Nourish Your Biblical Roots

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hello, and welcome to Nourish Your Biblical Roots Special Edition.
I'm Caleb the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. I'll
be your host on today's podcast. We're broadcasting this week
from NRB, the National Religious Broadcasters Convention. During our time here,
we'll be talking with special guests on a variety of topics,
especially as they relate to Israel, the current situation an

(00:29):
ongoing war there, in the work of the Fellowship Today,
I'm beyond honor to welcome to the podcast a Dell Raimer,
a writer, teacher, mother, grandmother, Israeli Kibbutz resident, and a
survivor of the October seventh attacks. Adell first spoke on
the podcast with Yell Extein, Fellowship president and CEO, after

(00:51):
the attacks. I'll put the link to her previous discussion
in the podcast notes. You won't want to miss it
you haven't already listened. Dell was gracious enough to travel
from Holy Land this week to here in America, where
she's been sharing her story with Christians here who love
and support Israel, and we wanted to bring her back
to share more with you today. So Adele, I want
to thank you so much for being here.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
You're very welcome. It's a real honor to be here,
and I am just I have to say, I am
getting so much love and support for Israel here that
it's certainly something that I do not take for braddav
that one second, because when I was growing up here
in America, I did not feel about love as a
Jewish child growing up here in America. I am getting

(01:34):
it now.

Speaker 1 (01:35):
Millions of people in Israel realize that we're here supporting
you all. You mentioned that you didn't feel that love
growing up here in the States. Is that what led
you to make Alia As.

Speaker 2 (01:44):
A child growing up, I was part of the Zionist
youth movement and we participated in educational activities, and I
went to summer camp with young Judea. And then after
high school I went on a gap year program to
Israel and fell in love with the country. I came
back to the States to go to university like all

(02:07):
good Jewish girls do. But then in October seventy three,
do You Keep a War? Broke out and I said, well,
what am I doing in the States. Israel needs me.
So that's when I made Aliya to keep it Touba,
which was founded by my youth movement. It had just
become a civilian ITZ. Until then it was at Ariel
Post and I was drafted as soon as I came

(02:30):
because I was nineteen. So through my army service, I
arrived at Kibbutzniri where I am today, which is about
a mile away from the border with the Kasa Strip.
It was not a war zone. I came to live there.

Speaker 1 (02:42):
That's one thing that working with israelis that as an
American I can't wrap my head around. I was actually
in Israel in twenty eighteen when there were rocket attacks,
and that's something that you all even just live with.

Speaker 2 (02:53):
But in my mind, I thought, this is a We're resilient.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
I'm an American.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
I'm not used to it.

Speaker 1 (02:57):
And tell me more about that skirit of drawing and
resilient peace. Well, I find it inspiring.

Speaker 2 (03:02):
So I never say that I'm used to them. It's
it's something that we learned how to live with and
don't have the hands of ourselves. That terror is not
something that anybody can or should be used to it.
And where isn't the terror where I live? There's there's
we have rockets, and there were periods when we have
when we had fear of terrorist infiltration from tunnels. You know,

(03:25):
people say, well, why do you live there if it's
so dangerous? But then where would I go? In Israel?
You know, I got a Bersheba gets rockets, Ashta the
Ashkaloon get rockets. Tel Aviva is that buses blowing up.
Jerusalem has had night things and landings, and up north
it's got rockets. You know, where do you go? And
even in the world we're twenty twenty four, where in

(03:48):
the world can you go that you do not have
to fear terror? I mean we're in Nashville now. Last
Saturday there were Neo Nazis marching through Nashville. So where
does it say it? You have dealt with so much?

Speaker 1 (04:02):
But then October seventh, can you tell me about that date?

