It’s been 680 days since thousands of Hamas-led terrorists stormed Israel and killed 1,200 people amid acts of rape and brutality. It’s been 680 days since Hamas kidnapped 251 people into the Gaza Strip.
Some are still there. Matan Angrest has lost function in his right hand from all the beatings. His face is disfigured.
Alon Ohel, a talented musician, is going blind after brutal beatings.
Evytar David and Rom Braslavski are being starved to death. There’s a photo – taken by Hamas of Evytar David being forced to dig his own grave.
Hamas terrorists dress as aid workers and kill their own people. They shoot children. They have stolen billions in donations not to help Gazans but to build tunnels and buy weapons for the sole purpose of killing Jews and eliminating Israel.
At 3 a.m. this morning, June 13, 2025, my husband, Jonny, and I were catapulted out of our sleep by a jarring warning signal on our phones.
Then sirens sounded in a long wail, alerting Israelis across the country – Jews, Christians, Muslims, Druze, Circassians, Bedouins – to get ready for an Iranian missile attack.
At about the same time, Israel launched a strike deep inside Iran that killed Iranian Revolutionary Guard leader Hossein Salami who had called to annihilate Israel. This was the man who issued death threats against his own people who protested the death of Mahsa Amini. She died in Iranian custody on September 16, 2022, for violating Iran’s dress code for women.
Israel struck Iran the same calculated way it struck the beepers of Hezbollah operatives, which weakened the Iranian proxy terror group and helped bring an end to 13 months of Hezbollah rocket fire and missiles on Israel.
A few hours after Israel’s attack, I received an email from a PR person representing Justin Logan at the Cato Institute that the Middle East is bracing for potential fallout after Israel launched a “preemptive strike” against Iran.
They put preemptive strike in quotes, as if Iran’s threats to wipe “the Zionist regime off the map weren’t really serious.
Logan said that Israel has “started a war with Iran that has no justification. The attack will destroy US diplomatic efforts to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapon.”
The US diplomatic efforts with Iran were naive. Iran never planned to stop building its nuclear weapons. Its leaders were just bidding time.
I took this photo during a Hezbollah drone attack above our house in Western Galilee, Israel, on November 16, 2024.
As Jonny said, “I’d rather have everyone in the world hate us and still be alive.”
Just this past week, I wrote in The Times of Israel about Israeli innovations – a device that can recognize people’s identity just by their breathing “fingerprint,” and another study that discovered why the acetaminophen drug works.
We are survivors. This war was started by Hamas on October 7, 2023, in which thousands of Hamas-led terrorists invaded Israel, killing 1,200 civilians and kidnapping 251 people into Gaza. There are still 20 hostages still believed to be alive in Gaza and 31 confirmed dead.
Israel has an inherent right to defend itself. We are now in a fight for our survival. We are still on the map.
All those aid trucks are going right to Hamas operatives. This is Ahmed who was killed by Hamas while trying to obtain food.
There are countless stories like this. As Amjad Taha wrote on X, “Since October 7, 2023, Gaza has received more than 300,000 metric tons of humanitarian aid, delivered through over 22,000 trucks to a population of just 2.1 million people.”
“If we turn #Gaza into a metaphorical restaurant, it is essentially receiving 400 supply trucks a day, delivering gourmet level logistics to every street, while war-torn regions in Africa are left to scavenge for leaves and sip contaminated water, completely abandoned by headlines and hashtags,” Taha wrote.
The Gaza Health Ministry is run by Hamas. Hamas inflates the death tolls. Western countries need to pressure Hamas and its supporters to free Gaza.
Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Hezbollah terror group, who built a terror army larger than many countries has been killed.
“It is justice for countless victims,” President Joe Biden said.
The Washington Post called him a “moral compass.” Hardly. Nasrallah said it would be easier to kill Jews when they were in Israel.
He said that Jews “are people with evil ideas.”
He made Lebanon, once a prosperous country with Christians, Muslims, Druze and Jews, bankrupt.
