Eli Levi, the Battle for Moshav Yoshivya

00:18 Speaker 1 Eli Levy, a shliach of the Rebbe shlita, Melech HaMoshiach, in Moshav Yoshevya in the south of Israel. Eli has a fascinating story of shlichus, and we’re going to listen and hear it. Please, Eli, the floor is yours.

00:42 Speaker 2 L’chaim, l’chaim.

00:43 Speaker 1 L’chaim and blessings.

00:45 Speaker 2 L’chaim and blessings.

00:46 Speaker 1 Yechi Adoneinu Moreinu V’Rabbeinu Melech HaMoshiach L’Olam Va’ed.

00:49 Speaker 2 Yechi Adoneinu Moreinu V’Rabbeinu Melech HaMoshiach L’Olam Va’ed. So, we’ve been shluchim here in Moshav Yoshevya for ten years now. Before that, we lived in Tzfas. We got here after quite a journey trying to choose where to go on shlichus. We were on our way to the Philippines, and we wanted India, somewhere abroad. We wrote to the Rebbe, and the Rebbe wrote to us that “the poor of your own city come first”—not to chase the sparkle of faraway places. Our shlichus was specifically here in Eretz Yisroel. So we spent six months looking for our place of shlichus. We went to Kibbutz Zikim, Gevim, and Kfar Aza. We were specifically looking for our place of shlichus here in the Gaza border area. But it wasn’t quite working out. We went from kibbutz to kibbutz, got a sense of the people involved and some of the opposition, and it just didn’t come together. After six months, we came to the Netivot area, and my sister-in-law told me there was a place called Yoshevya, here in the Gaza border area. I said, “What’s Yoshevya? Is it even on the map? Where is it?” She said, “It’s in the border area. I have a friend who lives there. Go check out a house there, see what it’s like, and decide whether it suits you.” I came, and we saw the house. It was about fifty square meters, and we already had five children. I walked in and said to the owner, “Listen, this is our house for shlichus. I want to sign a lease with you.” He said, “Are you sure? You don’t know Yoshevya; you don’t know the area.” I told him, “I’m writing to the Rebbe right now.” I had Igros Kodesh with me. We wrote together about our good resolution and everything else, and opened a volume of Igros Kodesh. The Rebbe wrote a blessing for success in their place of shlichus—a truly wondrous letter about shlichus.

02:52 Speaker 2 Our home in Tzfas was already packed up because we were supposed to go to the Philippines. That’s another story. Two and a half weeks later, I ordered a truck, and we moved to Yoshevya. We moved there with no idea what Yoshevya was. I didn’t know the people. At the beginning of our shlichus, I would simply go out to the main road on Shabbos, set up a table with l’chaim and some pekelach and other things, and wait to see who the first person to pass by would be. It’s a moshav. That’s how I caught one young man, then another. I said, “Tell me a bit about this place, Yoshevya. Who’s here? Who lives here?” Like a Mossad agent, I started gathering information about Yoshevya: what kind of people lived here, who it was worth approaching, who I should stay away from, and so on. A little l’chaim for the young men, and I managed to get all the information—at least enough to start with. So that’s the story of how we came to Yoshevya. Baruch Hashem, we’ve been here for ten years now. But before I tell you about what happened on October 7, I want to tell you about the period six months into our shlichus. We were facing so many challenges and tests in every area—shalom bayis, raising children, food, everything. All the things we’d been used to having in a community were suddenly gone. You’re alone in a moshav in the Gaza border area, with none of the Yiddishkeit or anything else you were used to, and you have to start everything from scratch. The person who brought me close to Chabad was Rabbi Alperin, Reb Eli Alperin from Herzliya. After six months, I traveled to the Rebbe for the month of Tishrei and met Rabbi Alperin there. I went up to him and said, “Rabbi, can I talk to you?” He said, “Yes, I’m doing some shopping. Come

04:59 Speaker 2 along with me, and we’ll talk on the way.” I felt just like a soldier with his commander. The rabbi went into a store, picked out perfumes, took some [unclear], bought things as we went, and I trailed after him like a soldier following his commander. I said, “Rabbi, I want to tell you that we’ve been on shlichus for six months, and I’m dealing with very difficult challenges in our shalom bayis, with the children, and with all sorts of other things we’re going through.” Then he suddenly turned around and looked me right in the face, with a very serious expression...

