Last week, I attended a vivid, moving photography exhibition, celebrating kibbutz and day-to-day Israeli life. I shouldn’t write about it because I’m not an objective observer, given that the photographer was my talented cousin, Adele Raemer.
But what made it exceptional, newsworthy, and inspiring yet heartbreaking was that her photographs capture life in Nirim, a Gaza border kibbutz, since 2020, meaning before it was invaded on October 7, and since.
Baseball fans love split-screen television. You watch the pitcher prepare to pitch, as the first-base runner prepares to bolt.
What a metaphor for life in Israel.
It’s the “great Israel disconnect.”
What’s true?
I wonder “what’s real in my amazing, enjoyable, reassuring, soul-expanding, day-to-day life?”
Is it that life is full of wonderful, grounded, all-too-often heroic, self-sacrificing children, many weddings and births, fun coffee dates, scenic jogs around Jerusalem, and special relatives and friends?
Or, as many others fear, is “the real Israel” its toxic politics, the terrifying headlines, the threats from so many evil enemies?
The challenges are mind-boggling. And they’re exacerbated, I regret to say, by some American Jewish friends minimizing the threats, joining the pile-on demonizing of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while trying to bond with supposed allies who increasingly threaten them – and us.
Still, I live in the moment, and what a moment it was last Thursday. My cousin, Adele, a Bronx native who moved to the Negev decades ago, has long had a remarkable artistic flair.
In 2016, she joined the online network 52Frames to grow as a photographer. Since then, by 7 a.m. every Monday (midnight East Coast US time), she posts a photograph in response to the weekly challenge. It could be a self-portrait, a landscape, a group shot, or a photograph taken with a certain technique. She’s become Nirim’s unofficial photographer-in-chief, recording the community’s life, moment by moment.
So yes. After all these years, she deserved to be honored by her community for her eye, her composition, her technique. One woman thanked her for capturing so many of her family’s special moments as her kids grew.
The photographs were displayed in the old etching studio of the late Dov Heller, a Romanian-born artist who arrived at the nine-year-old Kibbutz Nirim in 1955.
His daughter, Galia Heller Kremer, offered Adele a converted dairy barn, which is now the community’s art gallery, and greeted the guests warmly. “We could have called it From New York to Nirim, but ultimately, Adele is from here. She’s one of us,” Kremer said.
It was more appropriate to call the exhibit Seeing Home, especially, she sighed, “after all we’ve been through.” Enough said.
To those who will never come home
The exhibit was dedicated “to all our friends who never got the opportunity to see home again, after October 7,” and especially commemorated Adele’s dear friend Judih Weinstein Haggai.
Weinstein Haggai was murdered by Hamas while walking in Kibbutz Nir Oz’s fields with her husband, Gadi Haggai, early on October 7.
The snacks at the exhibit were vegan, honoring her passion. Recalling Weinstein Haggai’s warmth, patience, love, and goodness, Kremer observed, “She died so far from everything she lived.”
The split-screen nature of Nirim’s post-October 7 life hung over the delightful photos of kids in mid-jump at the pool, dads dressed in silly ways at a community Shavuot ceremony, and stunning landscapes of the surrounding fields.
Adele, who survived for 11 hours in her safe room, said that in the unnerving weeks following the massacre, “from week to week I didn’t know where I was going to sleep, but I knew that every Monday I would send in my photography assignment.” The power of ritual, of regularity, in defying catastrophe was quintessentially Israeli.
Beyond feeling how, for these survivors, the pall of October 7 infects everything, the juxtaposition of Nirim’s renaissance, with Weinstein Haggai’s beloved Nir Oz just 2.5 kilometers away, suspended in October 7, was sobering.
On the day of the massacre, Nirim lost five civilians and had five members kidnapped. Those devastating losses pale compared to the 47 souls Hamas murdered in Nir Oz, while kidnapping 76 people – 67 of whom were alive. Fifty-four eventually were freed.
What it costs to survive
Rehabilitating Nirim cost approximately 43 million shekels. Since last summer, it’s fully restored and functional – physically at least.
Most residents returned. It will cost over 10 times more to rebuild Nir Oz – and will take years. “Hamas didn’t just set out to murder us, kidnap us, abuse us,” Adele explained, “they wanted to destroy our communities, the societies we’ve built.”
Of more than 30 individual civilian communities assaulted that day, Hamas hit 22 kibbutzim. Intelligence documents and the terrorists’ boasts revealed that these terrorists delighted in ravaging the kibbutzim – all of which are within Israel’s original borders, the so-called Green Line.
But to Hamas and their enablers worldwide, every inch of Israel is “occupied territory.” Every Israeli is a “settler.” Even the most secular, left-wing, Peace Now kibbutz is an illegitimate “settlement,” reflecting the kind of Zionist success Hamas cannot tolerate and seeks to annihilate.
Apparently, it is quite easy for the world to forget that Hamas and other Gazans planned, intentional, unspeakable horrors. Yet the people of the Gaza border communities can’t forget – even the “lucky ones” back living their seemingly-normal lives.
Few Israelis forget either. That’s why we need our friends worldwide to understand how deep the trauma runs and how much we have learned about our many enemies’ non-negotiable evil.
Our friends should also take pride in Israel’s Zionist resilience. It’s remarkable that so many of those who were overrun on October 7 have returned, as Nirim’s members have, or are still vowing to return home.
Professor Gil Troy is a Distinguished Scholar of North American History at McGill University and a Senior Research Fellow at the JPPI, the Jewish People Policy Institute. He is the author of nine books on presidential history and nine on Zionism, including Theodor Herzl: Zionist Writings from the Library of the Jewish People, as well as his latest e-book, The Essential Guide to the US-Israel Partnership: the 250th Anniversary Edition.