The New York Times said he wanted Palestine to be with equality for Muslims, Christians and Jews. Another lie. He killed other Muslims.
Why am I writing this? Because for the past year, we have been living under the threat of Hezbollah rockets and missiles aimed in our direction.
A rocket hit the Druze town of Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights, killing 12 children at a soccer game. The woman holding the cup in the photo above is Naela, the mother of Alma Ayman Fakhr al-Din who was killed. On her left is her mother, Adele. They are talking to 3 volunteers who came to the town to offer alternative healing treatments to ease their grief.
You can read more at The Times of Israel, where I report on real news from Israel.
“We must be aware of the truth and not let people in authority sway us from that truth.” Who said that? I did!
Stillwater, Oklahoma, a college town in the American Southwest, is a far cry from the central Israeli metropolis of Tel Aviv-Jaffa, says Adisu Guadie, an Israeli national running champion and holder of the under-20 and under-23 record in the 10,000-meter track runs.
Nevertheless, Guadie, 21, from Tel Aviv-Jaffa, has settled in at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, where he’s getting a full ride as a member of the track team, ranked one of the top long-distance programs in the United States.
And while other American universities are roiled in anti-Israel protests, Guadie and one other Israeli runner at OSU, Sivan Auerbach, don’t have to hide their Israeli and Jewish identity. Guadie runs each race with the Star of David shaved into his hair, and Auerbach, who holds Israel’s record in the 1,000- and 1,500 meter runs, wraps herself in the Israeli flag.
Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, whose alma mater is also Oklahoma State University, said he’s proud that the two Israeli students feel “the same sense of community that I did during my time there.” He added that “it’s crazy to think that all Jewish-Americans don’t enjoy the same sense of belonging and security that our Jewish communities do in Oklahoma.”
Growing up in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Guadie started running as an 11-year-old boy through the Alley Runners, a social project to empower at-risk children that began in 2012 and has since evolved into Hapoel Tel Aviv, a professional athletic team. Yuval Carmi, one of the organization’s founders, said that Ethiopian Jews have had difficulty integrating into Israeli society, and Guadie’s achievements are “exceptional.”
“There were other kids who were more talented, but Guadie was stubborn,” Carmi said. “In 10 years, he didn’t miss one workout. I use him as an example for the kids in the program today.”
Guadie said that his mother heard about the Alley Runners and signed him up as an after-school activity. For the first two years, Carmi said, “Guadie didn’t talk.” But slowly, Guadie said, the Alley Runners “became like family.”
Guadie is slender and sinewy, with springy curls and an angular face. He said that his parents, who “are very proud,” always encouraged him in his running, even though they didn’t have the financial means. His father has worked in physical jobs and his mother cleans in a hospital. At first, the only pair of running shoes they could afford to buy Guadie were soccer cleats — but that didn’t stop him from surging ahead of other runners. (Today, he runs in Nike shoes, he said.) He recently broke the Israeli 10-K record, with a time of 28:10. His dream is to participate in the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.
During a Zoom interview with The Times of Israel, Guadie apologized as he took a few moments to make himself coffee, grinding beans from Ethiopia, where he was born. When he was 3 years old, his family moved to Israel.
uadie, who has five siblings, said he’s the “first generation” to study at a university. He’s a management information systems major, and during his first semester, in the fall of 2023, it was very hard to immerse himself in a new language and culture. And then came the October 7 massacre, when some 3,000 Hamas terrorists stormed into Israel from the Gaza Strip by land, air and sea, killing some 1,200 people and seizing 252 hostages, mostly civilians.
“I spent so much time watching the news,” Guadie recalled. “I kept asking myself, ‘What am I doing here?’ I felt so alone.”
He said he stayed close to Auerbach, who had similar feelings of helplessness. The two young athletes both served in the IDF; Guadie as an assistant coach in an Air Force special unit, and Auerbach as a fitness instructor. For Auerbach, who grew up in Moshav Ein Ayala, only another Israeli could understand her feelings after October 7.