Speaker 2 (04:04):
So October seventh was certainly unprecedenta. We'd always prepared for
terrorists and to hold the fort down for ten minutes,
fifteen minutes, so the army came. We're five minutes away
from a big army base. So when I tell my
October Southern story, like to take it back a step.
My Kibutz is one of the pioneer in Kibutsim in

(04:27):
nineteen forty six, two years before the state was bound there,
Bengorian set out a call for different kiwatzim, and most
of been different communities to set out in the Negab
desert and to spread out so we have a Jewish
presence in the Negave Desert when the state finally would
be declared. So Nitting was one of those communities, one

(04:51):
of eleven communities that on the eve of yong Kipur
in nineteen forty six set out to claim state to
harry which would be their key books. So we always
celebrate that. We don't We don't celebrate it on Young
Kipore because there were people week asked, so we celebrated
on Sinhatowa. At the end of that holiday season, we

(05:14):
had lots of visitors that came, including my thirty three
year old son who does not live on eating anymore,
but he came to visit his birthday's October eight. He
came to the for the festivities, and before I went
to sleep that night, I told him, if you don't
see me in the morning when you wake up, don't
worry because I want to take the car and the

(05:34):
camera and go out to take a picture of a
field of wildflowers at sunlights. Thank god I was too
tired to get up at a quarter to six in
the morning on October seventh, because if I had been
a little less tired and gone out, I would not
be sitting here with you today. I would have been

(05:55):
in the field where a friend of mine actually was
Judy Hamburg husband, who are engraved on the back of
my dog tag. We're out on a sunrise walk. That
morning they were both shot. We thought that they were
alive but kidnapped. Unfortunately, about a month ago we got

(06:16):
word that they're no longer alive and their bodies are
being held captive in Gaza, along with one hundred and
thirty two other Israelis live in day in the Terra
tunnels of Balza. So that October seventh started with incoming
rocket alerts. Now, when we hear that incoming rocket alert,

(06:38):
we know that we have between zero to ten seconds
to get to someplace safe. That's how close we are
to the border, zero to ten seconds between the second
you hear the alert until the second you hear the explosion.

Speaker 1 (06:50):
So you have to stop doing dishes, put down whatever
you're jump.

Speaker 2 (06:53):
Out of bed and run. I run fast, So I
ran into the safer I was still in bed. I
ran to the safe room, which is also my guest room,
so my son was sleeping in there. And ran into
the guests room. And the barrage was so heavy that
I was scared to stand up and close the metal

(07:15):
window that keeps us safe from schraduois. So I was
just sitting on the floor. And I have a Facebook
fled with twelve thousand followers called life on the Border
with Gaza and when stuff happens, when the escalations happened,
I do lives there. So I'm sitting on the floor
in my safe room with this barrage of rockets coming

(07:37):
and doing a Facebook live and people were finding out
all over the world what was happening as it was
happening live. After a little wild things sort of calmed down.
But I mean, this barrage was so hiby. It wasn't
only that it was intense for us. It was from
north of Tel Aviv to south of us. It was
a huge spray. I only realized in retrospect is that

(07:59):
this was to camouflage the main events that was going
on along the border where thousands of Ramas and Islamochi
had terrorists were infiltrating the border at the same time.
At that time, they went to the Nova Music festival,
they went to twenty two other communities along the border
and invaded. They invaded the army. They caught the army

(08:22):
totally off guard and went into the army bases and
slaughtered the soldiers that were supposed to be coming to
save us. But of course we had no idea of
what was going on. We got no information that morning.
No official information was going through because nobody knew anything.

Speaker 1 (08:41):
How annoying did you learn there in your SAFA that
this wasn't just rocket attacks, that there were actual terrorist infiltration.

Speaker 2 (08:48):
So we have an internal messaging system, it's not what's
up that it's a closed messaging system. Of course, anytime
there's an escalation, I have my TV on it. But
it was just so crazy what was going on that
I just turned off the TV and we were seeing
pictures that terrorsts in the city of Stivoes. Like I

(09:08):
was saying, this, this is impossible, this can't be. So
I wasn't really paying attention to the TV, and we
started getting messages on the internal message in system saying
that terrorists had infiltrated Israel and that we should go
out and lock our doors and windows and go into
the safe room and lock ourselves into the safe row.

(09:29):
The problem with that is the safe room does not lock.
The safe room was built to keep a safe from rogins,
not from infiltration, and there were actually people on Nigging
who were not aware of that.