05:37 Speaker 3 Tzimtzum.

05:39 Speaker 2 He looked at me very seriously and said, “Eliezer, I want to tell you something.” We’d been busy shopping for clothes and perfumes, and suddenly the rabbi became very serious. He said, “Listen, the two hardest years of my life were my first two years on shlichus.” Then he said, “Do you know how much I’ve been through in my life?” There’s the story of what he went through with his sister, who passed away, and with his parents. He served in Sayeret Matkal and went through so many trials. Yet he told me, “The two hardest years of my life were those first two years of shlichus.” He said, “I’m asking you for something. First, you don’t leave your shlichus. Second, I promise you that after two years of mesirus nefesh on shlichus...” I thought to myself, What, has the rabbi become a mekubal? Is he predicting what’s going to happen to me two years from now? I didn’t ask him, though. He looked at me very seriously and said, “After two years of shlichus, I promise you that the gates of heaven will open for you. Eli, listen to me—just don’t leave your shlichus.” And that’s what happened. We went through so much in those two years, and afterward, wonders upon wonders. We lived in fifty square meters with five children, and in fact we spent four years in that tiny house, in difficult conditions. It’s a moshav, so you’d see cockroaches and slugs in the kitchen and all that. It was like living in conditions you’d find in India, only here in Israel. Anyway, throughout those four years, the Rebbe kept writing to me not to wait to buy a Chabad House, that it was a shame to keep renting and spending the money on that, and so on. There was a house on Rashbi Street that I’d had my eye on from the first day I set foot here. It was a house

07:43 Speaker 2 they had started building but never finished, and the Rebbe wrote to me about that house. Baruch Hashem, by the end of the story, all the local homeowners had told me, “You have no chance of buying that house”—and today it’s our Chabad House. It’s a large house on a plot of over six hundred square meters, a wonderful place for our activities. I said to myself, wow, this is what it means to go on shlichus and set out to transform the world. The Rebbe writes you letters, while everyone else discourages you. Even my mashpia told me, “Eli, if it’s hurting your shalom bayis and your shlichus, leave it.” And Rabbi Alperin—truly, knowing the Rebbe Melech HaMoshiach through him is a gift from heaven. He’s a very special chossid. He told me not to give up. He said, “You don’t leave your shlichus. You give it everything you’ve got.” Today, looking back after ten years, I understand. I understand exactly what he meant and how much we needed to be here throughout that time. So that’s the background to our place of shlichus. Now, maybe we can talk a little about October 7, as much as we can. It was Simchas Torah 5784. For years, I was used to traveling to the Rebbe for Simchas Torah, until the Rebbe wrote to me, “With all due respect, you chose a place of shlichus, so that’s where you belong.” Fifty young people came to us for Simchas Torah, that October 7—people from all sorts of backgrounds: hilltop youth, religious young people, less religious young people. We have a tipi tent that we brought from Mount Hermon, which serves as a kind of Chabad House for us. Our shlichus is in a Breslov community, and we join forces with them. So we brought this tent together, and we