On her social media, Auerbach posts about running — and Israel. She feels a responsibility to educate people, explaining that Zionism is “not a bad word,” but rather means “the right to self-determination for the Jewish people.” She is distressed that students don’t understand “the genocidal messages” because “very violent hate speech is being normalized.”
There have been very small protests on the OSU campus, with students chanting “from the river to the sea,” but for the most part, she said, the atmosphere is calm.
She knows that her pro-Israel posts are “just a drop of water in all this hate,” but she continues to juggle her training practices — twice daily — and her studies, where she’s a double major in computer science and computer engineering.
“It takes a lot out of me,” Auerbach admitted, and then seemed much happier to talk about her sport, in between munching on slices of a clementine.
At home in Israel, she runs by the sea or up in the Carmel Mountains. In Stillwater, she’s had to get used to “miles and miles of flat dirt roads,” and, she joked, “an occasional tumbleweed.”
Meanwhile, in his OSU dormitory room, Guadie said that he realizes he’s even “more Zionist” than ever before. He misses the country along with his family and friends.
“I’m here in Stillwater, doing my best,” he wrote in a recent Instagram post. “My heart is with my people in Israel. Stay strong and help each other.”
There are more ways to be wounded than just physically. Here’s an article I wrote for Times of Israel here about the two chaplains in Soroka Hospital who care for spiritually-wounded patients.
That’s Chaplain Boruch Siris, Right, with a soldier. CREDIT: DINA FRENKEL
Boruch Siris, a chaplain at the Spiritual Care Center at Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba, says that since the Hamas massacre on October 7, the question many hospital patients ask him is, “Why?”
“Why would God allow something like this to happen, they ask,” said Siris, a religious Jew. “All I can do is absorb the question. It’s unanswerable.”
Siris works with another chaplain, Frieda Ezrielev — who prefers the term melavah ruhanit, or spiritual companion — in providing spiritual care to patients and their families of all different religious beliefs (or none at all) at Soroka. Israel’s second-largest hospital, Soroka is the closest to the Gaza border. Since the start of the war, it has treated some 3,000 wounded soldiers and civilians, hundreds of them in very serious condition.
As chaplains during the war, Siris, 49, and Ezrielev, 51, navigate across religious and cultural barriers and grapple with unbearably complicated questions.
“We look for spiritual wounds,” Siris said. “We are doctors of the soul.”
The chaplaincy program at Soroka is one of the first of its kind in Israel and a relatively new field. The idea is to accompany and support people during the most painful times of their lives. The October 7 onslaught, Siris said, was like an earthquake with aftershocks, and “there’s nobody at the hospital who hasn’t been affected by the war.”
The atrocities of October 7 — when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists breached the border to butcher 1,200 people in southern Israel and abduct 252 to the Gaza Strip — struck an even more painful nerve for Israelis and Jews around the world than previous terror attacks.
That’s because not only was it the largest one-day massacre of Jews anywhere since the Holocaust, but it was carried out with particular brutality. The terrorists targeted mostly civilians, young and old, whom they raped, tortured, dismembered and mutilated, wiping out entire families together, many of them burned alive in their homes.
And so Siris tries to “channel spiritual energy,” connecting with people on what he calls a spiritual wavelength, according to each person’s spiritual needs.
He tells the story of a Bedouin police officer who was on active duty near the Gaza border on October 7, when a fellow officer with whom he had been very close was killed. A few weeks later, the Bedouin officer suffered a heart attack and wound up in the hospital.
Although the Bedouin don’t share the same religion as Jewish Israelis and have their own customs and traditions, Siris said, “because of this man’s religious beliefs, he was able to see me as a spiritual leader. He talked to me in a frank way, saying that he saw the connection between the events of October 7 and what happened to his health.”
Something powerful happened between the religious Muslim officer and the religious Jewish chaplain when they spoke about faith, loss and grief.
They were able to harness “spiritual power, meeting each other in a holy space,” said Siris.
