Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
In the week since October seventh, the world's eyes have
been focused on Israel, especially Southern Israel, the part of
the Holy Land hit hardest by the Hamas attacks that
day and the ongoing barrages of terrorist rockets ever since.
But while the world is only now becoming aware of
life on Israel's border with Gaza because of the attacks
and because of the ongoing war, the region is a
(00:29):
long time home to so many Israelis and so many
Fellowship projects and was the target of the worst violence
carried out on that day. In the days since, because
the Fellowship was already on the ground in Southern Israel,
we have seen and heard the stories of what happened
that day, and we've had the privilege of being able
to help the people of the South begin to heal,
(00:51):
thanks to our supporters who stand with Israel from all
around the world. But we also want to share these stories,
both the stories of October seventh and the difficult day
of war since, as well as the stories of healing
and of hope from this region of Israel. The people
are the people who have inspired the world with their hope,
(01:11):
with their unity, with their desire to go on and
rebuild instead of falling into despair. And this week's guest
to someone who is singularly qualified to speak to life
in southern Israel, both before October seventh. On October seventh
and in the days since. Adele Raymer is a blogger
and an activist and an Israeli who lives on Kibuts Nierm,
(01:33):
near Israel's border with Gaza. A mother, a grandmother, a teacher,
a Zionist, a desert dweller, a hospital clown, and so
much more. And so Adele, I want to welcome you
to my podcast and thank you so much for joining.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Thank you, it's an honor to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Well, Adele, before we talk about October seventh, in the
days since, you had a very full, exciting life on
Kiboot Sneering, I'd love for my listeners to hear a
little bit about you. You actually were born and raised
in America, So if you could tell us a little
bit about your life in America, why you ended up
moving to Israel, and how long you lived on the
(02:12):
key Boots and what life there was like the pleasure.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
I was born in the Bronx and raised and was
part of a Zionist youth movement Young Judea, and when
I finished high school, I went on the Young Judea
year course which brought us to Israel, and I fell
in love with the country. But at the end of
the year course in August July August nineteen seventy three,
(02:41):
my parents expected me to come home to do the
university thing, and you know, do what every good low
Jewish people do. So I did. But while I was
waiting to be accepted into the college and stream of
my choice in nineteen seventy three, the October War broke out,
(03:04):
and so I wasn't in college yet, and I said, well,
what am I doing in America is really needs me,
And that's when I took the decision to make Aliyah.
I met Aliyah finally to Kibuktua, which was founded by
Young Jideon. It had just been transferred from the army
(03:24):
to a civilian Hibutz and so that's where I met Aliyah.
It was still the Young Kipper war was sort of
you know, petering out, and I was nineteen, so I
was given my draft papers. I went into the army,
and while I was in the middle of my army service,
(03:45):
I realized that Toua wasn't the place that I wanted
to stay, and that's how I got to Kibutniri, where
I am today on the border. Were two kilometers just
under two kilometers from the border with the Gaza Strip,
and that was in November nineteen seventy five, so that's
how long I've been living there. And it was not
(04:09):
a war zone. When I went to live there. We
used to get in a car on a Saturday and
drive over to the shook and Gaza to the open
air market and go to the beach, and gousins used
to come in and work in our kibbutz. In fact,
a Gosen built my house and one day I was
(04:31):
asking that this was already in nineteen ninety It was
in nineteen ninety six. So I asked him, it must
be hard for you to get here to you know,
you have to go through the security and get up
really early in order to get here, and he said, yeah,
(04:52):
but I can earn an honest living. I could put
food on my table and get education for my children,
so so it was worth it. And we called the
area in ninety five percent heaven because it really was
ninety five percent of the time, if not more heaven
on earth. It was beautiful and quiet and green. It's
(05:13):
a desert, but it's green and beautiful and community. We
have a very very special community here. I was in
Jerusalem yesterday visiting my cousin, and I'm driving home with
the cab driver and talking him to him about October
seventh and life on the board. He knows exactly what
(05:34):
I'm talking about. You go to the States, who can
you talk to about it? So all in all, this
is my place. This is unfortunately not a lot, but
I do believe that eventually, hopefully sooner rather than later,
but it has to be securely rather than insecurely. I'll
(05:55):
be back in my home, in my own chair. You know,
I was at my cousin's house, as I said, to Jerusalem,
and I had this longing just to be in a
normal house with the kitchen, with with with a share that.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
You know, I'm going to clarify here that you're a
refugee right now, that I don't think we right now.
