Rising from the ashes: Moshav Mevo Modi’im marks one year since fire
Social Affairs: A year after a devastating fire, the residents of Moshav Mevo Modi’im refuse to lose faith
By MAAYAN JAFFE-HOFFMANZELDA BURKEY outside her burned-out house: The country and people around the world opened their hearts and hands(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
Newly planted flower pots rest near the side of the road. Patches of green grass. A rose bush. Lilies. The colors pop like a rainbow after the rain, a reminder of the counterculture, hippie, rainbow gathering that Moshav Mevo Modi’im once was.On Lag Ba’omer last year, a fire, exacerbated by a heat wave, engulfed some 794 hectares of land, displacing the entire community of nearly 60 families near Modi’in, destroying more than two-thirds of its houses, melting power lines and water pipes, and scorching the gardens they had planted with their own hands for more than 40 years.Twelve months later, and the surrounding forest remains full of emaciated trees, blackened by the heat. The shells of what were once homes that welcomed countless Jews from around the world to dance and sing in love and prayer are pockmarked and steeped in soot – unlivable.The residents are scattered throughout the area in Hashmonaim, Matityahu, Modi’in and Gimzo. One moved down south, another up north, and a few relocated to Jerusalem.On the day of the fire last year, a young resident, Nachman Solomon, posted on his Facebook page, “My home, my childhood where I grew up and my family lives in, and so many others called their second home, the moshav, was mostly burnt down today. Thank God everyone is OK. We will build up from the ashes.”But they haven’t.There is a tent here, a makeshift mikveh (ritual bath) there, and three children – the only three little children who have moved back to Mevo Modi’im since the fire – laughing on the playground. But it is hard to recognize the community that used to represent the small moshav located west of Jerusalem, near the city of Modi’in.Mevo Modi’im is also known as the Carlebach moshav, named for the late Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, the hippie rabbi who in 1968 established the House of Love and Prayer in San Francisco, a Jewish commune.Carlebach traveled to Germany in the 1960s to teach people whose parents had murdered scores of Jewish people that the time for peace and forgiveness had come. Ultimately, he established the Israeli moshav.“Reb Shlomo used to have a teaching based on the Zohar: One side of my heart is laughing, and one side of my heart is crying,” said one of the moshav’s founders, Rabbi Avraham Arieh Trugman in an interview with The Jerusalem Post. “This whole year for us has been an exercise in one part of my heart is grateful and joyous – no one died in the fire – and the other part is connected to all the people who lost so much.”
Zelda Burkey, who moved to the moshav in 1990, said she has moved five times in the last year until, on March 1, she finally settled back in a small rental on the moshav. She said her journey was one of “hessed” (kindness) and miracles, as the country and people around the world opened their hearts and hands to contribute basic supplies, clothing, furniture and money to get the residents through those first few months.She looked around her two-bedroom home. She used to live in a seven-bedroom house.“We don’t ask, ‘Where did you get it?’ We say, ‘Who is it from?’” she said with a laugh. “The hand of God is in everything.”In 1968, Burkey’s mother-in-law helped found the House of Love and Prayer with Carlebach in San Francisco, and then moved with him to Israel in 1975 to found the moshav. In 1980, Zelda married her husband, Emery, and they moved to the moshav together in 1990.Once on the moshav, Burkey’s own home became a house of love and prayer in its own right, a revolving door. She said she has had more than 8,000 kids in her house over the years.“He gathered them up – people searching for Judaism and connection,” she said of Carlebach. “Shlomo touched everyone. He did not care who you were.”She said that Shlomo’s Torah teachings centered around two messages: love thy neighbor as yourself and worship God with joy – and this can be done anywhere.HOWEVER, IT has not been easy. Trugman’s house was one of seven that were not destroyed by the fire, but he and his wife spent seven months displaced while the moshav sat without electricity or water. Extensive smoke damage meant that all of the couple’s clothes, blankets and sheets had to be fumigated, and the whole house had to be repainted.Furthermore, his business, Ohr Chadash, centered on inviting people into his home for workshops and shabbatons. The fire, followed by coronavirus, forced him to reinvent. Now, all of his work is online or through email.“It has been a very challenging year,” he said.Many of the older residents said they feel the weight of not being home. For many of the first generation, their lives and their worlds revolved around Carlebach.“In a way, they were in another world, a little cloister of their own here on the moshav,” Burkey described. “They are lost. They are not homeless, but they are rootless.”Burkey said she is trying not to be bitter, but when you look around the moshav, it is a cause for sore eyes. She recalls how she watched from the city of Modi’in as firefighters fought to quell the flames, but there was not enough water because, despite requests, the area council had never invested in a proper backup water tank.The country never determined how the fire was started, though they know it was ignited from three surrounding points. There was an investigation for arson or terrorism, but nothing was ever proven, and the case was dropped.