The Stickers of the Fallen Faces on the Walls
“My father was dancing with the Torah with tears streaming down his face,” recounted my friend in a silent stoic whisper. “What happened?” I asked naively. For the first time I heard the words “hostages,” “babies,“ a massacre.” “Are you sure?” I replied questionably, It sounded like a rumour that crept up and echoed from the past. An echo reminiscent of the rumours Elie Wiesel heard as a child from Moshe the Beadle. It was too unbelievable to believe. I didn’t want to believe it. I couldn’t believe it. I still find it hard to believe.
Simchat Torah, October 7th 2023 will forever be remembered as one of the darkest days in Jewish history. It’s the day that over 1500 Jewish souls were taken mercilessly from this earth in cruel and barbaric ways comparable only to the horrors I had only ever read about in Jewish history books.
It is a shadow that has pervaded our Jewish consciousness. It has woken us up from our apathy, from our innocence, from our nativity. It has pushed us to reflect, to be more active, more Jewish. To face antisemitism with more semitism.
I have to admit that this is the most important article I will ever write. Because it is dedicated and will be read by those that have suffered tremendously in the past 365 days. Quite simply their lives will never be the same again. It is dedicated to the Jewish nation, a reminder that it is simply impossible to go alone, we must go together. In many ways this story is very personal to me. It’s a story of my deep personal quest to feel some concrete relief to find answers to understand the pain in my soul. Why was I hurting so deeply? I never met Ariel Bibas or a single precious soldier that has fallen in the past year.
Yet I have cried at funerals to the extent that it has been like my own family member has fallen. I needed to understand how and why.
The enigmatic mysterious inextricable magic we have as Jews, the ones antisemites hate us for, the very thing that makes us magical, Gdly, above the natural fabric of the world.
And so I began this journey, the journey of feeling physically close to the emotional and spiritual pain that was killing me on the inside. The pain of losing an arm, yet never having actually touched the arm that had fallen.
How can you love and miss people you have never laid eyes on? That was the overarching quandary that I was grappling with. I always knew intellectually that the Jewish people are one spiritual interconnected body, but my travels over the past year—in Israel and along “the Hummus Trail,” the Eastern routes that many young Israelis travel after they complete their military service— I didn’t need any convincing.
I boarded the El Al flight on the 5th night of Chanukah, the very night that the light finally pervades and overtakes the very apparent darkness. Yet it took me eight months in a makeshift Bet Chabad in Laos to uncover the events that unfolded just a few short miles from the Ben Gurion Airport.
Both of us on a mission, his being putting his life on the line for Am Yisrael. His eyes sparkle as he reminisces. He is taking us back to a war zone. To the deafening explosions, with the angel of death masked as Nukba terrorists. “
It was a moment that ignited my belief, one of those moments that its spiritual weight was impossible to ignore, it revived me, reminded me why we are here, why we are fighting.” I knew I was about to bear witness to a spiritual gem, from an unlikely narrator.
Raz Barabi, an archetypical fearless strong soldier from the Duvdavan Unit, a traditional not typically observant Jew with a heart of gold. “It was Chanukah, we were stationed in a house in Jabalia, north of the Gaza Strip,” it was a Jewish history story of the past unfolding in the present.
“Soldiers in my unit wanted to light the candles, but it was dangerous, the lights could have exposed us. It could have been deadly, we were constantly living in the darkness of night, any movement could have unmasked our hiding spot.
But it’s Chanukah,’ he paused with conviction, “it didn’t matter the circumstances, it was time to light the candles. And so we masked all the windows, not unlike Jews of the past. Overcoming fear with the sentiment of triumph.
We did it, we could do it, we were the Chashmonim of the present. We huddled together in a corner careful to mask the light and together we lit the same candles that have been lit by Jews for thousands of years. We sang the same songs, as the Jews did in the barracks, in the darkest of times, in their homes from all the far corners of the world.
But here we were in Gaza, in a place darker than most, and yet despite that here we were Jews fighting for the Jewish people, not only physically but with the power of the lights.” He is no longer here, he has been transported to that moment, and his vivid descriptions has taken me with him.