09:45 Speaker 2 It’s called Beis Avraham Avinu—a place of unity and Ahavas Yisroel. So we brought all the guys over and celebrated Simchas Torah that night with lots of l’chaim, and, as they say in army slang, treats—plenty of candy for the children, activities, and pesukim. We did hakafos until eleven at night. It really had the atmosphere of 770. Wow, the guys were on cloud nine. What a wonderful place Yoshivya is! At eleven I went home, to the Chabad House, to the children, with some of the guests. Not everyone came to us; some went to other families. We started the meal at eleven at night, and by then Dad was already quite tipsy from the Simchas Torah l’chaims earlier that evening. So I started getting the children excited, and we did hakafos inside the house, with all the singing and everything. The meal lasted until about one in the morning, and then all the guys arrived. The guys who had been at the other houses came to my home and said, “Come on, Rabbi, we want to farbreng. This is the time—it’s Simchas Torah, and we want to strengthen ourselves.” I told them—an inner voice was speaking to me. Maybe it was the amount of l’chaim I’d had, on top of all the excitement. It told me: “Listen, guys, tomorrow is a long day, and we need to gather strength for Simchas Torah. Tomorrow is the main thing. We celebrated today, but tomorrow, with everything—the Torah scrolls—we need to have strength.” They said, “What kind of worn-out shliach are you? You’re a dyed-in-the-wool Chabadnik—what brought you here?” And on and on; they started giving me a hard time. I said, “Listen, my brothers, we need strength for Simchas Torah tomorrow.” “Fine, tell us something from Tanya and we’ll go.” So I told them something from Chabad seichel, chapter 11 of the Alter Rebbe’s Igeres Hakodesh, which, incidentally, speaks very directly about this very point: the trials

11:57 Speaker 2 and suffering that are higher than the World to Come, and that whole subject. They were very moved by it. I told them, “See the door? Clear out. This worn-out shliach is going to sleep. We’ll see each other tomorrow.” And I went to sleep. I slept very well. It was about two-thirty. At six-thirty: Red Alert. Now, we’d been used to these Red Alerts for ten years, through round after round of fighting. Just so you understand, it’s about ten meters from my bedroom to the safe room—ten or twelve meters—and you have fifteen seconds to run there, get your two boys from their bedroom, bring them down to the safe room, and hear the boom. My dear friends, in those fifteen seconds you have to wake up, run, get them—everything. It’s a shame I don’t have a camera in the hallway to see everything that happened over the years. I took the children to the safe room. My wife and I got them in, and I immediately shut the safe room’s metal door. We have a rule whenever a round of fighting starts: we have a ready supply of gummy candies waiting in the cupboard. I take them out, bring them over, do negel vasser—wash the children’s hands—and then each one gets a candy. Yes, it’s first thing in the morning, but we turn it into a positive experience. Then we start singing, niggunim, and dancing in the safe room, and really get the children into it. My children actually look forward to a Red Alert. It’s reached that point. They ask me, “Dad, when will there be a Red Alert? We want to be in the safe room with the gummy candies already.” And I hear that the Red Alerts aren’t stopping. I keep hearing “Red Alert, Red Alert, Red Alert,” and I can see it isn’t letting up. My role on the community emergency response team—I was supposed to be

14:02 Speaker 2 the community security coordinator, but apparently, for various bureaucratic reasons, that didn’t work out, so I became his deputy. I went out, opened the win—after washing my hands, I opened a window. The Rebbe Rashab says there’s a reason to look at the sky when saying the morning blessings; it broadens the mind and the heart. So I looked out, as I do every morning, and then I heard gunfire. I heard rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat. I’ve spent many years in the army, and it sounded like .50-caliber fire, the kind of gunfire, for those familiar with it, that comes from combat helicopters. And I said, “Wait, there aren’t any exercises on Shabbos. The IDF doesn’t train on Shabbos.” I looked and couldn’t see any helicopters. I thought, wow, the Red Alerts aren’t stopping, and I’m also hearing incredibly heavy gunfire close to us. I said to my wife, “Listen, stay in the safe room. I’m going outside to see what’s happening.” I went out, and the community security coordinator came up to me. “Eli, listen,” he said. He spoke to me privately, took me into his car, and told me, “There’s a very serious incident. People have already been killed in the moshav next to ours, Yachini, two and a half kilometers from me. Three people have been killed already, including a child. What I need you to do is get everyone who has a handgun out of their homes. Bring out the people with handguns, open all the shelters in Yoshivya, and get people into buildings.” That’s what happened. I got into my car, turned on my phone, took my handgun, put fifty rounds in my pocket, and drove toward the main road to see what was going on. I saw pickup trucks—four, four