‘Hallway conversations’ and forks in the road
Another role chaplains play is to help people search for closure, he said, “even if they don’t necessarily find it.” A soldier, requesting anonymity, who was wounded at the end of November fighting Hamas in the Gaza Strip said that every conversation he’s had with Siris “helps me to heal.”
zrielev, a native Russian speaker, talks with many Russian-speaking patients in the hospital. She said that because the Communist Soviet Union “stamped out the faith of a whole generation,” these patients usually don’t ask her, “Why did God do such a thing?” Instead, they ask practical questions such as, “How could it have happened in Israel?” Or, “What can we do to survive?”
Ezrielev said the chaplain’s job is to take in what people say and serve as listeners, witnesses, and then as catalysts for people’s own spiritual processes. In other words, a chaplain is someone who sits with people as they look for answers.
Since the start of the war, Ezrielev said, she has also spent time talking to hospital staff members who “have had to care for so many wounded, and they’ve stood up to this daunting task.”
A chance meeting that starts as a “hallway conversation” might develop into a serious discussion. Staff members are “surrounded by so much trauma and tragedies” that they “sometimes need to cry and unburden themselves,” she said.
Ezrielev, who grew up in Dekel, near the Gaza border, said that she personally knows several people who have been kidnapped, wounded and killed.
“People often ponder how life can go on without the people they’ve lost,” she said. “And along with that, comes the irony that amid all the deaths, you feel more alive.”
Siris said that he has heard people voice two opposing reactions since the war.
The first is the question, “Where was God?”
The second is the statement, “I found God.”
He cited one example of a man who was treated in the hospital after a Hamas rocket exploded next to his house. The doctors expected that the man would lose his leg but the amputation proved unnecessary, a development they attributed to his “spiritual strength” they noticed in him.
The patient then felt his mission was to tell people, wanting to be a “walking testimony to the Divine,” Siris said.
New openness to seeing the other
Even people who were not directly impacted by the events of October 7 felt the war’s consequences. There was a patient who had lost his 19-year-old son a few years earlier, Siris said. While the boy hadn’t been a soldier, the patient became distraught seeing all the wounded 19-year-old soldiers. A doctor recommended that Siris visit him. “The war had triggered all kinds of baggage in his life,” Siris said.
Another story that Siris heard was from a man who was injured on October 7 and lay in the street until a stranger found him and drove him to the hospital. This wasn’t unusual. A hospital spokesperson said that on that day, more than 680 wounded people with varying degrees of injuries arrived at the hospital, some in ambulances and some in cars.
After the man recovered, he found out that the person who brought him to the hospital had gone back to help other people and was killed.
The person who saved this man’s life was from the other end of the religious spectrum. Before October 7, the patient had unfavorably judged what he considered “that type of people.”
Suddenly, the man felt remorse for all the things he had said, and told Siris he would never speak that way again. He organized a prayer group to pray for the man’s soul, Siris said, “and he began to see this person as a brother.”
Both Siris and Ezrielev studied Clinical Pastoral Education, or CPE. The two consult with the doctors, nurses, social workers, physical therapists and other staff members, and speak with the patients and their families.
Siris said that the idea of chaplaincy has been around since the 14th century, when King Charles V of France, also known as Charles the Wise, invited a priest to sit with him in a small room, which would later be known as a chapel, to talk about spiritual ideas “that went beyond prayer.”
Siris’s first wife, Noa, died of cancer in 2007 and was a patient at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, an experience which made Siris understand what things feel like from the patient’s point of view. (Since then, Siris has remarried and has four children, one from his first wife and three with his second wife, Tzipi.)
Ezrielev, a mother of two, did volunteer work at a hospice and then began studying Clinical Pastoral Education. There are several courses taught throughout Israel, with a curriculum that combines working with patients, theoretical lessons, and individual and group supervision. Students learn about spiritual texts, singing, religious scriptures, personal prayers and guided meditation.
