Living on Shlichus, Less Than 10 Miles From Gaza

By Rabbi Levi Kantor – Shliach in Patish, Israel

Less than ten miles from Gaza is Moshav Patish, the place of my Shlichus. That’s right, Patish, funny name. But that’s its name, and it has been my home for close to seven years.

For nearly seven years, I have been so close to monsters who desire blood, my blood, and the blood of every Jew, but It never felt that way. I never felt that way until that morning of Simchas Torah.

Gaza, that hateful place where babies are taught to kill. Gaza, that hell on earth where brainwashing people to spill the blood of innocent Jews is a top priority.

So close and yet psychologically so far. Whenever those monsters send rockets, we can see most of the Iron Dome hits from the beautiful view in my backyard. We have thirty seconds to get to a bomb shelter. Still, Patish itself was mostly calm, although we could see everything happening in the sky. Most of the rockets were not directly overhead, so we didn’t have to go through the scare of hearing sirens often.

Everything changed Simchas Torah morning.

Early Simchas Torah morning, I wake up. Not sure what time, but something was bothering me. Sounds like lots of them. Far off, I can hear what sounds like rockets exploding when hit by iron dome missiles, but strangely, it can’t be seen. I have never heard so many “Booms” at one time, and I have been around for some of the largest barrages.

Ok! I get up, wash my hands, say Modeh Ani, and go to the front door. I open the door and, very confused, walk outside. Then I hear them, sirens, everywhere, north, southeast, and west from every direction besides my peaceful Patish.

Finally, I figured it out. They, the beasts of evil, had awakened to ruin our Yom Tov. Like I said, from my backyard, I can witness it all even though I’m not in the trajectory of most of the rockets, Boruch Hashem!

I quickly go to wake my wife. It’s obvious that I only have a few minutes, maybe a few seconds, before sirens go off in our Moshav. Such a barrage will surely be aimed in our direction, too (I wasn’t wrong. During the next few hours, we receive a record-breaking forty sirens). I decided with my wife not to wake the children. Am I nuts!? What about going to a bomb shelter!? Good point, but like many of the homes in my area, we don’t have one, and being that it takes thirty seconds, there’s no way I’m getting to one in time. So, for the time being, we’ll stay put and not traumatize the children.

One problem with the plan. Me and wife get very nervous when there are sirens. How in the world are we going to play calm? Luckily for us, we have a secret weapon, Hashem. See, on that day, Hashem decided to bestow upon me and my wife the gift of calm.

Almost immediately, the sirens start. Thoughts running through my head, “No shul, no dancing, this is going to be a rotten Simchas Torah. It’s hard enough spending Simchas Torah without other Lubavitchers, but this! This is just the worst.” If only I knew… if only I knew how Hashem was protecting me at that moment.

Eventually, my oldest woke up. “Mami Tati! What’s all the sirens? Why didn’t you wake me up?” oh, I laugh. “it’s nothing, ziskiet, we have some Sisu and Simchu in the sky for Simchas Torah.” She’s bewildered; we’re never this calm around sirens.

Thoughts running through my head: “I’m going to be so grumpy today, sitting at home no Hakofas grrrr, wait! Stop! Don’t go there. On Simchas Torah, we must be Happy! We have to dance, Chassidim dance! As a Chassid as a Shliach, I must dance!”

By now, the other children are awake; my wife tells me at some point that she thought she heard automatic gunshots. I told her it was probably something else. Besides, she doesn’t even know what gunshots sound like.

And then, at some point, quiet. A lull in the continuous Booming since the morning. I go out of the house and head into the street. I see the neighbor’s son with another boy from the Moshav; they both look into their phones with serious expressions. It was odd because they’re the type of people who hide their phones when they see me on Shabbos, but then again, we had just spent several hours listening to sirens and booms, so it made sense that they would be checking out what happened.
One of them looks at me. “Chag Sameach!” I boom (a different sort of boom).

“Rabbi,” he replies, “if you knew what was going on, you wouldn’t say “Chag Sameach.”