“Wow,” he exclaims, “there was no feeling like it. A simple light, in the deafening darkness. It reminded me why I was fighting, it gave me the strength to push forward.” A simple story in the most complex of circumstances.
Yet it wasn’t even his profound words that moved me, it was the excitement in his tone to which was indescribable.
I had grown up on the path of observance all my life, yet at the moment he has an undeniable vision of clarity, he saw the spiritual makeup of this world through the obvious Gdly energy that each of us carry within.
It was a moment, a moment that we Jewish people crave. A moment that reminds us who we are, why we are fighting and what we stand for.
I inhaled, feeling the depth of the story penetrate my soul. I looked around, our makeshift Chabad house was surrounded by stickers, stickers with faces of those that had passed, with a quote reminding the world of their message. What else had he witnessed I wondered to myself?
Could the gravity of the lights of Chanukah truly spread light to places as dark as the graveyard of soldiers that had fallen in Gaza?
* * *
‘Is that a picture of Aloush on your phone case?’ asks Matan Sussman. ‘He’s our friend from home’ two friends reply. I had just landed in Hoi An in Vietnam and was overhearing a conversation between those that had clearly only met moments ago.
‘I was with him in Gaza the night that he fell,’ said Matan quietly. His friends are taken aback, somber yet curious and come to sit closer. There is a lot of Hebrew, a lot of army talk, but I sit and watch as two men listen to the the events leading up to the death of their childhood friend, Liav Aloush. He served in the Duvdevan Unit, Tzevet 100, the most elite team in the Unit.
I don’t understand all the details, but there were terrorists, explosions, and lots of gunfire. “Everything that could have gone wrong, went wrong,” said Matan sorrowfully. Ordinary young people, on vacation in Vietnam, yet it is nothing less than indescribable the horrors they have bore witness to.
However, the conversation had not ended, soon the somber talk transformed into smiles and laughter, as one calls out ‘Achla Aloush,’ slang for ‘incredible Aloush,’ as they segue into reminiscing about the life that he lived, the ‘tzchokim’ that they had experienced together in their short lives.
I saw another sticker on the phone right above Aloush, I didn’t want to ask any more questions. It was too heavy, too much death, too much loss, too much pain. The price of being a Jew I thought bitterly.
Did I have the strength? How did they laugh and smile? How did they live ordinary lives after all the pain that they had witnessed? What did I even experience in life living in a small quaint war free town in Sydney? What gave me the right to feel the pain too? I wasn’t there, I had never met Aloush.
‘I didn’t tell them all the details,’ Matan tells me later that Friday night in the Chabad House. It had been 24 hours since I had witnessed the encounter and I didn’t sleep well the night before. I dreamt of the war zone, the chaos and the sounds, and of course the face of Aloush that had been imprinted on my mind from the sticker on the phone case.
Later I see the two friends of Aloush sitting with Matan drinking a beer. They had only met 48 hours ago. But they shared a story. They shared Aloush.
* * *
I’m sitting at a coffee shop in Pai, Thailand. I overhear a Dad sitting with his three daughters stating that he is from Kibbutz Eilot. “Kibbutz Eilot?! I chime in.”
I spent every Friday running a Shabbat booth for five months,” I babble excitedly. “With Danielle?” they reply with equal excitement. Immediately they take out a phone, we send Danielle a video. Danielle runs the weekly Friday market in a Kibbutz right outside of Eilat.
“One day in Kislev we get a call,” recalls Rebbetzin Chanie Klein, the Shlucha of Eilat and honestly the most incredible woman I have ever met in my whole entire life.
“Kibbutz Eilot is searching for something more after the trauma of Simchat Torah, would Chabad of Eilat be interested in opening up a stand in our Friday fair?” “I could have never anticipated this,” exclaimed Chanie excitedly.
A secular Kibbutz reaching out to Chabad for a Shabbat stand in their local Friday fair? It was a modern day miracle. Sure enough it was the most beautiful stand I ever saw. Chanie quite literally brought her very own silver candlesticks to place at the center of our Mivtza booth for this auspicious occasion.
