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Adele Raemer
Life on the Border with the Gaza Strip

Painful homecoming

Returning to the kibbutz for the first time after the horrors of October 7: A bloodstained floor and the smell of ashes
Photo credit Oren Rosenfeld Used with his permission
Flag I hung, seen through the window slats broken by terrorists when they attempted to break into my home Photo credit Oren Rosenfeld, used with his permission

I went home yesterday. Correction: I went back to what HAD been my home for almost 48 years, until October 7, 2023.

I got a ride from our temporary refuge in Eilat, from another Nirim member, who left me off at the entrance to Kibbutz Tze’elim, where I switched cars.

That’s when I stopped breathing.

I continued the final 20 minutes of the journey in a car with a team from the BBC who, aside from filming and telling our story, also helped me empty my fridge, throw out the garbage – they even washed the dust off my car and jump-started it.

After packing up everything on my list (and then some), and futilely watering my already half-dead houseplants, I took the crew to see the sections of the kibbutz that had been hit the hardest: the burnt house where Uriel, Amy, baby Kai and his grandmother escaped with their lives through the fire-licked window, and the house where Doron z”l and Mor z”l weren’t as lucky. We saw the charcoaled skeletons of cars, the collapsed porches where, a mere few  hours prior to the attack, people had been celebrating in their sukkot. We saw the blood stained floor where my heroic son-in-law saved the lives of my granddaughters.

Photo credit: Oren Rosenfeld

Nirim didn’t smell like home. Usually, it smells like a mixture of fresh green and sweet earth and cow manure mixed with milk. Eau de Nirim. Yesterday, I didn’t recognize any of the smells. Yesterday, I smelt burnt ashes from the homes set alight, incinerated cars and turkey excrement, from the hundreds of turkeys roaming the region, after escaping from the turkey coops of neighboring Kibbutz Ein Hashlosha.

If you look carefully at the horizon through the burnt car window, you will see the minarets of Gaza
Turkeys roaming, instead of residents

It was frightening and tense walking around my community yesterday, where just half an hour before we arrived, a rocket had exploded on one of the houses. I was lucky yesterday. At any moment another rocket alert could have sounded. At any random second, a barrage, like the one of the morning of October 7th, could have caught us outside. Had it been a mortar, we might not even have had the luxury of a 10-second warning.

I was relieved to be on the road again, driving my car, accompanied by a fellow refugees from Nirim, back to Eilat.

The hardest part of leaving was not knowing when I would ever be able to return.

When we passed Tze’elim, leaving Eshkol and most of the mid-ranged rockets behind, I started to breathe again.

One more thing: usually my posts are edited and polished by my dear friend Judith Weinstein-Haggai. I apologize for this post being less elegant than usual; it is without her edits, due to the fact that she, her husband, and hundreds of other friends and neighbors are still being held hostage by our ruthless enemies, in Gaza. Please help us bring them home. 

About the Author
The writer (aka "Zioness on the Border" on social media) is a mother and a grandmother who since 1975 has been living and raising her family on Kibbutz Nirim along the usually paradisiacal, sometimes hellishly volatile border with the Gaza Strip. She founded and moderates a 13K-strong Facebook group named "Life on the Border with Gaza". The writer blogs about the dreams and dramas that are part of border kibbutznik life. Until recently, she could often be found photographing her beloved region, which is exactly what she had planned to do at sunrise, October 7th. Fortunately, she did not go out that morning. As a result, she survived the murderous terror infiltrations of that tragic day, hunkering down in her safe room with her 33-year-old son for 11 terrifying hours. So many of her friends and neighbors, though, were not so lucky. More than she can even count. Adele was an educator for 38 years in her regional school, and has been one of the go-to voices of the Western Negev when escalations on the southern border have journalists looking for people on the ground. On October 7, her 95% Heaven transformed into 100% Hell. Since then she has given a multitude of interviews. She has gone on five missions abroad in support of Israel and as an advocate for her people. In addition to fighting the current wave of lies and blood libels about the Jewish state, she is raising money to help restore their Paradise so that members of her kibbutz can return to their homes on the border, where they can begin to heal. If you wish to learn more about how you can help her and her community return home, please feel free to drop her a line.
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