16:01 Speaker 2 pickup trucks driving on the wrong side of the road, from Netivot toward Sderot, so that they could shoot and kill any car coming toward them. When I saw this at a quarter to seven in the morning, I thought they were Bedouins. I thought, all right, they must be Bedouins having some kind of wedding here. I could see the green ribbons, and I could see the machine guns [?], the weapons mounted on the pickup trucks, but as far as I was concerned, these were Bedouins celebrating a wedding, and I was waiting for the police to arrive and catch them. But that wasn’t happening. I went in and started opening safe rooms—all the shelters in the moshav—and gathering people with handguns. I was sending messages in the groups: anyone with a handgun, come out of your house. We were short of people. They had taken our rifles away four months earlier, as I’m sure you know, Rabbi. That’s what they did throughout the Gaza border communities during that period. I kept opening shelters, one after another. Now, you have to understand that while I was opening the shelters, the Red Alerts were going off, the whole sky was black, and it was literally a matter of life and death. It wasn’t as though you could be outside and everything would be fine. I didn’t really understand that there were terrorists on the roads, even though I’d seen them. I kept opening shelters, and then there was one I couldn’t open. I entered the code—this was the most important shelter in Yoshivya—and called Kobi, Rabbi Sasson. I said, “Kobi, isn’t this the code you gave us, the one we know?” He said, “That’s the code.” I said, “But it won’t open.” I banged on the door, banged and banged and banged hard, and then someone opened it for me—a tall, tattooed young man, a guy

17:56 Speaker 2 Strong, in an undershirt, with some kind of feather [?] here by his ear, and he says to me, “Who are you?” I told him, “The army, the emergency response team.” Now I’m in my Shabbos clothes, with a bulletproof vest so there won’t be friendly fire [?], and a tallis. That was the scene, yes? Like some kind of chassidic Superman. It was something. Just seeing that scene, you’d say, “Wow.” He opens the door and can’t make sense of it: he sees a chareidi with a bulletproof vest and a tallis. But I told him, “I’m with the emergency response team, I’m with the army. Everything’s all right. Stay calm.” He says to me, “Come downstairs for a moment. I want to talk to you.” I have no idea who this man is. It’s ten to seven in the morning. I go in, I go downstairs, and I see ten young people lying on the floor, crying—boys and girls, lying on the floor. I see someone putting a bandage on his girlfriend’s leg, and all sorts of things. It’s chaos. So I said to them, “Good morning, dear souls. How are you?” “Who are you? What are you?” “It’s all right. I run the Chabad House here, I’m a shliach here in Yoshivya, and I’m on the emergency response team. Everything’s all right. Stay calm. What happened? Tell me what happened to you.” Then they said to me, “You’re religious, right?” I said yes. “Can you look at this on the phone for a second?” I said, “I have a phone too, here.” Then he opens his phone, opens Telegram, and I begin to understand what’s actually happening. He shows me what’s happening in Be’eri and what’s happening on the roads around us. As part of the emergency response team, I had no—the army and the police weren’t answering us. We had no one to talk to. And he says to me, “Listen.” I said to him, “Listen, it looks like you’ve come back from some party. You look all right. Where do you live?” “Tel Aviv, Rishon

19:47 Speaker 2 LeZion.” “Listen, my dears, I’ve lived here in the Gaza border area for ten years. It’s just another little Red Alert, a few rockets being fired at us, and it’ll be okay. There’s no need to panic.” He says to me, “Listen to me, my friend. I’ve just come from a party called Nova, and they shot at us the whole way. Do you understand that there are terrorists on all these roads?” I said, “Brother, you’re imagining things. What roads?” Then he opens his phone and shows me Sha’ar HaNegev. Sha’ar HaNegev is a five-minute drive from my house, and he shows me that the terrorists had set up a checkpoint there. They’d disguised themselves as IDF soldiers, and every car that went through, they simply fired at it and killed the people inside. They saw that checkpoint and noticed the men had Kalashnikovs. They saw soldiers in IDF uniforms, but with Kalashnikovs, so they just drove like mad. The terrorists fired at them and hit the back of their car. They stopped at the entrance to Yoshivya and simply ran into the first shelter they saw. I don’t know how it happened to be open. That was negligence on our part, but Divine providence for them. They just went into that safe room, into the shelter. My wife, by profession, is a social worker and psychologist. I drove straight home and said to her, “Hodaya, listen, bring the sedative pills—whatever we have at home.” I took burn supplies and milk; I took whatever I had at home. I called another therapist who lives near me and brought her along. I said, “Hodaya, sit with them, give them treatment, take care of them. I have no idea what’s going on here.” It turned out these really were young people who had been at Nova—ten of them who had escaped to us. They’d left the party at 6:15 in the morning. At 6:15 in the morning, through tremendous Divine