Speaker 1 (09:41):
I was.

Speaker 2 (09:42):
I knew it because the day I got the key
to my safe room, as it were. It was built
in around twenty eleven, when the government of Visuel realized
that they had to invest money in all of the
communities within seven columbus on the border to keep them
safe from these rogins with zero to ten seconds, we
realized that the only way to keep it locked to

(10:04):
any extent was by pulling down on the handle, which
had prongs, metal prongs going into the to the floors
and the frame that was built to protect you inside
the safe room in case the house was hit elsewhere
by a rocket, so that the door didn't fly open

(10:24):
and endanger you. My son held down on the handle,
and I'm sitting in the bed and we're watching what's
going on on the WhatsApp group, and all of a
sudden we're seeing messages from people in my community. The
kibbutz is and small kibuts were four hundred and fifty people,
and I know where everybody lives. How seeing messages that

(10:46):
people are seeing. We hear shooting now, I know what
rockets exploding sounds like, and mortars. We've never heard gunfire,
jordinage and RPGs exploding in the kibbutz. Pople are saying,
we're hearing these explosions and gunfire, and we hear Arabic
outside our walds. And I'm watching the progression of the

(11:09):
people of these terrorists as they're getting closer and closer.
They're going from house to house as they're getting closer
to us, and all of a sudden, we start hearing
Arabic outside arm wall of the safer and my son,
who understands a little bit Arabic, was sitting there holding
down the handle and he said, they're saying go away

(11:32):
from there. We didn't understand what that was about. We
just looked at each other and told each other that
we loved each other and basically said goodbye. I was
certain that I was not going to see another sunrise.
I was sure this is it, this is the end
where where we thought this was over in the days

(11:54):
of the Nazi in Germany and Poland, that when the
Jews were hunted down and hiding in their closets and
in their houses. With twenty twenty three, how is this
happening in our own country. Where's the idea? Where are
the people that are supposed to be coming to save us?
We know nothing. About an hour afterwards, it's sort of

(12:16):
quieted down, and I was already in visible pain because
I really had to go to the bathroom. I opened
the safe room door very quietly in case the word
terrace in the house. As I opened the door, I
saw the window opposite the safe room that the slats
had been broken, so the terrors were on my front
porch starting to break into my house when they got

(12:38):
called away dumb luck, divine intervention, my husband watching over
us whatever, and we waited. Unbeknownst to me. At the
same time, my son in law and daughter also Novaldi Kivoltz,
they're separated, and my grandchildren, my three grandchildren aged two, six,
and eight, were with my son in law in this house.

(13:00):
He's one of the first responders, so he has a weapon.
He couldn't go outside with the other first responders and
help them. They were very small team that there were
like four first responders outside trying to hold down the flour.
So he was in his safe room. My daughter was
in her safe room. She turned off the lights. She
pid under the bed and she was too scared to

(13:22):
go out to put the balt furnace. Won't go into
any more details than that, but you can imagine. My
son and law started hearing the terrorsts entering his house.
He heard them shouting and breaking things to the house
and knocking things over. He told my grandchildren, cover yourselves
under the blanket, don't come out, no matter what you're
gonna hear a loud noise, don't come after it. The

(13:46):
children never listen. They listen. He loaded his gun, pointed
to the door, and as soon as the handles started moving,
he kicked open the door and shot the terrace that
was right in front of the door. He looked out
and saw other terrorists running away. He was going to
after them, but he realized that there were about four

(14:09):
or five other highly armed terrorists just outside and he
didn't stand the chat. So he cut his losses, went
back into the room, closed the door, in the gun
at the door and waited. They were highly traumatized, of course,
and they just stayed there and their daddy's a big

(14:30):
guy and he protected them and they felt safe with them,
so they were okay. Around one point thirty, we got
and we're here all of these horrible stories. We're witnessinging
through the messaging group, people saying they're in our house,
they're shooting up our house, they're setting the house on fire.