“What happened?” I ask.
“Hundreds of Terrorists, maybe 200, are running wild. There are several hundred dead, and they’re in Urim (3 miles from me in one direction) and Ofakim (4 miles in the other direction). Any moment, they could be here,” he says, pointing toward the open field just behind me.

“Are you sure? That doesn’t make sense,” I say.

“Rabbi, no one knows what’s happening, but it’s all true.”

I head quickly back home. I don’t know what to think. Something is going on, and obviously, the guy is receiving exaggerated reports.

I go inside my house, lock the door, and quietly tell my wife that there’s a serious situation with terrorists and we have to keep the door locked the entire time.
We were utterly oblivious to the danger we were in and to the horrors happening literally a few minutes from our house. I made a Kiddush with the children; then we had Hakofas at home singing at the top of our lungs, hugging the toy Seffer Torahs to our hearts while ignoring the constant sirens and booms overhead.
I stop my story here to tell you what was going on.

If you open Google Maps, you can check the distance between Patish and Re’im, where the music fest was happening; it’s less than six miles.

Although I didn’t go to shul because I live a fifteen-minute walk from there, many people live near the shul who decided to brave it, and also, there’s a corona minyan who survived until this day with a group of neighbors.

The latter was trying to do Hakofas in between sirens when people started walking out of the fields surrounding the Moshav. They looked strange; they were hysterical, many half-dressed, and some had blood on them. The people there saw these groups emerging from the fields, and somewhere scared, others yelled at them, “What are you guys doing in the fields during this crazy barrage of rockets?” but they kept on coming, more and more.

These were survivors running away from terrorists. They had come on foot, running through the desert and fields; this is how close we are to the massacre of Re’im.
By now, even some Shabbos observant Yidden were turning on their phones and TVs to find out what was happening. Very quickly, it became apparent that a large group of terrorists was chasing down many people.

Now let me explain something about Moshav life: it’s the wild west of Israel, no not guns, freedom, freedom to roam and enjoy the earth. A thirteen-year-old can take a horse, motorbike, desert bike, or simply an electric bike and ride out with his friends into the great yonder, speeding over sand dunes and flying over ditches (yup, it’s dangerous, and each of these kids has a Malach who’s probably a nervous wreck worrying about the next genius stunt he has to save his little neshomale from) in other words this is their land, they know the desert here better than anyone else. This is the way it has been for several generations.

Many of the Moshavnikim decide to go out and save people from the clutches of the monsters. There are no better-suited people for the job; they know every hill, every dune, and every ditch. And so they drive, they drive, and they dive, dive behind dunes to avoid bullets and RPG rockets, they find someone running away or wounded, load him on the pickup (I did say this is the wild west of Israel), and continue. When the pickup is full, they head back to the Moshav (a six-minute ride by way of dune and ditch), drop off the survivors, and head off again to save more people.

Some people saved over a hundred Yidden on that day. A very sad story is of Assaf. Assaf was one of these drivers, and while he was risking his life to save Yidden, his daughter, his oldest daughter, a soldier serving in Urim, a post only a three-minute ride away from Patish, was being murdered with every single soldier and police officer at that post (I believe there was only one survivor).

At the Moshav, an emergency shelter and medical bay have been set up; we can’t send them anywhere. There are reports of terrorists in every direction. In one corner, a person lists everyone coming in so they can contact their families. In another corner, a person is lying with a severed hand. “I need more bandages!” yells someone attending the wounded. “get me as much rope as you can or anything to tie with,” roars another who’s administering emergency blocking of vital arteries. A small group is walking around giving out water and something to eat to the survivors.

I stop here, dear friends, and ask: almost every village and post was attacked on the road leading from Gaza to Ofakim; the highway was filled with bullet-ridden vehicles, and anything that moved was shot at. My Moshav is the only one with gates always open. Yet the terrorists just drove right by. Not one of those monsters entered. We, unlike most of the other towns and villages in the area, had no organized response in place of an attack on Chas Veshalom. And Hashem Protected us: “They have eyes but do not see.” we were saved and merited to save. Every day since then, I think about it. We, like Avrohom Avinu, were thrown into the flames, yet we had no hair on our bodies singed.

Thank You, Hashem.