21:40 Speaker 2 providence, they left the party, and the terrorists who caught up with them weren’t at the party; it was at Sha’ar HaNegev. They managed to escape to us. I told them, “Come to our house, to the Chabad House. Come have a shower, rest a little, sleep.” “No, no, we can’t leave here. Don’t try to take us out.” And I could see they were really traumatized. They were in a very bad state. Um—

22:04 Speaker 4 No wonder.

22:05 Speaker 2 No wonder, yes. In the end, we managed. My wife sat with them there for about half an hour and gave them something to calm them down, and they came to our house. Some of them came to the house. There was a couple who decided to escape through the fields. They got into their car and just drove through the fields, taking an incredible risk. Just to give you a sense of it: the road by us is called Route 34, which intersects with 232. It’s a stretch of about thirty, forty kilo—thirty-something kilometers, I think. There were 250 people killed on it over that Shabbos, and more than 300 terrorists. That’s right near my house. We live here in Yoshivya, and we don’t really grasp the scale of the horrors taking place minutes from our home. We only know about the people killed in Yachini. I have no idea what’s happening in the other places around me. All I saw were the terrorists going toward Sderot. The young people come to my house, and we give them something to eat, a chance to rest a little and shower. Then I get into the car. You have to understand, our moshav doesn’t have a fence. We only have an electric gate because we’re classified as the “outer Gaza border area.” According to the official definitions, it’s as though there’s no chance anyone would ever get in here. I get into the car. There are two of us patrolling. There’s no fence, and we drive around, patrolling all along the moshav road. I’m on my own with a handgun. There are eight of us with handguns. We set up a group, the Yoshivya emergency response team. Each person got his [unclear], the location where he needed to be. One stands at the playground, one by the Gamaliel family’s house, one by the Levy family’s house, and each one just waits for the terrorists to come in. Then we’ll respond to the situation from there.

24:18 Speaker 2 Now, it’s clear the terrorists are going to come in. We understand that it’s eight Maccabees against 300 terrorists. That’s the situation. And I’m driving, and people ask me, “Eli, were you afraid then? What did you feel?” I think what I personally felt was: I’m a shliach of Melech HaMoshiach, and I mean that sincerely. I came here on shlichus, and even if I have to give my life—it was really this feeling that even if I have to die now al kiddush Hashem, I’ll know I fulfilled my shlichus until the very last second. A person’s shliach is like the person himself—that you’re the Rebbe here. I remember when I came here, a friend told me, “You’re the Rebbe in Yoshivya.” So if I’m the Rebbe in Yoshivya, then it’s all the way. And you see that you’re the shliach and you’re the fighter, and you’ll give everything you have. We keep driving back and forth along the road. It’s already eleven in the morning, and I know the road is full of terrorists. I call the police—I remember, it’s eleven in the morning. I wait on the line for an hour. A policeman answers and says, “Hello, where are you?” I tell him, “Yoshivya.” He says, “Do you see terrorists inside the moshav?” I say, “No.” He says, “Then how can I help you?” Are you kidding me? I’m telling the story now, and it may sound different because you already know how it ends. But when you’re in the middle of it—G-d forbid, if there’s a stabbing now, dozens of police officers arrive within two minutes. I have 300 terrorists on the road, and not a single police car goes by. I’m Eli Levy, the shliach in Yoshivya, and together with eight others I’m supposed to save eigh—