(14:51):
And there's especially this one family with a ten day
old baby in the house. The terrorists entered their house,
they tried to open the door. The father and the
mother were both holding down the handle. They knocked the
door and dislodged from the frame so that when they
set the house on fire, smoke was streaming into the

(15:11):
safe room where this ten day old baby is. And
they're on the phone with the police, with the army,
with the fire department trying to get help, and nobody
can get to them. Four first responders who were out
in the field tried to get to them from the
outside to save them, but there were just too many
terrorists that were armed and shooting back at them. They

(15:33):
killed some of them, but they eventually retreated they are
our first responders retreated and went up to the to
the grain tower so that they could get a bird's
eye views of how extensive the infiltration was. What I
learned only afterwards. The army that were on the way
were coming into the area, were told to go to

(15:56):
a different Kibutz, but when they saw this this family
calling for help with the ten day old baby, they
changed their plan and they came to us. They rescued
this family, So this ten day old baby saved many lives.
There were many tragedies that day, many big tragedies, but
there were also many little miracles. We didn't know about

(16:18):
this at the time. Again, we had no information. We're
just sitting there petrified, waiting for the terrorists to come
back and kill us. We found out through the messaging
system that at one point thirty the army did arrive,
but we were still in our safe rooms waiting. We
had no idea where there were, where the army was,
where the terrorists were. And they went house to house

(16:39):
rescuing the people on the side of Kibut that was
being burnt, that was being totally destroyed, saving people from there,
and they finally got to us at around five fifteen,
So we were eleven hours in our safe room, just
the tool of us, petrified Petrocyde. And when they extracted

(17:02):
us from there again there's there's incoming rocket fire all
this time, and you're hearing the shooting all around. So
they're walking us from our house. They took each family,
each couple of families outside to take us to the
community center. So we're walking around and they're taking us
around the long way, and I'm thinking, there were rockets,

(17:22):
there are terrorists, this is a war zone. Why are
they taking us out a long way. In the middle
of evacuating us, there was in cut rocket fire. We
threw ourselves down on the ground, covered our heads and
waited to hear the explosion, and then continued going. It
was only afterwards that I realized. When we got to
the community center, I asked them, why did you take
us around the long way? They didn't want us to

(17:44):
be exposed to the bodies that had been shot. I
didn't know if it was terrorist bodies or our people's bodies,
so they wanted to protect us from seeing that. Eventually,
they brought the entire cubbuts to the community center so
that they could surround us and protect us. So we
went through the night that way. There were too many people.

(18:08):
Our community center can hold one hundred and twenty one
hundred and fifty people. There were four hundred and fifty
people plus guests in there. So around nine o'clock in
the evening, the army decided, even though it was still
a dangerous wars off, they decided to take families with
children and bring them to different children's houses daycare centers

(18:28):
which are totally protected and rocket proof, in order to
disperse us so that we would be able to get
a little bit rest. We were all after an entire
day of terror and people were exhausted. So this went
on until the next day. At about one in the afternoon,
they told us they'd believed they'd gotten all of the

(18:50):
terrorists in the community, but they knew that there were
still many outside. They told us to go quickly back
to our houses to pack a small suitcase, and to
wait in the safe room until they called us to
come to the buses to evacuate. We did that, and
the evacuation was also totally chaotic because they didn't have

(19:11):
time to plan it really, and they didn't know who
was going on the buses, what was going with their cars.
It was like one big traffic jaw within the kibbutz.
There had been an incoming rocket at that point, we
wouldn't have been able to evacuate a time that in
itself was just a petrifying forty minutes that I sat
in the bus and waited to get out of there already.

(19:31):
And then they drove us out of the kibbutz around
a quarter to three and through an active war zone.
There were cars on the side of the road, burning
charred bodies on the ground, tanks driving by, shooting rockets.
We got to a lot, which is where we were
evacuated to. The whole community was evacuated to a lot

(19:52):
shell shop. My grandchildren were also there. They were it's
terribly traumatized. We were in a lot for three months,
the entire kibbutz, but it wasn't a calm place where
you could really start healing. We were still getting incoming rockets,
and my grandchildren were scared to leave the ruin. They
were scared to leave the hotel. My son in law

(20:14):
finally convinced them to leave the hotel to go to
dinner with his sister who was visiting and on their
way out and incoming rock and caught them. So that
just finished them off completely. After that, anytime my son
in law would leave the room, they made my daughter
voted with them in the stairwell until he got back,
because they knew that the stairwell is the safe place.

