My Connection to Kibbutz Nir Oz

My initial connection to kibbutz was transient. It was in 1964 during my first trip to Israel from Dundee, Scotland where I was medical student at the venerable University of St. Andrews. The clinical component of the education was in Dundee, then a city of 180,000 people, struggling from a severe economic decline. The loss of the jute industry to the newly developed synthetics, changed the carpet backing industry on which Dundee had depended.

I was doing a student placement in the department of Obstetrics (in the UK known as midwifery) and Gynecology. It was my first trip to Israel. Although I had grown up in a traditional Brooklyn New York first generation Jewish home, it was only my bubby, a Lithuanian immigrant who had visited Israel with her Yiddish choir, whose concerts I had often attended in various venues in New York. When she returned home, she could not stop raving about the wonders of the country, the spirit of the people and the beauty of the land.

My experiencer at Rambam hospital in Haifa was life changing. Within a very short time I literally fell in love with the country. I recall getting on a public bus a few days after I arrived and heard people speaking Hebrew and other languages that I recognized from my years of travelling through Europe and thought to myself, “These are my people”. For its part, the clinical experience was inspiring, and the Dr. Abraham Peretz, the professor of the Department was revealed to me by a member of staff, as a significant witness at the historical Eichmann trial having seen children being torn from their mothers and loaded on to trucks to be murdered.

Towards the end of my one-month stay, the Canadian dental student with whom I shared the small, non-air-conditioned cabin, offered to take me to Kibbutz Ein Hashofet where her parents had been founding members. It was situated in a geographical region located on the Carmel Range, between Mount Carmel and Mount Amir/Umm al-Fahm, not far from the hospital to meet his cousin who he suggested might be of interest to me. I had only one weekend day before I was due to leave the country. Carmella’s suggested that we drive to a small kibbutz, Nir Oz on the Gaza border. She was planning to move there soon, to establish join this extension from the original home kibbutz to help populate kibbutzim in southern Israel.

It was a memorable trip for several reasons, the main being the idea of spreading the kibbutz idea from a long-established kibbutz in the north to an offshoot in the south. The community was established in 1955, and Carmela was proud of her decision to move there from here current more established kibbutz. The second experience was visiting the border with Gaza. There we met a team of blue beret-wearing Indian peacekeepers meant to separate Israeli and Egyptian forces following the Suez crises in 1956. They jokingly said that they wished they had been stationed on the Israeli side of the border as when they had vacation, they really didn’t have a place to go that was lively whereas they heard from their colleagues that going to Tel Aviv was great fun. I left a few days later and Carmella and I promised to write. Before my departure, Professor Peretz indicated that if I wished to return to his department, he would be happy to have me as a resident for further training.

I went from Israel via Paris to visit my sister who was a Peace Corps worker in Tunisia. Two days after my arrival we heard via Arab Language radio (my sister spoke the language fluently in her role of setting up a pre-school education facility in the small town of Hammam Souse, that what later became known as the Six-Day war had erupted It took three days of very poor radio broadcast options before the BBC became unscrambled and the broadcasts cast doubt on the Egyptian radio announcements with accompanying martial music, that Israel was in the process of being destroyed. I left on the Friday after the war started on Monday June 5th a few days prior. I arrived in London on Saturday June 10th, the day the war came to an end. Although both I and my flat-mate Steve from medical wanted to go to Israel, it seemed that such an option was out of the question at the time.

I returned to Dundee to finish my studies. As a stroke of either luck or providence, I was awarded a prize of five-hundred pounds sterling in Midwifery and Gynecology. When I enquired if I could use the money to do an internship in Israel, the chief of the department said, “it’s yours to use as you want” in his beautiful Scottish accept. I wrote to Professor Peretz who gladly accepted me to do a fellowship after my planned Aberdeen half-year internship in Aberdeen Scotland. I wrote to Carmella of my plans, and she seemed very pleased. (This was before email; letters took almost a week in each direction)

The six months at Rambam was even better than my first experience there. I was allowed to participate in more clinical work, deliveries, Caesarian Sections and the provision of anesthesia during what was already legal in Israel at the time: medically indicated abortions. I visited Carmella, who seemed somewhat disappointed that I had no intention of marrying her which I believe was a consideration. I know that she promptly recovered from any disappointment, and I learned that she married a fellow kibbutznik.