Adele is a refugee for everyone listening. That the key
boots that she lived on her home of over thirty years,
of over forty years she's been evacuated from because it's
the town where terrorists infiltrated, where they killed people, where
(06:32):
they kidnapped people, where they burned down homes, and so
it's not safe for them to be there. So for
the past two and a half months, Adele, along with
over one hundred and fifty thousand others in Israel, have
been living as refugees, and so Adele, it makes perfect
sense that what you're longing for is home, but not
just home, a secure home that you don't need to
worry about terrorists infiltrating like they did on October seventh.
(06:57):
I want to I want to go back to something
that you said. You're living there in a peaceful neighborhood,
in a town that is longing for peace with the Palestinians,
is longing to see a reality where it's just the
simple citizens of Gaza who are being held hostage by Hamas,
(07:18):
just like israel Is. And for years, even though you
didn't have a physical infiltration, you had lots of rocket attacks.
And so when you mentioned that life there on the
border was ninety five percent heaven and five percent difficult,
(07:38):
paint for us a picture of what that five percent
difficult looked like. How long did you have to runt
to your shelter. How often did you have rocket attacks?
What was going on in your mind when you were
out and just taking care of your garden or drinking coffee?
Was the terror situation? The security situation always there of
(08:00):
mine for you? And what did that look like?
Speaker 2 (08:03):
So where we live, we have between zero to ten seconds.
But from the second you hear that alarm, the voice
saying sevadon read alert, until the second you hear the explosion.
And we don't always get warning, even because mortars don't
always trigger the warning. So sometimes you just you hear
(08:27):
an explosion and you know you've got to get to
someplace safe. I never say that we get used to it.
We learn to deal with it, We learn how to
handle ourselves. Rocket fire is not anything that anybody can
or should ever get used to. When my children were
(08:48):
growing up, we didn't have that threat. There was There
were always people that feared infiltration. But you know, that
could also happen anyplace in the country. Could happen in
Judee and Samaria, could happen in Tel Aviv, It could
happen in I mean terror infiltration and terror has happened
(09:09):
all over the all over the country at some point
or another. But I felt very secure because we have
we have the fence around our community, and we have
the army in the area, and all eyes are on
the border. We have a new fence that was just
(09:31):
built in since twenty fourteen. It was finished, I think
about two years ago, an underground barrier that cut off
the tunnel threat, which before that was a very severe
threat of infiltration through these tunnels. In fact, my daughter
who's now forty one, was so traumatized when she was
(09:55):
a child on eating by a there was she was
about eight or nine years old and it was passover
and we're having passed over on the kyboots, and her
grandfather was walking around with his gun because there there
was an alert of possible infiltration. And since then she
was scared of infiltration. She was sure that a terrorist
(10:17):
was going to pop up in a tunnel outside her
window and abduct her. And she even she was so
traumatized that when she studied a script writing one year,
she made a short movie about her fear, about her
(10:38):
worst nightmare, and it came true. Inconceivably, it came true.
I always told her it can't happen, especially with the
underground barrier. I mean she's now married. She lives on the.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
Keybotz oh, she lives on the keyboots.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
She lives on it. If you told me one of
my four kids would come back and live on Nirim,
I would have said okay, but not her. But she
did because she fell in love with another son of
Nirim and they built their house there and they have
three children.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
So as a mother, from the time your child was young,
you've assured her, we're safe, we're protected, nothing can happen.
And she ended up moving back to Nirim raising her
own children there, and you had rocket attacks that you
would find shelter from. That was just a part of
life that you never got used to, but that you
(11:33):
learned how to deal with. And then came October seventh.
