Life in Israel right now means being on edge all the time. There is tension in the air, along with rocket airstrikes. Families are torn apart as parents are sent to the frontlines. Businesses are quiet as workers are called to fight, or to stay home with children since many schools have gone remote. Normally bustling streets are emptied; so are many supermarket shelves. And everyone, everywhere, is grieving.
“Every person in Israel knows somebody who was murdered, who was raped, burned or kidnapped,” said Tel Aviv restaurant owner James Oppenheim.
Now, he fears the rest of the world will forget the horrors Israelis are facing daily.
“As everyone around the world moves on to the next trauma, we are still here living through history. Picking up the pieces,” he said. “The 15 minutes of grace that was given to Israel is quickly running out and we all know it.”
Here, five Israelis reveal how life has changed.
This was supposed to be a joyous week outside Jerusalem for the Abelow family, as son Yakir, 23, was set to marry his fiancée, Maya, 23, from the town of Modi’in.
The wedding hall canceled the 300-person event “because it’s wartime. Everything is canceled,” said Yakir’s father Avi Abelow, 49. But “Jewish law says you’re not supposed to postpone weddings.”
In spite of the tragedy, it was decided the wedding must go on last Sunday.
Both father and son had to be temporarily released from IDF service: Yakir is stationed on the frontlines and Avi is on active duty with the reserves. Their rabbi ended up performing the ceremony in uniform, complete with his gun slung across his chest, before running back to base.
“You don’t understand how much strength you’re giving the Jewish people by getting married right now,” the rabbi said at the ceremony, held at a synagogue hall. “This is a spiritual nuclear bomb that you’re doing now.”
Avi, who is the founder and CEO of a media company, was grateful to switch army shifts to be there for his son, as more than 300,000 reservists have been called up and “many homes in Israel today are without fathers.”
But, he added, “It’s a privilege to protect the Jewish people in our ancestral homeland. We’re a small country. There isn’t one person who isn’t one degree of separation from someone who was either killed or injured in the massacre.”
That made the wedding all the more important for the family, he said: “They tried to kill us and we lived. That’s the Jewish answer.”
Since opening in 2019, James Oppenheim’s hip Tel Aviv burger joint Bodega American Kitchen had been a destination for both Jewish and Muslim customers.
Now the cool hangout has been repurposed as a hub for delivering kosher-bacon burgers and other food to soldiers — and those sitting shiva.
“Bodega has a 10-year-old toasting the bun and a 14-year-old smashing the burgers. It’s all hands on deck — all the kids are recruited into the company and running the place,” said Oppenheim of his nine kids, ages 10 to 28, who decorate every bag with words of support.
His two oldest sons are soldiers on the frontlines.
Oppenheim’s normally teeming neighborhood is now a “ghost town,” said the 54-year-old Long Island native, who moved to Israel after college more than 30 years ago. “Dozens of times every day, we’re running to the bomb shelter. You hear the sirens and the few people who are even on the streets just vanish.
“Kids are not in school. No one knows when and where they’re going to sleep every day,” he added. “I’m not complaining; I’m opening a window to show what’s happening to ordinary people doing extraordinary things in insane times.”
His family recently made a food delivery to a shiva in the old city of Jerusalem, for a young man who was “beautiful, young, strapping,” one of some 260 people killed by Hamas during the attack on the Nova music festival.
Oppenheim said of the shiva: “The screams of anguish, it’s unbearable.”
He is well aware that it could have been his family.
“Three weeks ago my children were at a rave in the north. Two weeks ago my wife was at a yoga retreat in the south. It literally could have been us or our children — it’s not theory,” Oppenheim said. “Everyone is walking around the streets in the heart knowing it could have been them — religious, non-religious, settler, left wing. We underestimated [Hamas’s] intentions, but they underestimate our resilience.”
Living on a kibbutz along the Gaza border has never been easy, but nothing prepared Deborah Ben Aderet, 46, for the day Hamas “tried to force themselves in to slaughter and kidnap us.” Her family hid until IDF forces showed up.
After evacuating with only a few essentials for her daughters, ages 6 and 8, Ben Aderet recalled her husband warning them to look away from the “bodies of dead terrorists on the side of the road. Thankfully my girls didn’t see.”
