Munders and Metzgers, salt of the earth

On Wednesday and Thursday, we witnessed two funerals in the small pastoral cemetery of Kibbutz Nir Oz.

The first was of Avraham Munder, who was kidnapped from his home in Nir Oz on October 7 with his wife, their daughter, Keren, and their only grandson, 9-year-old Ohad. Keren’s brother Roi, was murdered that day on the kibbutz. After the heartbreaking eulogies in front of two coffins waiting for burial, side by side, father and son, Avraham and Roi (Roi was being reburied), the coffins were simultaneously lowered into the ground and immediately covered with buckets of sandy dirt wielded by their family and the kibbutzniks who had known them for decades.

Avraham Munder (Courtesy)

Who takes 80-year-olds and 9-year-olds hostage? Three generations of a family taken into the tunnels of Gaza. At her father’s funeral, Keren described their last moments in the “safe room” of their home, the room designed to protect against the blast of falling missiles, not swarms of terrorists with machine guns and grenades. As in all the safe rooms, the reinforced door was not lockable from the inside. As they heard Arabic and shooting around them closing in, the four of them — grandparents, mother, and child — froze. Then Avraham, whom everyone called Munder and who walked with a cane, got up and held the handle of the door to prevent the terrorists from coming in. When, inevitably, the terrorists broke into the room, they forced Munder onto his knees while he watched them take away his daughter, wife Ruti, and grandson, Ohad. It was while in captivity that Ruti overheard that their son Roi had been murdered on October 7.

For five months, Munder survived in the tunnels in Gaza. A video of him alive was released by Hamas — as a form of psychological torture — in December. According to forensic evidence, his captors executed him and other hostages as they feared capture by advancing Israeli forces.

The second funeral was that of Yoram Metzger, husband of Tami, also taken captive, father of three sons, grandfather to six grandchildren. At first, Yoram was held separately from Tami. The couple, both of whom spoke fluent Arabic, were eventually reunited in the tunnels of Gaza. In late November, the rest of Metzger’s family was released in the first and only hostage deal. Tami did not want to leave her husband but Metzger insisted, “You need to take care of the children.”

Both Munder and Metzger (who also went by his last name) were the patriarchs of their families. Both were larger-than-life characters who, despite or because of their age — 79 and 81 — still shaped their entire clans with their storied lives and eccentricities. The Metzgers were talkative extroverts who loved to debate. The Munders were quieter and loved to sing and collect family and friends.

Both men served in the paratroops, the red-booted elite infantry unit to which many kibbutzniks gravitated. Both fought in Jerusalem in 1967 (Munder was wounded) and again in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, exactly 50 years before that black October day. Both were born in Israel and were children of Holocaust survivors.

These two men embodied the Israeli story. They lived through or fought in all of Israel’s wars. They were pillars of a flourishing kibbutz so close to Gaza that both funerals began with a macabre public service announcement: please turn off your phones and, if a siren goes off warning of missile attack, you have eight seconds to lie flat on the ground, in place, with your hands on your head. Lying flat on the ground may not be pleasant but it saves lives, the announcement said.

The funerals were interwoven with celebrations of the men’s lives and accusations against the government for abandoning them twice: first on October 7 and then in the tunnels of Gaza. Both of them were kidnapped alive and returned dead.

There is an unspoken tendency to think that the cutting off of the life of an 80-year-old is less of a tragedy than that of a younger person. At least they lived a long life. They got to experience what Metzger’s granddaughter described as the special relationship where she could share thoughts and dreams that she might not share with her parents or even siblings.

Yoram Metzger (Courtesy)

But the sweep of their lives, cutting across Israeli and Jewish history, also sharpens the bitterness of betrayal. These men personally fought for their country twice in wars in which Israel’s existence hung in the balance. We take the eventual victories in 1967 and 1973 for granted. But before Israel’s pre-emptive attack in the Six-Day War, mass graves were being dug in Tel Aviv. And in 1973 Defense Minister Moshe Dayan spoke in closed rooms about the “possible fall of the Third Temple.”

Who prevented Israel’s destruction then? Who fought to unify Jerusalem? It was an entire generation of Munders and Metzgers. And as if that were not enough, these two men chose to raise their families a stone’s throw from a regime whose raison d’etre was to commit genocide against a neighboring state and rain destruction on its own people.

Hadn’t Munder and Metzger done enough for their country without, again with their own hands, building a paradise in the desert next to these beasts because, after all, someone needed to do it?

Just outside the cemetery there was a house with its walls blackened and crumbling and its windows blown out, burned to a crisp from the inside. We do not know which family fell asleep inside this home after their family Friday night dinner to be awakened by sirens and terrorists and, still in their pajamas, be kidnapped or slaughtered or fighting for their lives.

But what was really striking was the contrast. Turn your head just a few degrees and you could see the green lawns and tidy paths, gardens, and homes of typical kibbutz life, now eerily silent and abandoned. We had come to the funerals from Kfar Aza, a neighboring kibbutz, where volunteers like us were going house to house, cleaning out the gardens of the residents so they would return to a facsimile of the kibbutz they knew.

“Salt of the earth” does not begin to express the joy, toil, and selfless sacrifice that Avraham Munder and Yoram Metzger brought to their families, communities, and the country they loved. It does express their end, in that treasured earth, far too soon.