26:14 Speaker 2 A hundred and eighty families? Wow, that’s not fair. And he tells me, “I can’t help you. There’s heavy fighting across the entire area. Uh, stay strong.” A police officer from the Israel Police is telling me, Eli Levy, to stay strong, to hold myself together. So I end that call. A friend of mine who had served in Duvdevan, a guide—Yoram Alutar[?]—he’d been through a lot. He came up to me and said, “Eli, give me a hug.” I said, “Yoram, what’s gotten into you?” He said, “Give me a hug.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Because it’s over, brother.” I said, “What’s over? You mean this is where we’re going to be buried?” He said, “Yes, Eli. It’s over.” I said, “What do you mean, Yoram?” He said, “Come here a second.” He opens his phone, and we realize they’ve taken over the division headquarters, Sufa, Nir Oz, and Nir—over the whole area. If the division headquarters, the Gaza Division, is gone, then we have no one to turn to. It’s the backbone of this whole area, and we have no one to talk to now. We understand that it’s been taken over. He gives me a hug and says, “Eli, if we make it through this, it’ll be by Hashem’s kindness.” I go into the house, find my wife, and say, “Hadiya, pack the things, everything you can. Put it in the car. Get the children into the car and get out.” She says, “Come on, I know you. You’re traumatized from things that happened before. You think you hear terrorists, you’re imagining things. You’ve just gotten worked up.” I said, “Hadiya, really, there are—I’m not—there are terrorists on the road.” She says, “What do you mean?” And my little girl, Chaya Sarah, says to me, “Abba, are you not

28:08 Speaker 2 a hero anymore? Aren’t we going to—?” That’s what she says to me: “Abba, aren’t you a hero? Aren’t we going to win this war? What, Abba, are we going to lose? Are we going to lose here?” And I didn’t know what to tell her. It was really surreal. I took my tallis, called all my children over, and put the tallis over them. I was still wearing my tallis and my bulletproof vest. I put the tallis over the children and gave them Birkas Kohanim. And I explained to them that this might be the last time I’d give them that blessing. We had really come to terms with the fact that we probably weren’t going to come out of this alive. But we were here on shlichus, and if we had to die, it would be al kiddush Hashem, and perhaps we had merited that. I put the tallis over them and blessed them. Then I took it off and asked them to go to their room, because I wanted to speak to the Rebbe. I have a large picture of the Rebbe in the living room, and it’s known that you can look at the Rebbe’s picture. The Rebbe also said afterward that by looking at a picture of “my revered father-in-law, the Rebbe,” you can enter yechidus. So I entered yechidus. And I said to the Rebbe, “If I stay alive, I have one last wish.” If we survive, it’s as though... And then I said, “The depth of a chossid is in his Rebbe,” as the Frierdiker Rebbe said. What is a chossid’s last wish? I said to him, “If we stay alive, it’s only so I can come to you one more time. Just to get to 770 one more time, to set foot there with you, to say ‘Yechi’ to you—for me, that’s it. I don’t need anything more.” That’s what was going through my mind on October 7, in the middle of everything—the terrorists, the missiles, all of it. All I could think was that I just wanted to get to 770. And that’s joy.

30:06 Speaker 2 I look at the Rebbe’s picture and say, “My last request is to come to you.” And that’s it. I leave and go outside. You have to understand, this went on for many, many hours—hours of uncertainty, of coming to terms with the fact that you weren’t going to get out of it alive. And there was no fear, which is the most astonishing thing. Now, we didn’t have enough people. We had eight fighters, my two older sons, and a few other teenagers. I stationed my sons on a roof at the entrance to the moshav with a phone and told them, “The moment you see terrorists, call me, so I can get there right away and deal with it. Deal with it.” Uh—

30:54 Speaker 5 With the pistols.