I lost track of her but recalled the affection I felt towards her and admiration for what she was doing on the kibbutz. A few weeks after October 7 attack by Hamas on the border kibbutzim of Gaza I read in the Israeli press (along with a picture) that eighty-year-old Carmella Dan along with her autistic twelve-year-old granddaughter had been murdered during the initial assault on Nir Oz. I was shocked and very much saddened and have expressed my feelings in a previous published TOI blog.

Nir Oz entered my consciousness recently again when among the first hostages that were released from Gaza was Yocheved Lifshitz, eighty-five years old whose 83-year-old husband was also abducted and returned dead in a hostage exchange in February 2025. During the initial exchange, the news discussed the medical condition of each of the hostages as it was revealed that medications that they required were not provided in a consistent manger. Yocheved seemed to be reasonably stable. One of the other hostages however, who was not from Nir Oz but rather from nearby kibbutz Nahal Oz.

As described by a journal article in the November 2024 issue of the Rambam Maimonides Medical Journal, by A. Mark Clarfield and Hagai Levine, “85-year-old Woman Mrs. Elma Avraham was nearly 85 when taken hostage. Before being abducted, she was living independently in her home in Kibbutz Nahal Oz (not far from Nir Oz), in a stable medical condition, despite suffering from several illnesses. The article states that, “Mrs. Avraham’s medical details, her rescue, and the subsequent dramatic life-saving therapy she received in an Israeli hospital are as follows: Released in critical condition after 51 days of captivity, Mrs. Avraham has a medical history that includes hypothyroidism, cutaneous vasculitis, ischemic heart disease, and a transcatheter aortic valve implantation five years before her capture. Medications prescribed include levothyroxine, aspirin, ramipril, lercanidipine, rosuvastatin, and amitriptyline. Mrs. Avraham did not receive the medications she needed from her captors but was able to grab some of her pills when abducted. This resourcefulness likely saved her life. Among those on the Israeli side awaiting her return, there was a strong clinical suspicion that Mrs. Avraham would be severely hypothyroid upon release. I as well as several geriatricians known to each other predicted that she was likely suffering from myxedema. “Upon her return as part of a prisoner swap, she was indeed found to be in myxedema coma: rectal temperature 28.6°C, pulse 40 beats per minute, atrial fibrillation, blood pressure 68/40 mmHg. This was a dire clinical picture rarely observed in modern practice. After 8 days in an intensive care unit, she was transferred to the hospital’s geriatric ward for rehabilitation. After several months, Mrs. Avraham was discharged from hospital to a senior center. Today, more than a year after her release, Mrs. Avraham’s activities of daily living are markedly reduced.

I had only seen two patients in my whole career with such low thyroid function (myxedema), in an era of frequent thyroid screening and readily available replacement therapy. That she recovered, even in a much-diminished state of health is due to the good fortune that her release occurred when it did and the fact that the receiving medical staff suspected that she might very well by severely hypothyroid because of the lack of being provided with her necessary thyroid replacement medication.

From what was a very short personal interaction with Kibbutz Nir Oz and the acquaintance of a young kibbutznik just prior to the Six-Day war, every time I see the name of this kibbutz in the media or see pictures of the severely damaged property and hear thoughts about surviving members, talking about their aspirations to return to their kibbutz home and rebuilding it, I pause in whatever I am doing. The tragedy of a young family from the same kibbutz, affecting the mother and two small children of the Bibas family from Kibbutz Nir Oz filled the media in late February 2025, resulting in an almost universal and international expression of sympathy and mourning. Whether a sense of safety can ever return to the Gaza border kibbutzim and other communities will always be a major question to be pondered when such a decision is made.