Siris, who studied for many years in a yeshiva, said that rabbis wrote about the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem only after more than 100 years of coping with that loss.
For such a large trauma, the generation who went through it could not have understood it. The same is true for now.
“We search for understanding, but that can’t happen immediately,” he said.
However, even without a historical perspective, what Siris has found is that people have resilience.
“I try to help them tap into a power that is greater than they are,” he said.
Susan Sarandon denies the rapes of October 7 even happened. That’s the same as denying the Holocaust, and perhaps she does that, too, proving her anti-Semitic ignorance. In any event, there’s an Israeli group that began a few days after the October 7 genocide. That was when Hamas-led terrorists stormed into Israel from the Gaza Strip by land, air and sea, killing some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and abducting 253 more to the Gaza Strip.
This is my article from Times of Israel. You can read it on the website here.
Adele Raemer, survivor of the October 7 Hamas attack from Kibbutz Nirim PHOTO CREDIT: (Courtesy: Edut 710)
Sharon Weisberger was watching the sun come up at the Supernova Festival on October 7. Moments earlier, she had a conversation with a photographer about music and love, and how “you only live once, and you have to fulfill your dreams.”
Then everything changed as Hamas terrorists began their brutal attack on the festival, killing 360 people at the nature party and kidnapping 40, some of whom are still being held hostage in Gaza. The festival attack was part of a wider terror onslaught in which thousands of Hamas-led terrorists stormed into Israel from the Gaza Strip by land, air and sea, killing some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and abducting 253 more to the Gaza Strip.
Weisberger managed to escape, but she’s lost her inner “fire” and she no longer knows if there’s a place in the world for the things she once loved.
Weisberger is one of the more than 700 eyewitness survivors of the October 7 massacres to give video testimony for Edut 710, the largest grassroots organization of Israeli documentary filmmakers, scholars and mental health professionals who began filming testimonies within a few days of the October 7 atrocities. The group’s name draws from the Hebrew word for testimony and the massacre’s calendar date.
“We realized very quickly that we wanted to record the primary witnesses who were in the firing line,” said Edut 710 cofounder Sagi Aloni. The group has about 400 volunteers involved in the project. Each witness tells a raw, fresh story, adding to a collective outpouring of trauma, fear, uncertainty and survival.
“We have to think about the future and how people will try to find proof and deny that the event even happened,” said another founder, Itay Ken-Tor, a documentary filmmaker and producer of the award-winning documentary, “A Film Unfinished,” about a Nazi propaganda film shot in the Warsaw Ghetto.
“Because I have researched the Shoah and collected a lot of evidence, I know the importance of firsthand testimony,” Ken-Tor said. “It’s very important that the quality of our videos are really good so they can be seen in the future, preserved for 100 years.”
The art of listening
Edut 710’s ethos is guided by the teachings of Dr. Dori Laub, a Holocaust survivor who collected testimonies of other survivors and taught the art of listening to people who had undergone trauma.
“We aren’t ‘interviewing’ the survivors,” said Talya Avishai, one of the founders of Edut 710. “We are listening, deeply listening. We aren’t doing anything else. We pay attention. We do it ethically so we won’t hurt people who are still in the midst of their trauma.”
Avishai, who said she has listened to more than 70 survivors, said that the words survivors try to use don’t encompass the depth of their pain.
“We can’t use words that have existed for so long to describe something that never happened before,” Avishai said. She pays attention to a survivor’s tone, body language and looks that have “nothing to do with words.”
“I’m looking in their eyes,” she said. “I’m looking into their souls.”
“They tell their story as part of Jewish history,” Avishai said. “The fact that I sit and listen to them is a success. It’s heartbreaking, but it’s a happy ending because they’re still alive.”
Bat-El Segev, a mother of six, including a one-month-old baby, survived the onslaught in her garden apartment in Sderot. She spoke to Avishai while videographer Kfir Amir filmed her a few months after October 7.