And sure enough for the next five months, every Friday we gave out Shabbat candles in the thousands.
On my final Friday I received a job offer to work at the local Kibbutz, free earrings from the stand next to us, and lots of very teary hugs and kisses.
“Chana, please come back and bake Challot with us?” asks Shira, a soldier I had met only moments ago at a BBQ at a base in the Golan. “Sure,” I said without missing a beat. I am Chabad after all.
I was leaving to Australia in two days, “tomorrow?” I heard myself say. Their base was situated four hours from the center in a muddy field with no electricity in the middle of nowhere.
I honestly never felt so connected to baking Challah, as a child it felt like a chore, after Simchat Torah it feels like a lifeline. I need it, I crave it, women coming together baking bread generation after generation, the power of prayer and the mystical energy that is undeniably palpable, there is nothing like it.
We have laughed together, we have cried together, I have travelled to bases all over Israel for it. Not for them, for me, it’s my much needed spiritual therapy.
I convinced my friend Devorah Leah Friedman, on her 24 hour break from volunteering in Eilat to rent a car and drive with me four hours there and four hours back. ‘Wait, do you have an oven on your base?’ I asked Shira. I knew the answer would be negative. I had seen the base, there wasn’t even a concrete floor, my shoes had been swallowed by mud. I had to find a solution.
The base was five minutes from Moshav Keshet, I searched the internet. “I have a strange question, do you by any chance have an oven I can borrow for an hour, I am trying to run a Challah bake for soldiers in a base close by?” I stutter on the phone to a random hotel that I had found on the internet in Moshav Keshet.
“We are closed because of the war” said the lady on the other line, “but let me send you three numbers of families on the Moshav, I’m sure you can use their oven at home.” Only in Israel.
Obviously a random Australian girl on the phone can come use a private oven, in a personal home, no questions necessary. It was a response so calm it was as if I asked her what her last name was.
Sure enough one of the numbers referred me to another family with a bigger oven. And so, after completing one of the most memorable biblical Challah bakes in a tent, on an Artillery base, in a field in the Golan Heights, with girls, soldiers on our indigenous homeland, we arrive at Sheri’s house, an Olah from the US, at 10pm at night to drop off trays of Challot to bake in her very roomy oven. I’ll say it again, only Jews, only in Israel.
“No problem, I’ll drop it off at the base in the morning” she tells us. It’s already 11pm at night, we have a four hour drive to the center and I have a flight to Australia in the morning. But Shira said the Challah was delicious.
I carried the holy dry mud from our homeland, on my shoes from the base in the Golan, all the way to Australia.
She’s sitting on the floor, outside the hostage and missing family forum, a room dedicated to the hostage families in the hostage square in Tel Aviv. It’s the 100 day anniversary of the war breaking out. Then I thought 100 days was inconceivable, now 300 plus days later, it’s incomprehensible.
There is a small ledge covering us from the rain. I see her, sitting next to Tamir Adars sister. His mother just announced on stage that he had been murdered in captivity.
I had spent one month playing house in the Gan Nir Oz Kindergarten with his four year old daughter Neta Adar. My heart was beating heavily, the tears were stuck in my chest. ‘Why Gd why?!?’ I thought bitterly.
Yet sitting next to her, I see light, her smile is infectious, she introduces herself as Mor Bayder, she is a soldier who currently prepares the Shiva for the families that have lost their loved ones in the war. That was enough to make me shiver.
“Chana, I am speaking tonight on the stage, do you mind videoing me?” she asks after a couple minutes of casual conversation. “What are you speaking about?” I asked innocently.
I should have known better. I am sitting outside the Hostage and missing family forum. “I am the granddaughter of Bracha Levinson, she was murdered on Facebook Live in Nir Oz on the seventh.” There is nothing like hearing something so horrific from the mouth of someone who witnessed it to make you feel sick in the stomach.
All I could do was gasp, “I never felt so helpless in my life,” continued Mor. “To sit online and watch your grandmother, the person I love more than anything in the world, suffering in front of your eyes, and know that there is literally nothing you can do, no help that can be sent.”