Since then, they have been staying at a hotel with others who have been displaced. One of their first nights there, sirens pierced the air and Ben Aderet went right back into panic mode. “I was frantic trying to find my girls,” she said. “It was terrifying.”
Most days, humanitarian groups send in children’s entertainment to help distract the youngsters, including clowns to lead them in a sing-along. “It lifted the kids’ spirits and even the adults’. It was good for everyone,” Ben Aderet said, noting that her eight-year-old told her: “I was really happy the clowns came. I really had fun for a while and forgot how sad I am.
“It’s a moment of happiness, but it’s amidst such horror,” said Ben Aderet, who teaches pattern design. “All we can do is try to stay strong.”
She’s doing so in the face of images coming out of her community, where rockets struck the building housing a day care her children once attended.
“It’s a ghost town there, filled with soldiers and tanks,” Ben Aderet said.
Her 6-year-old, desperate to return home, recently asked: “Can’t we do Zoom with Hamas and say we want peace?”
While Ben Aderet is anxious about the future and traumatized by the past, she looks ahead: “We’re homeless … but I’m grateful we’re alive while so many innocent Israelis are not.”
Located in Moshav Hodaya, near the rocket-battered coastal city of Ashkelon, Michal Havivian’s namesake farm is struggling — its usual 100-strong workforce decimated as employees are called to serve in the IDF.
Several of the women who haven’t been called to war are at home with kids as many schools have gone remote.
“My life has been turned upside down,” said Havivian, a 40-year-old mother of five who started the farm with her husband 17 years ago. “The men went into the army and the women have husbands who went to frontlines — they’re prisoners in their own home with the children. It’s not safe [to be outside] with the rockets.”
Meanwhile, supermarket shelves are empty, exacerbating the need for home deliveries.
To keep the vegetable farm, which produces everything from 60 different varieties of cherry tomatoes to peppers, cucumbers and eggplant, running, Havivian, her family and a greatly reduced staff are working “around the clock.”
“When you’re at war, it’s not only enough to go to the frontlines and fight. You have to fight in the fields and prepare the foods for the winter,” she said. “You need to deliver the vegetables to the houses with women alone with babies.”
Havivian has taken in relatives who lived on a nearby border kibbutz and now have no home to return to. “Their neighbors got so badly massacred,” she said.
She is also caring for several workers who arrived mere days before the attacks — from Thailand, Bhutan, Uganda, Tanzania, Ghana — to study agriculture.
“They don’t know the job or the country,” she said. “The workers thought we were having fireworks for the holiday” when the first rockets rained down.
One of the things that haunts her most is that many Israelis cannot properly bury their dead. Funerals now “are too dangerous — [Hamas] will shoot at us,” Havivian said, noting that families must look for burial sites “far from their homes.” Her children’s beloved teacher was killed, but she’s not shielding them from the horror.
“We can’t hide from the kids what’s going on and we don’t want to,” she said.
Noga Guttman’s family is living a modern nightmare.
“I wasn’t prepared for the videos. It was really painful and terrifying. It breaks you down. It’s psychological warfare,” said the 37-year-old of clips posted online that, she said, show her beloved cousin Evyatar David, 22, after he was abducted from the Nova music festival.
One that Guttman said she saw on Telegram shows a shirtless and bound Evyatar being dragged around by the neck by an armed gunman amid what Guttman, who lives in Kfir Saba, said looks like the streets of Gaza.
Another, alo posted online, shows the young coffee-shop manager and others tied up and lying on the floor. The Post has seen both videos.
“He looked really scared,” said Guttman.
Guttman, who is pregnant with her second child, said her family is, “ironically, considered one of the lucky ones — we got to see [David] alive in two videos,” said Guttman.
She heard from one of David’s friends who made it out of the rave safe that her cousin “was already on the run, escaping” but was captured after he “stopped to help people hurt or in shock. I think that says a lot about him.”
As she grieves for her missing cousin, she also worries about raising her toddler daughter and a coming baby in this world. “It’s very hard to think about what we are bringing him into — this reality.”