(20:35):
So eventually, my daughter, as did many other people, after
a few weeks, realized that this was not healthy but
a choser, and she took them to another kibbutz that
is not in a rocket range. They're there now, and
the kibbutz voted on an alternative venue where we could
be until we can go back home because we're refugees

(20:57):
in our hall. So we're now in bishop Up, divided
among four different neighborhoods in Burshema. We're split up. And
you know, on October seventh, we faced an existential threat
to our to our bodies, to our families. Today we're
facing an existential threat to our community, to our kibutz.

(21:20):
Because kibbutz is all about community. So we have to
work really hard. But we have to be pioneers again
and find the way to build community dispersed within a city.
That's our challenge now. I've been back about six seven times,
so it's about a forty minute drive. The first time

(21:41):
I was back there, it was really scary, But since
then I've calmed down and I love going back there,
and I mostly go back there to take potential donors
around and tell them our story there, like I'm doing
with Yule. That they are on the ground, so I
show them this is where we were hiding in our saferum,
and this is where the ten they oh baby was rescued.

(22:01):
It's even more meaningful and they see the close proximity
that we are at Tagaza. On October seventh, five people
on Needding were slaughtered, in fact, more than five people,
three soldiers at seven o'clock in the morning, which we
did not know about until about a month and a
half ago. The Southern commander came into Needing because he

(22:24):
realized that something was going on. He was in the
base that was supposed to be saving us. He took
two soldiers and they drove out to see what was
going on. Drove past Needing, realized that terrors were already
in Kneeding, drove in the front gate and had a
battle with the terrors that were there. They killed a
number of them, a number of the leaders, the ones

(22:47):
with the plans, because as you said, they knew exactly
what they were doing. They had plans and naps with
people's names on them, the targets. So he killed the leaders,
some of the leaders. They killed all of the soldiers
because they were greatly outnumbered, and the leaders that were
left wanted to get credit for this Sahigh ranking soldier

(23:10):
that they killed, so they threw their bodies onto a
vehicle and drove back to Gaza. Terrorist fighters that were
left in Nirim were without a leader. So this is
what prevented Nirim from being as devastated as nila O's,

(23:31):
which is just a mile away. They lost one out
of four, one out of their refour and Keyt and
my two friends here slaughtered, kidnapped, Missa. Eight people on
Niding were slaughtered, that's including the three soldiers. Five people
were kidnapped, Nadav and his mother who were kidnapped, Fana

(23:54):
seventy nine and the doves fifty one. And until they
come back, our community, our families, our country can't even
start healing. October seventh was such a wake up call
for us. We want to go back home. And I
intend to go back home. I already have plans for

(24:16):
rebuilding parts of my house to make it more secure
and more beautiful, so that it's a beautiful place, and
families are going to want to move back with their children,
and new families are going to want to come in.
But we're not going to be able to do that
until our hostages come back, and until I have the
same sense of security that I had in October sixth

(24:37):
when I intended to go out before sunrise on my
own in my car to take pictures of the wildflowers.
We have to let the IDF do their job. We
have to let them finish their job of doing away
with the Hamas, doing away with their military capabilities, because
otherwise we won't be able to go back home. And

(24:58):
if you give up on Zirins, you can give up
on Israel. So we can't give up a needing. We
have to go back, build it bigger and better and
stronger and more secure. I'm so overwhelmed with the support
that we're getting here from the Christian community. I grew
up here. I did not feel that when I was

(25:18):
growing up, but I'm feeling it now, So I want
to thank you all. For that, I want to invite
you to come visit Israel, because that also makes us stronger.
When you come visit, when we host you in our
homes and tell you our stories, and then you bring
it back to your communities, that makes us stronger. That

(25:39):
inspires us to be strong