30:56 Speaker 2 With the pistols, yes. And they’re wearing bulletproof vests and carrying RPGs, arriving with all their equipment—may their names and memory be erased. And I’m supposed to deal with that with a pistol and fifty bullets. Every few seconds I get a call from my son: “Abba, I see terrorists on the road. Abba, I see terrorists.” I tell him, “Okay,” and I head over, but they just keep driving back and forth past Yoshivya. It was as though Hashem had blinded them; they simply didn’t come in. At one point, we saw on the security camera that they stopped at the junction, fired toward the gate, and then just kept driving. They didn’t come in. If they had reached Yoshivya, they wouldn’t even have needed the gate. They could have stopped and come in on foot, or gone around through the fields. Well, by then it was one in the afternoon. Time for cholent; we had to eat. Suddenly we realized that, in the middle of all this, we were hungry. So we decided to go to the Adris’ house at the end of the street. We took twenty-five people to the Adris’ house and another twenty-five to the Shis’ house. The whole street gathered in two houses at the end of the street. Understand that the house I was in was a hundred meters from the road where the terrorists were. And then the shliach in me kicked in. I couldn’t forget that I was the Chabadnik in this moshav, so I started singing the Hakafos niggun. My pistol was in my hand. I took a Sefer Torah, we put it in the center of the table, and I started serving them food with a ladle, like in prison. I’m ladling it out, each person gets a portion of cholent, and we start singing the Hakafos niggun. Ay, ay, ay, ay, odini, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay. Just picture the scene—

32:58 Speaker 2 there are terrorists on the roads. Red-alert sirens. A Sefer Torah in the center of the table, and I’m bringing 770 into those moments. Then a friend says to me, “Listen, Eli, we’re singing loudly. I’m not sure we’ll hear the red alert.” I told him, “You know what, you’re right. Download the red-alert app, and we’ll keep singing. What do you mean? It’s Simchas Torah. We’re not going to stop our joy.” So he downloaded the red-alert app. Now understand the situation: I’m sitting there, with a sliding door behind me. Beyond that sliding door is the main road where the terrorists are. It’s right behind me. That’s how close it is. And then, just a few seconds later, there was a boom. There was an explosion I can’t put into words. It was so powerful that everything seemed to happen in slow motion. I see a window shatter, shards flying toward me, and suddenly a chandelier falls. Then I see the baby, our youngest daughter, Ahava Rachel. She flies from the far end of the table and is thrown against the glass behind me. All my children have glass on them, everyone is on the floor—there are twenty-five of us, and you can’t understand what’s happening. Then suddenly I see my wife begin to cry, grab the children, and scream. And I thought: if my wife has suddenly realized that this is October 7, then we really are in the middle of October 7. Because she’s so calm; she’s a therapist, and she’s used to—wow. It frightened me when she suddenly started crying. So we rushed everyone into the safe room, and someone shouted that he could see terrorists in the fields through the window. I closed the safe room and locked the—there’s a hook outside the safe room. My friend Gal and I cocked our pistols.

35:02 Speaker 2 And we zigzagged. We went out in a zigzag, each of us covering the other. I opened the door and all I could see was a wall of fire. As far as I knew, terrorists had entered the moshav and fired an RPG at the house opposite me. That’s what I thought. I started looking for my friends, shouting, “Is anyone alive? Is anyone alive? Is anyone alive?” I couldn’t understand where everyone was. I thought they’d all vanished or died. I stepped into a puddle because the fire, or whatever had happened, had burst a pipe, and water was spraying all over me. I was running in every direction with my gun. I saw a Geely electric car on fire, and its batteries started sending fragments flying at me. I backed away and saw one of those big, 48-kilo gas cylinders. A fragment had struck it near the bottom, and it was starting to catch fire. I thought, if that cylinder explodes now, it’ll flatten us. If that cylinder and the one next to it explode, we’ll be flat. Then I went back into the house, into the safe room, and shouted to everyone, “Get out of the safe room and start running to the fields!” Someone in the safe room shouted, “But there are terrorists in the fields!” Now picture this: twelve children, wrapped in blankets so they wouldn’t see any terrorists. They tied the blankets around the children with string, rope, whatever they had in the safe room, and everyone started running with a child in a different direction. Nobody knew where they were going. One ran this way, another that way—it was total chaos. I was the last one left in the house. My gun was cocked