But tell me about that day.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Yeah, So before October seventh in we did not have
a safe room is a concrete reinforced room that is
part of your house because in zero to ten seconds
you do not have time to go outside of your
house and run to a BM shelter. Those were buying
(12:01):
for the seventy three war and the fifty six Kane campaign,
but they're no good if you've got zero to ten seconds. Anyway,
in the two thousand and eight nine war, we did
not have a safe room. We had no place safe
to be until at that period, so we just had
to find a safe area, the safest place in your
(12:21):
house with no external walls or windows. Keep us houses
are very small, so I had a very small cardor
that fit the fit the criteria, and that's where we
would run to and just hope nothing fell on the
roof because nothing would have helped with them. After two
thousand and eight nine escalation, the government of Israel invested
billions of dollars to build safe rooms, concrete reinforced safe
(12:46):
rooms on every house within four kilometers of the border,
and then it was widened out to seven kilometers, so
we have a safe room and that's where we run to.
So on October seventh, that evening, before I went to bed,
I told my son, if you don't see me in
the morning, it's because I'm going to go out to
(13:06):
take pictures of a wild a field of wildflowers in
the fields before the sun rises. So thankfully I did
not do that because I would not be sitting here
today to do if I had people who were where
(13:27):
I intended to go were murdered that morning. So on
October seventh, six thirty in the morning, six o'clock in
the morning, I was too tired to get up out
of my bed and do that. I'll do it another day.
They'll be there tomorrow. Yeah, So I at six point
thirty we started getting the incoming rocket warnings and I
(13:49):
jumped out of my bed ran to the safe room
where my son was sleeping. The safe room has a
special iron heavy iron sleeve which you're supposed to close
in times of threat, and an iron door that you
pull closed and click. The barrage was so intense that
(14:14):
I was when I ran into the safe room, but
I was scared to stand up to close the window
because the windows to prevent strapnel from coming in, which
can kill you. So we waited a bit until it
sort of calmed down. But it was just it was
so heavy, and we were on a what's up group.
(14:35):
I was on a what's up group with other English teachers.
I'm a retired recently retired English teacher, and We're saying,
this is crazy. What is such a heavy barrage? And
was from the north of Tel Aviv till south below
us and what's going on. And a friend of mine,
who I know takes sunrise walks in the fields sent
(14:58):
she didn't write, she sent the picture of the sky.
And I didn't really understand what that was about. But
you know, we were in survival mode. I didn't bother
going into it too deeply, and eventually, after a few minutes,
after about five ten minutes, it calmed down. I was
able to close the window, and we got notification that
(15:21):
we should go out of the safe room, lock our
doors and windows, and then return to the safe room
and lock it and not leave.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
So you knew by that point that there was an
infiltration on top of the huge rocket Brude.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
I knew that. We realized in retrospect that this huge
bruge was cover camouflage for the main event that was
happening over on the border. So I went out and
I closed the windows and the doors. And it's funny
(15:56):
because I didn't remember that I had done this, But
when I was preparing for an of you, I looked back.
I have a Facebook group called life on the Border
with Gaza things people may not know but should and
I was doing live Facebook lives already. Wow, at that
point I went out. I was doing a Facebook live
and you can still see it there, and I'm saying,
(16:18):
I don't really think this is necessary because I'm sure
you know, nobody's going to infiltrate the keyboats, but I'll
do it anyway. And I'm walking around and locking the
doors in the windows, and then I go back into
the safe room. But you can't lock a safe room, right.
The safe room is built to keep you safe.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
From rockets, right, not from infiltrators. And they're made that
if a rocket hits that someone could specifically open it
from the outside and come rescue.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
Absolutely, And it has a lot that you click right
in order to protect you in case the house has
hit someplace and there's an implosion that it doesn't blow
the door open, but anybody, as you said, from the
outside has to be able to open it so that
they can take come in and take cover as well.
People realize that very quickly that you can't lock the
(17:10):
safe room. The only way to keep it locked is
by pulling down the handle. So that was my son's job.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
We sat with holding it and so if anyone tried
to open it, he would be holding it closed.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
Yeah, hopefully you're strong enough to keep it strong than
the terrorist strong terrorists on the other side. Wow. So
we started getting frantic messages of people in our keyboats.
We have a special messaging system that's internal to the keyboats.
(17:48):
We're about four hundred and fifty people on my keyboats,
so I know everybody and I know where everybody lives.
So I'm following the progression as this is developing through
the messages on the group because we weren't getting any official
notifications because nobody knew anything. Nobody understood what was going on. Wow.
