(What’s up?) מה נשמע?

These simple, innocent questions that we automatically use at the beginning of an interaction with someone we know have, since October 7, 2023, become loaded in Israel.  With every phone call or conversation with my work colleagues or friends since October 7th, there has been a hesitation before answering this simple question. It’s as if you can hear the internal debate – do I tell the truth or just provide the accepted and expected answer “I’m fine”? Until about a month ago, most people I knew ended this internal debate with the answer “I’m fine considering the circumstances.” Now, most choose a more honest truth – “No, I’m not doing so well.”

 Why are we not doing so well? On one hand, there is pride in what the army has accomplished in the last month – the beeper attack and the assassination of Nasrallah. For many in the north, it feels like the army and the government are finally paying attention to our home.  On the other hand, it is a year since this war began. There is no end in sight and our hostages are still not home. The escalation in the north has led to more and more people being affected directly from the war. More rockets falling across larger swaths of the north, forcing schools to move online for a week from Haifa to Tiberias and north. Personally, the escalation caused me to move a work retreat to an online format instead of meeting physically so my staff would not need to travel from the north. 

 And of course, there was the missile attack from Iran on October 1. Lior and I already knew on the afternoon of October 1 that Iran was preparing for a missile attack due to reports in the news media. When we received alarms directly to our phones, we were not surprised. We grabbed the kids and ran to our safe room, which is my son’s bedroom. My husband managed communication with the family and I kept the children calm, as it was already the third siren of the day. The first one was while they were at school, the second one was a half an hour earlier while one of my daughters was in the shower. She had to run to the safe room dripping wet in a towel, crying. We were in the safe room for about 30 minutes. We spoke with my mother-in-law, I read stories, and we kept reassuring the children they were safe and gave many hugs. In the background, we could hear the nearby explosions of the Iron Dome intercepting the missiles. After about a half an hour, we left the safe room and continued our evening – finishing dinner, brushing teeth, reading stories before bed. My children all chose to sleep in the safe room and my little one refused to go to the bathroom by himself. 

 The next day we received reports that a missile fell on an abandoned building in Hod HaSharon, causing damage to hundreds of houses nearby. No one was physically hurt.

As I tell my children, we are lucky that Israel cares about its civilians unlike Hamas and Hezbollah; we have the Iron Dome, safe rooms, bomb shelters, and accurate warning systems. However, there is a psychological cost that our children and we pay despite being physically safe. It took three nights before my daughters returned to sleep in their own room. My son constantly tells me he is scared to go to kindergarten because he misses me despite having a great time. All my children, as well as myself, are on edge and go from calm to angry in a second without thinking. We can’t make any definite plans – all is contingent on the war situation. One of my daughters is heartbroken that the start of a long anticipated extracurricular activity keeps being delayed because of the war. This is the mental situation of my family who are lucky – we are safe (relatively) in a comfortable apartment in the center.  We are parents with education and means who are home with our children. We are surrounded by family and a supportive community. I can only imagine the situation of other families who are dealing with constant rocket fire and sirens, who don’t have a safe room, who don’t have constant work because of the war, who have lost a close loved one, or where the father is being constantly called up for reserve duty. This is why we, as a country, are not ok. 

 As we face the year anniversary of the October 7th massacre, the start of the war, and the evacuation from our beloved home and community, I want to end with what I wrote to my staff in honor of this day:

A year has passed since we woke up and had our lives shattered at the personal, college, community, and country level.

May we remember and honor the heroes that we have lost while they were defending the innocent, especially Ido Shani, Keren’s brother who fell a year ago.

May we mourn for the innocent lives lost on all sides of this war and the destruction it has brought.

May we pray for the safety of our soldiers who are currently serving to protect us – they are our husbands, wives, sons, daughters, and students.

May the hostages return home.

May we pray for the social workers, psychologists, teachers, volunteers, parents, and all who care for others to have the strength and energy to carry on their work.

May we find inspiration from each other and those around us who, despite uncertainty and challenges, continue to make the world a better place.

Thank you, my staff, for being my inspiration for this past year, and may we serve as an example of how this country is and should be.

Shalom,

Liz Dovrat

Elizabeth Dovrat is the daughter of Barbara Dudley, Jewish Community Relations Council chair. She occasionally writes for Jewish News on life in Israel with her family.