I am sitting next to Raizel, a childhood friend, currently an Instagram blogger from ‘That Jewish Family.’ They prod for more questions, questions I am too fearful to ask, questions that I know the answers will keep me up at night.
“They burnt her together with the entire house,” she continues to recount, showing us photos and videos of her beloved Savta Bracha.
She is young and she has witnessed the worst and cruelest actions perpetrated by mankind, yet ‘they didn’t succeed to break her,’ runs the commentary in my head. She is strong, resilient, kindhearted. The story hasn’t ended with her grandmothers death and suffering.
Mor continues, “she lived on the Kibbutz her entire life, she was so energetic and so active, she rode her bike every day and loved watering her garden,” a big smile appears on her face as she reminisces.
“We really hope that the beautiful Kibbutz Nir Oz flourishes and returns back to itself very soon, Bezrat Hashem,’ she concludes.
The story of the Jewish people I thought to myself, the dry bones of Yechezkiel, the garden of Nir Oz, the youth murdered at the Nova Music Festival, ‘we will dance again,’ I remind myself.
* * *
It’s 10 minutes to the fast, Tisha Bav is crawling up on us. We are on the road, cooking last minute couscous in a parking lot with eggs we picked up at the local market. We pack up and then I remember, tonight is his birthday. Shilo Raocberger.
A soul that I was introduced to through a copper bracelet worn by his two friends. What is written on the bracelet I asked innocently? “Learn to look at the good and rejoice in it.” I waited for an explanation, in 2024, if there is a quote on a bracelet or a sticker, it’s inevitably dedicated to those watching us from above.
It took me over two months to ask more questions. He was important to me, I couldn’t make sense of it, I had never met him. Yet that Tisha Bav, the day that would have been his 24th birthday I thought of him.
His name was Shilo and he was born on the birthday of Moshiach and he died for Am Yisrael. Was I going to see him again? I always believed in the revival of the dead, but on that Tisha Bav in a small communist country between Thailand and Vietnam I was desperate.
When I was asked to write this article I finally got the courage to call his three best friends, Nadav, Beeri, and Matan, to ask, to know more, for me, for you, to remember those that have sacrificed their lives for us, because as Jews we remember so we never forget.
The first thing Matan describes to me is what he was wearing on the first day that he met him in Ninth Grade. I didn’t understand the significance until the very end.
I wish I didn’t, I wish there wasn’t any significance. “He was wearing one of those camp shirts, like the merch they give you in Bnei Akiva, cut around the neck. He loved those shirts,” he reminisces, “always with those shirts.”
I look down at my shirt, there is Hebrew scribbled on the chest and on the back, ‘I love those shirts too I thought to myself,’ the feeling of representing something bigger than yourself.
They were a tight group of high school friends that had gone on to study for almost two years at the Yeshiva of Eilat. I had met them first just outside of Bet Chabad Manali in India when I first laid eyes on the bracelet.
I tried to imagine losing my best childhood friend from high school. I shudder. Metaphorically kick myself. ‘Chana, why would you ever imagine such a thing?’ I tell myself. I know for too many this is no mere imagination.
I have met enough orphans and widows, families of heroes, in the otherwise quiet residential city of Ofakim to keep my imagination dire for days.
‘How do you do it?’ I ask in desperation, like there is some secret formula to overcoming the incessant tragedy that has been suffocating us the past 365 days.
‘I have comfort knowing that he fought for Am Yisrael until the very end, that’s the only way Shilo would have done it. He would do anything to protect his soldiers, protect his people, protect his land, our land,’ says Matan with conviction.
Shilo Raocberger was born in Eli on Tisha Bav 2000 to Dudi and Nirit. One of 7 children. ‘He was always with a smile on his face, this photo is classic Shilo,’ he sends me the photo I have now included in this article. Shilo was a commander in the Golani Brigade 51 for Yeshivat Hesder, serving on the Southern R&D outpost on the Gaza border.
He had spent the first years of his army service in the Special Unit Egoz after completing his officer training and transferring to Golani. “It was an active choice, they offered him to be an officer in Egoz, but he wanted to inspire those from all different parts of Israeli society in the Golani Brigade not just those in the special units.