36:59 Speaker 2 and as I was about to go outside, it struck the wall and flew backward into a huge pile of laundry. I knew there were terrorists outside and a gas cylinder about to explode, and I was searching for my gun. It was one of those situations where you say, “Whoa, what’s going on here?” Too many challenges at once. I searched and searched, and finally found it at the very bottom of the laundry pile. I called that story “the gun in the underwear.” It became a bit of a thing. So I went outside and reached the main street. I saw guys starting to roll gas cylinders away from the fire. Teenagers had gone into the flames, disconnected the cylinders and started rolling them down the street. What had happened? A missile had passed the house I was in and landed right there. By the laws of nature, a missile couldn’t land like that. A missile would come in at an angle, or from above, but this one landed at the entrance to the house. There were seven meters between me and the missile—a huge missile. Fragments flew into the house opposite us, and each fragment was about half the size of a person’s body. You can’t imagine what fell there. And my children had been standing right where the missile landed just four minutes earlier. My friend Gal had told them, “Come inside, we want to eat the Shabbos meal, the Yom Tov meal.” We called that story “the cholent that saved us.” That’s really how it was. When you prepare cholent for Shabbos, understand that it has profound spiritual effects too. And what I remember most about the moment the missile fell is looking at the houses burning and saying to myself, in an ordinary movie,

39:06 Speaker 2 ambulances and police would show up. I’d be classified as suffering from shock, people would hug me, and I’d be the hero of the movie. But here, I remember standing alone, looking at the fire and saying, “There are no heroes here. There’s nothing like that.” It drove home something I’d learned in my first year of shlichus: you don’t abandon your shlichus. Even when no one applauds you, and no one comes to comfort you there in the middle of the fire, calls you “sweetie,” declares you traumatized and says how sorry they feel for you—whatever it may be—you have a mission, and that mission isn’t over. There are still terrorists on the roads, there are still Code Red alerts, and you’re still on shlichus. You don’t abandon your shlichus. That was what struck me right then: wow. I took from it that you don’t abandon your shlichus, and you give everything for it. I could see the houses burning. There were no firefighters because there was intense gunfire on the road, so we pulled out hoses and started trying to put out the fires in two houses that were completely ablaze. About an hour later, a fire truck arrived, riddled with bullet holes. They’d fired at it from below; we could see bullet holes all along its underside. The security forces, and everyone who could help, showed real mesirus nefesh. The firefighters started putting out what they could. Then they said, “That’s it, guys, we have to go. We have to move across the whole sector.” They were frightened. It was like a movie you can’t describe. They drove off, and that was it. We were left there alone in the middle of it. We went into the safe room. All my children were there with some of our guests, and every few seconds it was Code Red, Code Red, Code Red, Code Red. Then my wife said to me, “Where’s Ahava? Little Ahava, who was thrown against the window?” You see, one of our children,

41:08 Speaker 2 a two-year-old girl, had been thrown against the window by the blast. I told my wife I didn’t know where she was. She said, “But she’s not here in the safe room, and we haven’t seen her. Who took her?” I said I didn’t know. Maybe she’d been left inside the house, and the house was burning. And then—there’s no way to describe the scene. Suddenly I saw my wife turn into a lioness. She ran into the burning house, pushing through everything in her way to look for Ahava, shouting, “Ahava! Ahava! Where are you?” Everything was broken, with glass everywhere. I ran after her and said, “Hodaya, maybe she’s in one of the other houses and we just didn’t see her inside.” Then a friend told us that someone had wrapped her in a tallis—a tallis—and taken her to Yechiel Dadon’s house, the house next to mine. He’d brought her in and looked after her. We went there and saw her trembling inside the tallis, terrified. He hadn’t let go of her. He held her close and gave her so much love. And that was what happened.

42:21 Speaker 6 All right, let’s pause here.

42:24 Speaker 2 Okay, sure. Thank you, thank you. We’ll meet again later.