When my mom asked my husband and me to write about our feelings and reactions to the events in the past week (June 3 – 9) in Israel (increased rocket and drone attacks by Hezbollah, raging fires across the Upper Galilee and the Golan Heights ignited by these attacks), our first reaction was “What’s the purpose? Our feelings haven’t changed since October 7th – we are still worried, angry, frustrated, and sad.”

Despite this initial reaction, I realized that writing these updates is our tiny contribution to explaining the reality we live in as internal refugees (my heart still sinks each time I say this out loud) during this war.

The fires last week came dangerously close to our kibbutz, Yiftah. Our Kita Konenot, a group of mostly 30- to 50-year-old men from the kibbutz with combat experience who are the first line of defense for the kibbutz (most Jewish cities and villages have these), firefighters from the Galilee Elyion municipality, and a few soldiers were able to prevent the fire from spreading to the houses in the kibbutz. Yet our orchard and vineyard were burnt – some of our family’s most beloved places in the kibbutz. It is where I run, where we bike, where the grandparents take the kids to spend an afternoon, where we go and pick fruit right off the trees. Several houses in Kiryat Shmona were not as lucky – the fires near the city destroyed several houses. Numerous more have been damaged by rockets, drones, and shrapnel. These pictures – blacken hills, damaged houses, cause my heart to break a little bit more each time.

The fires raised a reoccurring parenting issue for us – how much to tell the kids? At first, we were planning not to mention the fires at all – there was no damage, we (unfortunately) are not going back soon – why worry the kids? But slowly we realized that their friends may ask them about the fires. Even though the fires near Yiftah did not make it into the traditional news media, the images spread on social media. I had mothers from the Hod Hasharon community where we live ask how we are. If the moms were asking, the chances of children in my twins’ second-grade class knowing seemed likely. So, we decided to tell them, emphasizing that no houses were damaged thanks to the hard work of the Kita Konenot. My five year-old son’s reaction was “what about the trailers for the tractors? Are they ok?” My twins asked about the orchard.

Another feeling that my husband and I experience constantly is the heaviness of the situation through our work. It is the end of the school year, so schools and teachers are making decisions about next year. For most of Israel, the war doesn’t affect these decisions – you just continue as if it is a normal year. But for teachers and schools in the north, how can you do this if you don’t know where you will be or how many students will register or where these students will be? Many evacuated teachers, including my husband, have had to make difficult decisions to leave their school up north to provide stability for their families. Every single person from the north is faced with impossible decisions – if they are evacuated, where should they work or register their children in the fall? If they weren’t evacuated, should they leave anyway because of all the sirens and rocket fire? And don’t forget the many parents and significant others worried about their loved ones fighting in Gaza.

For me, I feel this heaviness, but also hope when speaking with the faculty of my college, Tel Hai. Again, each person is facing their own difficulties – those evacuated like myself but who have moved multiple times or who lack childcare, those with multiple children serving in Gaza, one who lost her son in Gaza last month, those who live in kibbutzim that weren’t evacuated but deal with sirens on a daily basis and worry about their children when they are at school. However, my colleagues want to provide our students with the best learning experience despite these challenges. And looking towards next year, with no return to our beloved campus on the horizon, my college is determined to locate and run an alternative campus a few times a week to provide students and lecturers the chance to meet face to face. But how can you plan a course schedule when you don’t know where you will teach or how many days will be face-to-face and much of your evacuated administrative staff is burnt out and facing a summer of no childcare in hotel rooms? These are the wicked problems facing not just our college. I hope I can muster and maintain the perspective of my dean and other colleagues who recognize the challenges but see the opportunity to build something new that will benefit the college and the region in the future.

To end, I’ll paint a picture of the juxtaposition of our current life. In the center, life continues as normal, with the war breaking into the consciousness only through news and social media. This weekend we took the children to a waterpark where we all had a blast. In the early afternoon, the release of the four hostages was announced over the loudspeaker, causing the crowd to cheer and clap. And then everyone continued playing in the water.

Elizabeth Dovrat is the daughter of Barbara Dudley, Jewish Community Relations Council chair. She occasionally writes for Jewish News on life in Israel with her family.