(18:10):
And I'm following these messages and I'm seeing this person saying,
we hear shooting outside, so we know what it sounds
like when a rocket explodes. That's a sound we know
how to identify. But all of a sudden, we're seeing
other sounds that I had never heard of, needing, of
(18:31):
automatic gunfire, of grenades exploding, of RPGs exploding, and people
are writing there's shooting near our house. We can hear
people shouting in Arabic. And I'm following the progression as
it's happening and reading what people are saying. They're entering
(18:52):
our house. There are terrorists in our house. We can
hear them. They're trying to force the door open. They're
setting our house and fire on fire. The terrors took
gas balloons from outside the house, detached them, put them
in the house, turned on the gas and lit a match,
(19:13):
so they exploded inside our houses. There's a family there
on the other side of the kibbutz who are saying
our houses on fire, and we know that they have
a ten day old baby with them in the safe room.
And the terror When the terrorists tried to open their
(19:33):
safe room door at first, they managed to dislodge it
just enough to have a crack, where with the smoke
at this point was flooding into the safe room and
choking them and this ten month ten day old baby.
So that's a whole story in itself. They've given many interviews.
(19:55):
I just saw them interviewed again this morning on Israel TV.
Thank god were okay. But my point is we're following
live the horrors of what are happening. The army, so
we have a first a group of first responders. Only
(20:17):
four of them were out and active on that day
against tens of highly armed trained terrorists. We figured there
were between fifty and sixty terrorists that had infiltrated our community,
and that's like, it's hard to tell. They afterwards through
(20:38):
the cameras, they counted people. So the first responders who
were out there doing what they could, but there wasn't
all that much they could do against tens of terrorists.
My son in law is a first responder, so he
had a gun with him. My three grant children, aged two, six,
(21:02):
and eight, were with my son in law in his house.
So when he heard the terraces entering his house, he
told the girls, lie under the blanket, don't make a noise.
You can hear a loud noise, but do not run
after me. These girls never listen. They listened. He stepped
(21:27):
outside his safe room and shot a terrace just in
front of the safe room. He killed him. He ran
after two others that were in the house, but when
he got to the threshold he realized that there were
multiple armed terrorists outside and he didn't stand the chance.
He went back to protect my grandchildren in the safe room.
(21:49):
He went in, He closed the door, he didn't hold
the handle. He just kneeled on the on the ground,
cocked his gun and stayed there that way for hours.
He said, anybody who comes through that room is getting
a bullet wow. Around the same time, my son, who
understands a little bit Arabic. We at this point already
(22:12):
heard the shooting by us. We heard the Arabic voices
by us, and my son said, they're saying come away
from there or something like that in Arabic, and we
didn't understand what that was about. But he was sitting
there holding the handle, and I'm sitting there just trying
to follow what's going on on the what's up hoops.
(22:33):
The TV was off. Usually the TV is on when
there's an escalation, so I can keep track of what's
going on. But that was already too much information overload,
and we were in survival mode. We were just trying
to survive ourselves. We had enough information going on by us.
I didn't need to know what was going around in
any other place in the country except for nickname. So
(22:56):
my son and I are sitting there and you know,
we look at each other. We hear the Arabic voices,
and my son heard these sounds. I'm hearing impaired, which
means that there's stuff that I don't hear, which is
even more scary because your senses are there to protect you.
So if you don't hear danger, that's a very scary
(23:18):
feeling in itself. But you know, we look at each
other and tell each other that I love you. And
basically I did not think that I was going to
see another sunrise, that I was going to be able
to go out and take another picture of flowers at sunrise.
I truly did not. I was sure this was the end.
(23:39):
After a while, things sort of. We stopped hearing the
voices about an hour later, and I was in physical
pain because I hadn't gone to the bathroom. So I
opened the door of the safe room to go to
the bathroom, and I saw the slats on my window
had been busted. So what we heard earlier with the
(24:01):
Arabic voices were terrorists that had My son says he
heard a sound that he didn't recognize that was them
starting to break into the window, and for some reason
they got called away. Wow, did buy an intervention or
dumb luck or or my late husband watching over us?
I don't you know. I can't say what it was.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
So how many people from your key Boots that day
ended up being killed or kidnapped?
