Three Funerals and a Wedding

Life as I knew it, ended on October 7th. Neither my life, nor my beloved home on Kibbutz Nirim — just a mile from the border with the Gaza Strip, where I raised four kids, nor my region where I taught hundreds of students over the course of almost four decades, will ever be the same. Despite our ongoing tragedies and losses, the world continues to turn.

Last week, I was blessed with a spark of light: a celebration of life with a new family being formed despite all we have been through during this past year, personally and nationally. Both the bride and the groom have been serving in the reserves for months, but they made space to wed and bring joy to the world, to distract from the darkness. As is traditional at Jewish celebrations, as with the breaking of the glass to remind us of the destruction of the Temples, they paid homage to our tragedies from this past year. As a living example, a survivor of those tragedies that triggered this upheaval to all our lives, I was honored to deliver that homage through bittersweet tears during the ceremony. And then we rejoiced, as the mitzva says: “to gladden the bride and groom”.

The celebrations were barely over, when I woke up the following morning to the news that the bodies of Yagev Buchshtav and Nadav Poppelwell, hostages stolen from their homes on my kibbutz, were among the six who had been brought back to Israel from the bowels of Gaza. They were all kidnapped alive. They were all murdered in captivity.

Yagev was a talented craftsman and musician who loved experimenting with different sounds. He grew up in my backyard. Literally. His parents’ home is right behind mine. He was kidnapped on October 7th together with his wife Rimon. She had been a student of mine: sharp as a whip and no one’s fool. She grew up on Kibbutz Magen, right nearby. They were high school sweethearts who went their own ways during the army, then found each other again, and became inseparable. They had a home filled with music and pets and love.

Nadav must have been about 4 years old when I moved to Nirim. I was Nadav’s English teacher, too, at some point during his junior high school career. His English was perfect, thanks to his British-born dad and his South African mom. His accent, though, was pure Israeli. His dad, Rafi, lived in the house in front of mine, but he passed away years ago. Nadav’s mom Channa lived in the semi-detached house next to Nadav’s, three houses away from mine. They never locked their doors in case 79-year-old Channa fell and needed help.

They were kidnapped together to Gaza. He was a devoted son, and looked after his mom before that black Sabbath day, as well as after. They were both diabetic, but he didn’t take his insulin while in the tunnels so that Channa could have it. He was a quiet man, a brilliant man. I never wrote about him in social media after his abduction because the family were afriad that if the terrorists understood just how gifted a computer genius he actually was, we would never see him again.  When his captors would ask him something about the cellphone, he would claim not to understand technology. Tragically, that ruse did not keep him alive.

This is how Channa describes him:

“Nadav was a quiet, gentle man. He loved to play bridge, Rummikub, cards at every opportunity. He was an avid reader, enjoying science fiction. A good murder also did it. He enjoyed vacations in London, his favourite city. He was very close to his young sister and her family. Roi and Nadav were close friends. He always was ready to give a helping hand.
Nadav protected me with his body from the Hamas.”

Nadav’s older brother, Roi, was also a special person; but very different from Nadav. He was brilliant in his own way. I worked in his children’s house when I arrived on Nirim as a soldier in the Nachal (agricultural) branch of the IDF. In those days the children of the kibbutz did not sleep at home with their parents. The women who worked in the children’s houses would put them to bed at night and scramble their eggs in the mornings for their breakfast break, whilst the children were in their classroom, in the same building where they slept and ate. Roi struggled in school, starkly contrasting to his younger sibling, but was a talented artist with a style of his own. He was a “dog whisperer,” who cherished the fields and the gardens of Nirim. He loved to work with his hands. It was a garden tool that he used as a weapon while apparently attempting to protect his friends and fight off the terrorists who had invaded our kibbutz. His body was found a few rows away from his house. He was temporarily buried on his sister’s kibbutz near Haifa shortly after October 7th, since she was the only one of that nuclear family who was alive and unkidnapped at the time. That is the same kibbutz to where their mom was brought upon her release from captivity after 51 days, and lovingly welcomed. She was released, but Nadav remained. The hope at the time was that they would be able to bury Roi on Nirim once both Channa and Nadav had been released from captivity.

These three sons of Nirim: Yagev, Nadav, and Roi, were finally brought home to the place where they were all born and raised. The three of them were laid to rest in our beautiful, shady cemetery, where wild deer often roam and the only sounds you hear these days are the chirping of the birds and the sudden explosions from not very far away, in Gaza.