window, because smoke rises.”

Once the IDF arrived, “they started evacuating people, house by house, bringing them over to the community center. It was in the middle of a war zone.

“Alon was in his safe room. He was wearing only his underwear; he had no shoes and no shirt in there. He didn’t want to go out through the door; he didn’t want the girls to see the body of the terrorist he had shot. And because he’d seen smoke coming from the dead terrorist’s pocket, he was afraid that he might have been carrying a grenade. So he asked the soldiers to get him a shirt and shoes, and then the soldiers extricated them through a window.

“As they did that, there was gunfire, and they had to run into an external safe room and stay there until they could get to the community center.

“My daughter also was evacuated around that time.” Lilach first was taken to another house, where at least she was not alone. That house had a story.

“It had been newly renovated, so it had a camera,” Adele said. “The guy who lives there could see that terrorists were entering the house, so he clicked the app on his phone to start closing the window blinds. That spooked the terrorists, and they ran away. My daughter couldn’t communicate with me then. The best she could do was send me a thumbs up, so I knew that she was alive. I didn’t know about the grandchildren.

“We were not evacuated that day. It was too dangerous.”

They spent the night at the community center. It was crowded — 430 people were there. “There wasn’t even room to sit down.” So at night, families were moved to the children’s house, which was rocket-proof, and offered more room. (Adele said that starting in 1991, the kibbutz’s children no longer lived in the children’s house, but instead with their families. Since then, the building had been used for daycare.)

Back in the community house, Adele spent a mostly sleepless night, stretched out on two plastic chairs, freezing because it had been roasting hot in her safe room and she hadn’t had time — or spared any thought — to grab something warm to wear in the frigidly air-conditioned atmosphere. “I covered myself with a tablecloth,” she said.

The next day, they were taken, in what was a chaotic evacuation, to Eilat. There were buses; some people drove, but many others could not, because their cars had been shot up and burned.

“We were driven though an active war zone, with charred bodies on either side of the bus,” Adele said.

“Through that day, October 8, I started learning about the casualties. Friends, neighbors, my closest friend, Judih (that’s not a typo but her preferred spelling), and her husband, Gadi.

“Judih and Gadi Haggai lived in Kibbutz Nir Oz, just a mile or so away from Nirim, and they had gone on a sunrise walk when the rockets started to fall,” Adele said. “Judih sent a picture showing the sky and the field to an English teacher’s WhatsApp group, and so we knew that they were out on a walk.

“When we realized that there were terrorists around the kibbutz, I tried to call Judih, but there was no answer. I tried again. No answer. A little later, we were told that they were considered missing. A day and a half later I called one of her daughters and said, ‘Your mom sent us a picture at 6:45 in the morning.’ She asked me to send it to her, and then we realized that it wasn’t a picture. It was a clip. You can hear the incoming rockets, and you can hear them whispering to each other about what was happening.

“You can hear Judih speaking to a paramedic when her husband was shot. She called the ambulance driver on her kibbutz and asked for help, but by that time the ambulance was all shot up.

“Her call was passed on to Esther, a paramedic in another part of the country — all the lines were busy — and you hear her say, ‘I think my husband is dead. His brains are all over the place. And I have been hit in the face.’ The paramedic says, ‘Hold on. We are coming. We are coming.’ But of course, they weren’t. Nobody came.

“No one could save her.

“And their bodies were kidnapped to Gaza.

“Today, 360 days later, 360 innocent Israelis, alive and dead, are in Gaza, and that includes Judih’s and Gadi’s bodies.

“I lost so many people that day.

“I have been on five trips abroad since October 7” — for speaking engagements — “and each time I would say that. I would say how many people I knew personally who are lost — teachers, students, parents of students, someone from my yoga class — that I can’t even count them. And one of the people who was with me on one of those trips said that you should try to count them.

“So I did.”

Adele’s notebook, the one with the quote about hope on the cover, has about four pages of a handwritten list of the kidnapped and the dead.

“Five people from my community were missing, and five had been murdered,” she said.

The survivors of Kibbutz Nirim lived in the King Solomon Hotel in Eilat for three and a half months. “The hotel staff was amazing,” Adele said. “They were so warm and welcoming. They did everything they could for us. And the people of Eilat also were wonderful. When we arrived, there was a hall the size of this restaurant filled with clothing and shoes and books and toothbrushes and everything that you possibly could need.

Now, about 70 percent of the members of the community live in apartments in Beersheva. Most of them want to go back to Nirim, Adele said.

“Nirim is a 40-minute drive away from Beersheva, and since the second week of the war, people were going back to work in the field.

“On October 8, our dairy was up and running.” There might be a war, there might be fear, there might be rockets, but “the cows have to be milked. We take care of the cows.”

The cows survived the attack because “the terrorists didn’t get to the part of the kibbutz where they live,” Adele said. “They didn’t get to the part of the kibbutz where the Thai workers lived. The king of Thailand evacuated them, and they went home, but since then almost all of the workers who had been on our kibbutz have come back, and they are there now.”

Meanwhile, she’s been fundraising, because she knows how to tell the kibbutz’s story, and because her passion for it and its future is so strong. “Am Yisrael” — the Jewish people — “rose to the occasion in so many ways,” she said. “They continue to rise to the occasion. I have been here for almost a month. Every time I go abroad, the people I meet, who hear my story, give me so much support and love and care that it gives me strength and inspiration to continue doing what I’m doing.

“That is why I am here, fundraising to raise money for my community.

“We need to rebuild our community bigger and better and stronger and safer than ever before, so that we can convince young families to move back, and new families to join us.

“The government will help us, but we have to do more. We have to be bigger and stronger and more attractive. We are the front line of the country. If you give up on Nirim, you give up on Israel.

“If you were to turn off all the lights in Israel except the lights on the kibbutz, you’d have the outline of the country,” she continued. That’s not an accident. A country must have people living on its borders. “That’s how you hold those borders.” That’s not what Israel has today, with both the south and the north virtually abandoned. “You have to live and farm up to the last centimeter,” Adele said.

“We have to be pioneers again, because we are the breadbasket of the country. I am told that for the first two weeks of the war, Tel Aviv didn’t have any tomatoes. And they didn’t have any milk either, because although we milked the cows, we couldn’t ship it. We had to pour it into the ground.

“But innovations in agriculture happen on the border.”

She hopes that she and her friends will be back in Nirim sometime in the first half of next year.

She’s fundraising both for Nirim and for JNF, she said; to be more accurate, any money donated to Nirim will go directly to the kibbutz, and funds given to JNF will help the region, which again helps Nirim. “It’s a win/win,” she said. To learn more about ways to help Kibbutz Nirim, go to nirimrs2g@nirim.co.il. Unless you’re fluent in Hebrew, click on the “translate” link. Learn more about donating to JNF at jnf.org.

Because the kibbutz used to celebrate its anniversary on Simchat Torah, “we will never be able to celebrate it again in the same way,” Adele said. “But we are planning an event for October 25 to look back at this past year. I have a photography project that’s on Facebook. It’s portraits of people from Nirim in black and white. When we go back home to live, I will put the color back into those portraits.”

Despite everything — or maybe that’s because of everything — Adele Raemer still is hopeful. “We are strong,” she said. “We are resilient. The majority of the community wants to go back.

“Going back — that will be my strength. That will be my resilience. That will be my healing. That will be my victory. That will be my revenge. Going back home and living well.

“That is my hope.”

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