Speaker 2 (24:31):
So a nirim five people were slaughtered. Two of them
were visitors. Three of them were people I've known since
since I came or since they were born, whichever happened. Yeah,
(24:53):
later five people were hot taken hostage again. One of
those five was a visitor. She's since been released, and
two of the other hostages were released because they're women.
(25:13):
We have two hostages still there in Gaza. And the
story that I told you at the beginning about my
friend who was out walking in the fields about an
hour after this started, I tried contacting her because all
of a sudden, I remember Judy's walking with her husband
Gotti in the fields. I wonder if they got home okay.
(25:36):
And I tried to message her and there was no response,
And we're talking in the what's up? Group? Has anybody
heard from Judy? No response? Somebody suggested call Gotti, and
I tried to call Gotti. No response. And a few
days later I was talking to her children because by
(25:56):
then we realized that they were abducted. And what her
children knew was that at five after seven their mother
called the ambulance driver on Nivos to say that her
husband had been shot and was in bad shape, and
she had been shot in the hand and to bring
(26:20):
the ambulance over, but by then the ambulance had been
destroyed by the terrorists. So they asked me to check
and see when she sent the picture in the What's
Up group, and I went back and I realized it
wasn't a picture, it was a video. So there's a
(26:41):
video that she took of the sky. You can hear
the Red alert in the background. You can hear the
machine gun shots, and you hear them whispering to each other,
what's that, what's going on? What's happening? And they're lying
like they'd lie down. They lay down in the fields,
and we're hiding by this time. So until this day,
(27:06):
no one has seen them. We've got no word. Their
family know nothing. Seventy two days, we don't know if
they're alive, if they're dead, if they've been taken care of.
The Red Cross have been totally useless, aside from acting
(27:27):
as taxi drivers during the hostage return, and we're just devastated.
You know. Every time I open up, every time I
turn on the TV, I see people I know, or
parents of people I know, or children of people I know.
The TV is full of people from our communities, in
(27:49):
a school. We're a small community, right and we don't
know what's happening with them or they've been slaughtered. It's
heartbreaking to open to turn on the TV.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
And I think for everyone in Israel this has been
personal to a different extent, and for you, Adele and
for your family who think God miraculously survived, it's personal
in a different way. It's people that you know, people
that you love, your community, and it's something that you
never thought would happen that in an instant, entire reality
(28:24):
change that you went from being a comfortable person with
a passionate life of helping others. You do medical clowning
and you help others in so many ways, to suddenly
being a refugee yourself, with loved ones, friends and family
members who will have to rebuild their lives in a
way we don't even know how. And so I want
(28:47):
to tell you that, as you and the people of
your community has done for so many others, that the
fellowship is here with you, with the people of knie Reim,
with the people of Southerness, with people of Israel. And
I think the most important message right now to know
is that you're not alone, is that there are millions
of people around the world, both Christians and Jews, who
stand with you, who stand with the people of k Nearim,
(29:09):
who stand with Israel, and in face of the rise
of anti Semitism, there is a voice in a way
now louder than ever saying we stand with the people
of Israel. And so we just thank you for sharing
everything with the world, your story, your thoughts, your wisdom,
and taking the time to speak with me today.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
And I need you to know that that helps us
stay strong. That is truly significant. The hug that we
got first of all from the hotel here, the King
Solomon Hotel that till this day see to all of
our needs, that people and a lot who got together
(29:51):
and had a whole hole full of clothing and things
for us because we escaped, and and many people escape
just with the shirts on their back, and the people
of Israel and Amy Israel, and this is what gives
(30:11):
us strength. We have received an amazing hug from so many,
and I need to thank you and your audience for
perpetuating this hug and for letting us know that you
have our backs.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
Thank you so much, Adele. We're with you for the
long run, and We're thinking about you, praying for you,
and believing that life will somehow move on. Thank you
so much, Adele. God bless you.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
Thank you, God bless you too.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
Thank you for listening to the Conversations with ya L podcast.
If you like what you have heard, please check out
my weekly podcast, Nourish Your Biblical Roots, that explores the
Jewish roots of the Christian faith with inspirational and ancient teachings.
You can also me at my Biblical roots dot org
(31:02):
for more of my teachings, videos, blogs, and books. Follow
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Facebook at ye l Xtein Shall and see you next month.