“There are a lot of conspiracy theories,” said Burkey, “but it doesn’t help to think like that.”It took until August 12 for the government to allocate NIS 64 million to rebuild the moshav. The money was transferred to the regional council, which according to the moshav committee head, Chemy Danon, has been drawing plans and making preparations. But until now, nothing has really started.It was only last month, after a rainstorm battered the area, causing two large burnt trees to fall and cause yet more damage, that the council ordered the old trees removed and the grass and weeds cut, to help prevent a second fire this year.The compensation package from the government is being rolled out in three phases. The first phase lasts until this August and involves relocating the former residents and offering them rent subsidy for one year. Next, the council will erect temporary housing units for those who want to return home. Finally, it will launch a mass infrastructure and permanent housing project, expanding the moshav to 150 units.There were no funds allocated to the individuals, who will need to rebuild their houses on their own. Most lacked insurance and will need to fundraise or take out extensive loans if they want to live on the moshav again.In addition, there were several grown children who were living on the moshav in non-sanctioned temporary wooden caravans. There were also those who built homes on rooftops or in open spaces. These structures were the first to catch fire and likely exasperated what would already have been a devastating event.Technically, all the homes were illegal, explained regional council head Yossi Elimelech in an interview with the Post. The residents did not own their land except by default, because they had been living there for so long.The moshav was founded 45 years ago by seven families and a handful of single people. The residents took over land that was once a Nahal army settlement, strategically placed on the pre-1967 Jordanian border and only a 10-minute drive from Ben-Gurion Airport.From 1976 to 1986, Trugman said, the residents lived like “true pioneers. We really struggled financially to make it. We did not have phone lines for more than a decade. There was one car for everyone.”Trugman described the land as barren, with only a few groves of trees.“We had a vision of creating a spiritual community that would bring light and Torah and tradition to the people of Israel,” he continued. “We were young and idealistic, and we worked the land.... We put the best years of our lives into it.”The original members – all immigrants, mostly from America – ran the country’s first health food factory and started an educational center. Eventually, the community evolved to what Trugman now describes as a microcosm of Israeli society: “We have Ashkenazim and Sephardim, immigrants and Israeli-born. We have Chabad and Breslov – every kind of kippah you can imagine.”Since Carlebach died in 1994, his closest students have tried independently and spontaneously to carry out his legacy. Now, there are Carlebach minyanim all over the world.Elimelech said that most of the past year has been spent working through bureaucracy. The residents had been pleading for the last 15 years to come to an agreement with the Israel Lands Authority so they could purchase and legally own their land.Three weeks ago they came to an agreement, and a contract was signed. The 38 original members will be able to purchase the land on which their houses used to stand and build up to two houses. There is also the possibility for them to purchase one additional plot for a child at a discounted price.The additional units will hopefully be marketed to like-minded families interested in joining the community.The ILA took control of the area’s industrial zone, explained Elnatan Golomb, but the moshav maintains all communal spaces, 30 hectares of agricultural land and 1.8 hectares for tourism.Elimelech described the result of the negotiations as one “no one could even dream of; I thought they would get 25% of this.”Burkey said that Elimelech may in theory be correct, but she feels there was a lot of neglect, and there was sentiment on the part of many of the residents that the council could have been way more helpful and might have been happy if the people had taken a cash settlement and left.“Many people feel there was a lack of transparency between us and the council,” she said.WALKING THROUGH the moshav this week, the memories of the past came swelling back for Burkey of a moshav that was full of life and light on Shabbat and holidays.Among the miracles during the fire is that the community’s synagogue was untouched.“Ahavat ahim,” said Burkey, meaning brotherly love. She said that over the last four decades there was some infighting on the moshav, but when people came to pray it disappeared. In the synagogue, they named babies, held weddings and shared their joys and sadnesses.“There is a certain amount of divine intervention,” she told the Post, without going into details. “There were a lot of things going on here, and the fire will help sort certain things out.”Artist and resident Sara Naftaly expressed a similar sentiment. She said that in some ways the experience has been “quite refreshing.”“I had been living on the moshav for 32 years,” she said. “My house and my son’s house were destroyed. On day one, I said, ‘OK, what can I do? Now I have an opportunity to collect my life. I am not weighted down by stuff and things.’”Naftaly described a moshav as sometimes plagued by gossip and pockets of intolerance among its members, which she said she hoped was burned up with the fire. She left with only the clothes on her back, but she was determined to be strong. She lost a collection of memorabilia from her family who survived the Holocaust, artwork and photographs.“You learn what you can live without,” she said. “I really feel blessed.”Golomb has been living in a one-bedroom house with his wife and three children under the age of seven. The parents sleep in the living room, “but we have the outside, which is beautiful, and we have the moshav – the park to ourselves, the open space and air. It is a blessing.”Trugman said that within days of the fire, he and everyone else realized life and the moshav would never be the same.“There is no way that things can go back to the way they were,” he said with a sigh. “How things will turn out in the future, we don’t know.”Golomb said he believes that most residents will return and new people will be recruited, which he said he hopes will change the moshav for the better. “Hopefully, it will be a beautiful place for people to be Jewish, religious, happy and in love with God.”Burkey’s roofless house is still filled with broken pottery and sand. A charred fork sticks out from the rubble.“Every time I come, I find some other memory here,” she told the Post. “When I first came, it was hard, but I am used to it.”Now, instead of looking for what was lost, she finds what remains and the signs of new life, budding out of the despair.“My tree of hope,” Burkey said, pointing to a lemon tree with new flowers that was planted by her late husband, a tree she thought was dead but started coming back to life.Her eyes glistened as she walked toward her rosebush and lily plant by the walkway.“We are a stubborn and strong group of people who love their home,” she continued. “The plan is to come back. Just like the lemon tree, we will come back more beautiful than before. God is great.”
