A week before October 7, 2023, Gavriella Zahavi-Asa and Ro’i Hershkovici moved into an “amazing” apartment together in Metulla. They were both students at colleges in Tel Hai in northern Israel – she in art, and he in environmental studies. She also finished a course as a yoga instructor and was about to start teaching in several places in northern Israel. They decided to stay in the North and began building a life there together.
“We spent a week cleaning and organizing, and then we were evacuated,” Zahavi-Asa told The Jerusalem Post in a recent phone interview.
For two months, she said, they stayed with Roi’s parents in Moshav Gilon, between Acre and Carmiel, waiting to move back. But they didn’t want to just wait around to go home and decided to spend some time in nature.
“After two months of going crazy and just being in shock and not knowing what to do, we decided to go to Mitzpeh Ramon,” Zehavi told the Post. “We have a jeep, and we walked and hiked the whole machtesh (crater). We slept in a tent for three months. We spent a month in Sde Boker, a month in the Arava, and then time in Eilat. We did hikes and drove around with our dog, Stevie, a German Shepherd.”
When it started getting hot, they moved north to the Kinneret, alternating between camping and staying with friends. Zehavi said the trip was a way to take control of what appeared to be an out-of-control situation.
“Any time to be out in nature is good,” she said. “It’s positive to take control of our life and know our survival is our responsibility. We cooked; we made sure we had enough water. That was empowering. Here, there’s so much going on, but in the desert, everything is silent. In general, we all listen to the news too much and stress out. It was amazing to know we could travel in our country in a time of war and disconnect.”
Now, almost a year later, they are still unable to return to their home, so they decided to embark on a trip to India.
“While we were traveling in Israel, we were also in search of a new home, but nothing compares to our North,” she said. “We didn’t want to start a temporary life somewhere else. So, we decided to give it some more time and, in the meantime, to clear our heads and travel to the Far East. We are starting in India, and the plan is to continue to Thailand and Vietnam. The plan is to travel for four months, but it all depends on the war. We hope that by the time we come back, we will be able to go home.”
How evacuees have been coping with not having their homes
All this travel, both inside and outside Israel, is financed by the money they receive as evacuees. Evacuees have a choice: the government can pay for their hotel stays or give them 6,000 shekels monthly. She said their apartment in Metulla, where they lived for only a week, costs 4,000 shekels a month. The owner, who works for the army, offered to cut the rent to 2,000 shekels a month as long as the war continues. But they didn’t want him to lose money, so they compromised in the middle and decided to renew the lease next year.
At the same time, she worries about their future. Their community of friends is now scattered around the world. The jobs they had planned have disappeared. Their future is uncertain.
“We thought we were going to start our lives, careers, and creating a home – taking the next steps of creating a life. Everything is up in the air and has been for 10 months. We have a lot of friends who decided to move on, and a lot decided to stay in this in-between place.”
She said the uncertainty about their future is tough but it has only strengthened their relationship. “My Mom says that if we can survive this, we can survive anything together.”
OTHERS DECIDED to pursue opportunities abroad that they might not have had the war not happened. Yael Cohen and Sarit Brinn are married and the parents of Daniel, 8. When the war began, they were living in Kibbutz Eilon, less than two kilometers from the Lebanese border.
On October 8, the day after the war started, they prepared their shelter with water bottles and mattresses. Cohen’s parents, who had been visiting, left to drive back to Jerusalem.
“Later that night, I started getting really scared, and I called a friend who lives in our community and told him that I wanted to leave. He said I shouldn’t go until the morning. So we packed ourselves into one bedroom – the three of us and two dogs. Sarit took our biggest kitchen knife and hid it under the mattress. We locked everything and closed the shutters and tried to make it OK for our son.”
The next morning, they were ordered to evacuate, she said.
Originally, they were told they would be gone for 48 hours, she continued. So they packed a small suitcase with three outfits for each of them, along with some food and toys for the dogs, and went to Cohen’s parents in Jerusalem. As the days stretched into weeks, they bought some new clothes.
Three weeks into the war, they drove home to the kibbutz to clean out their closets, leaving Daniel with her parents. Due to an exchange of fire between Israel and Hezbollah, the roads were closed for several hours, and they got stuck. It was a frightening experience.
After a month and a half, she said, they signed Daniel up for second grade in Jerusalem, and the school welcomed him. Meanwhile, Brinn was in Bainbridge Island, near Seattle, training service dogs for an organization that she had previously worked for. Over the past three years, she had gone back and forth, spending a month or two in the US each time.
Cohen continued, “When she returned to Israel, Brinn said she felt better abroad; there, she felt like she could breathe, and it was nice getting away from all the tension.”
At the same time, Cohen, who had been coaching volleyball in the North, had suffered a sports injury and was on crutches. She had tried to keep up her coaching, traveling once a week to Beersheba, where many of her young players had been evacuated. However, the distance and the sports injury presented significant challenges.
In addition, Daniel was struggling to adjust to living in an apartment in Jerusalem after the kibbutz life he had known up to that point.
So, they decided to “relocate” for a year or two to Bainbridge Island until they could return to their home in northern Israel. They left Israel at the end of February. The hardest part, she said, was leaving their two dogs behind. Her cousin took one dog, while her parents took the other.
When they arrived in Bainbridge Island, Daniel did not speak English. The school has been welcoming, and he is studying in an individualized program. After six months, Cohen said, he now understands 99 percent of what happens in school and speaks English well, although they continue to talk in Hebrew at home.
“At the beginning, we had a lot of guilt about being here (in the US) and not there (Israel),” she said. “But we just couldn’t handle it, and my injury just added to the stress. We felt like nobody really cared about the northern evacuees.”
At the same time, she added, “We feel that we got the ground back under our feet.”
And most importantly, for any parent, their son has thrived.
“Daniel became a new person,” she said. “We took a load off his shoulders, and that was very apparent. We also felt like we could breathe again and just be.”
There are no other Israelis where they live, but there are other Jews. She said they continue to deal with guilt for not being in Israel, but they know their relocation is temporary. They intend to move back to the North once it is safe again.