2023-10-22 21:48:27
Three elderly women sit in the lobby outside the dining room of the Lot Hotel in the Dead Sea, each with her festive headdress. It’s Friday evening, and one puts the book with the Kiddush into the bag, not before she kisses it, with shining eyes. He is from home. In the short time she had, she decided to take the book. An entire city, with families and communities, neighbors with all that implies, should live together door to door, floor above floor, after experiencing horrors.
They are talking about the Shabbat elevator. One claims that there is an exemption from the rabbi according to which a normal elevator can be used if there is an emergency. The second replies that everyone will do what they understand. All of a sudden all your Shabbat customs, whether you are light or strict or a little less strict, suddenly everything is exposed. How do you keep Shabbat in a place you didn’t choose to be, at a time you didn’t choose to be there.
The parents load the children on the strollers and go out into the steamy streets of the city of hotels on the Dead Sea. Everything seems normal if everything is ignored. “At least we’re here, there’s nowhere to go. The kids in the hotels are probably smoking their parents,” says Daniel, lighting a cigarette. His little daughter stopped talking in the previous round, a ‘black belt’. After intensive work her condition kept getting better, until this war came.
He is sitting with his good friend Aviel on the steps of the hotel, “I slept until 12, until he called me” says Aviel. He lived in Sderot for only 5 years, and quickly got used to the alarms. He learned about the terrorists’ infiltration from television and WhatsApp messages. Daniel was standing with another family member at the entrance of the house with machetes, while the children and women are in the security room. The bundles got closer and closer. “We closed the gate with my brother-in-law’s weights, he is alive. We had no reception since the evening and in the morning there was no electricity.”
At noon on the second day of fighting, everyone got into two vehicles and drove to Eilat. “We didn’t know where, we fled to Eilat, without knowing anything, without locking the house.” They were in an apartment in Eilat for three days until they went to the Dead Sea. Daniel traveled several times without rest to bring the family from Eilat to the Dead Sea safely. Now he serves as a representative of the municipality in the hotel.
In the face of the failures and squeaks of the state mechanisms, the organization of Sderot Municipality should be a symbol. At a very early stage, it was decided that a municipality is not a physical place, and thus municipalities were established in all the central points where there are refugees from the city. The city has rented entire floors in hotels, and is trying to manipulate the needs of the residents in this way. An elementary school and a high school were established in the Dead Sea, and every day there are shuttles that pick up the children from the hotels to the temporary school. Attempts to deploy in a chaotic situation.
Daniel says that the children don’t always go, but that the very existence of the frameworks is reassuring. The psychologists fill the free time, all the children practice resilience talks. So Aviel and Daniel try to volunteer, come up with ideas, flood needs from the field to the decision makers. A city that has been united together in hotels, is trying to figure out how to cope. Tensions rise, boredom increases, the children have school – but the adults do not work. The tension, the uncertainty, and the horrors they were exposed to, don’t help.
On Friday they returned home for the first time, to lock up and see what was happening. Daniel drove with the machete in hand, when he entered the house he realized that all the contents of the refrigerator had to be thrown away, because of the power outage. The first thing Avial did was apply for a license to carry a weapon. From home he brought the confirmation of the military service, “This is the only document I’m missing. What was will not come back, the question is what will happen,” he says, a doubt asks a doubt knows.
Daniel is not sure he will return to the city, “When you have children it’s different,” he says. “I want to go back to normal, to life,” Aviel says and Daniel says it won’t happen soon. “Look at Barry,” Aviel tells him, “who have lost families, what will you say about them? And what will you say about the parents who sent children to Gaza? There is nothing to be done, we will have to face it and there is no other country.”
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