That was Shilo,” he explains, “he wasn’t one of those commanders that was authoritarian and firm. Yet, his soldiers performed better than every other unit under his command. They simply loved and respected him.”
I don’t want to ask about his final day. My usual talkative curious self has lost the ability to ask such questions. But, he doesn’t wait for me to ask.
“It was Simchat Torah, Shilo had organised for a Rabbi to come spend the Chag on the base. In the morning the sirens went off. Dressed in his usual merch, cut around the neck, he went to gather all his soldiers to the safe room in the Cheder Ochel.
Shilo stood holding the door. And for the first time shouts in Arabic were heard followed by grenades, shrapnel, RPG’s shot, directed towards the door. A commander of his troops until the very end, despite being badly hit by shrapnel from the grenades, Shilo stood firmly by the door, when he couldn’t stand no more, he lay down continuing to direct commands to his soldiers to protect the base at all cost until his holy soul left this world.
Not a single terrorist managed to break through past the base into civilian territory. The majority of the southern kibbutzim and Moshavim on the Gaza border had been saved. But what a price we paid. Almost a week later, on Thursday was his funeral at Har Herzl. I wasn’t there, at that moment I had never heard of Shilo, our collective souls as a Jewish nation were undeniably aching.
I don’t want to imagine, but the intrusive thoughts take over. I see his friends, his family, the pain, the loss, the immeasurable grief. How do they continue on? Somehow they wake up every morning, drink a cup of coffee and live the life that we were put on their earth to live. Not despite the loss of Shilo but because of him. Because he quite simply lived his life until the very end not for himself, but for me and you, for the entire Jewish nation. Past, present, and future.
I once saw his three friends together at a waterfall, laughing, discussing their forthcoming trip from Thailand to Japan. My imagination overtakes me, next to them I see Shilo, with his classic smile that I have now seen in all his photos, chiming in whether they want to spend three or four days is Osaka.
My imagination is in full force, I look to the right, I see more stickers on the beams holding up the pergola housing shoresh shoes and articles of clothing owned by those swimming in the waterfalls.
The stickers suddenly come to life. Each one in their early 20s. Each one sacrificing their lives for our land. I silently whisper up to heaven, ‘G-d, aren’t there enough heroes up there, surely there isn’t room for any more?’
I have had the honour to meet some of the most inspiring people, that have weathered incredulous amounts of pain in the past year. Ironically, I have been comforted by those that need the comforting the most.
Never did I think that on the Sheba Hospital Rehabilitation balcony I would catch the contagious stomach ache laugh of a wounded soldier trying to smoke a cigarette with his newly fitted prosthetic hand for the first time. ‘If we are not laughing, we are crying,’ he exclaims through his chuckles.
The story of the Jewish people this year summed up in a sentence. And yet I will say it now and I will say it again, Am Yisrael Chai. We don’t just survive, we live, we laugh, we celebrate life forever, we are a nation with Gdly antennas, and we give it our all, because at the end of the day the interconnected Gdly soul that we share, the inconceivable love that we have for each other, is the key to our survival.
There is a story in the Talmud Yerushalmi (Brachos 2:4) that has always spoken to me. On the day that our holy Bet Hamikdash was destroyed by the Romans, a Jew was in his field unbeknownst of the tragedy that had befallen him.
An Arab passing by interpreted the ‘moo’ of the cow, ‘Jew, Jew!’ cried the Arab, ‘your Holy Temple has now been destroyed.’ The cow then ‘mooed’ once more, ‘Jew, Jew!’ the Arab interpreted, Moshiach has now been born…’
The day of our destruction will inevitably be the day of our ultimate salvation. And thus I know deep in my heart, with complete and total faith, that this Simchas Torah 5785, 365 days after our tragedy, will be the day that we are reunited with all those that have tragically fallen in the past year.
May the gravity of our pain be transformed to that of inconceivable joy, family reunions and unparalleled celebration. After all, I am excited to meet my heroes and together peel off their faces on the stickers on the walls. Amen.