“The days when we are all on a shipwrecked boat, the people of the project are for us an anchor, a listening ear and a refuge for pain,” Segev said afterward. “The very act of talking, telling, listening was a source of finding renewed strength and the first step of returning to life.”
The videos show how “people go from survivors to witnesses,” said Ohad Ufaz, a filmmaker and one of Edut’s founders.
Ufaz directed the movie “The Listener” about Laub, who “enabled Shoah survivors to deliver their testimony and to experience true listening for the first time.”
“We have a protocol at Edut, a method of approaching survivors,” Ufaz said.
“There is a slight risk that we might trigger Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder [PTSD], so we give survivors as much time as they need to lead and witness their own story. We’re very sensitive. We never interrupt.”
Ufaz said that the videos also let survivors introduce themselves as “regular people” who describe their lives and the week before October 7.
Emotional trauma is like a wound, he said, and “a wounded memory is in pieces.” As much as possible, the goal is to help survivors “gain agency over their stories and memories.”
Pay attention and ask no questions
Edut 710 is posting both one-minute and five-minute testimonies on social media and YouTube, as well as full testimonies on its website to combat the denial of the October 7 attacks.
“There is nothing more persuasive and convincing than someone who shares their point of view, going into details that nobody could imagine,” Ufaz said.
Gil Levin, a photographer involved in the project, used to work as a social worker with neglected and abused children. He volunteers at Edut both as a listener, he said, and behind the camera.
“We’ve learned to pay attention and ask no questions,” Levin said. “We don’t push people to talk. We’re not looking for drama.”
Everyone’s story is part of the larger story, from men who were soldiers and first responders to women hiding in safe rooms with their children. A story of a woman who “held onto the door of a safe room so that terrorists couldn’t open it,” revealed her “resourcefulness and determination to survive.”
“Nobody can talk about these atrocities and tell the story except them,” Ufaz said. Alon Davidi, the mayor of Sderot, gave his testimony “as a citizen” to Edut 710 and urged others to do the same.
“It’s very important not only for future generations but for ourselves,” Davidi said.
Dr. Renana Keydar, Assistant Professor of Law and Digital Humanities at Hebrew University, along with Dr. Yael Netzer, the lead scientist at the university’s Center for Digital Humanities, have volunteered to build a digital archive of Edut 710’s videos that will be stored at the National Library of Israel. The testimonies will utilize sophisticated machine learning and artificial intelligence models to make the project sustainable for future scholars.
Keydar observed that there are close to 100 initiatives all over the country to document what has happened on and after October 7. Growing up in Israel, she said that she grew up hearing testimonies. Every year on Israel’s national Holocaust Remembrance Day, for example, she said, “There was always a witness telling you a story.”
The people listening to the story then helped carry the burden of the story.
Does that have something to do with the role of memory for Jews in their tradition and history?
Speaking with The Times of Israel, Edut 710’s founder Aloni said he believes it does. Even after the pogrom in Kishinev in 1903, Aloni said, there was a researcher gathering testimony.
He let out a sad laugh and added, “I guess we’re experts in grief.”
Well, we survived what might be only the first round of Iranian missiles shot into Israel on April 13 through April 14. Relief is an understatement.
Meanwhile, last month, I had the pleasure of joining Nadim Faris, a mushroom forager from the Druze village of Hurfeish in the Galilee, on a walk in the woods despite the war for Times of Israel. The full article is here.
Faris is known as the man who gives Arabic names to wild mushrooms. He has even supplied monikers for mushrooms to foragers in Syria via Facebook, using a combination of Latin, English and Hebrew to create Arabic names that easily slip across borders between warring countries.
After heavy rains on a late March morning, the 62-year-old mycology enthusiast was eager to go out to forage for chanterelles and other mushrooms in the woods by Hurfeish, about 5 kilometers (3 miles) from the Lebanese border, despite the constant threat of rocket attacks by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah terror group.
Hezbollah has attacked Israeli communities and military posts along the border almost daily, killing 10 soldiers and seven civilians, with the group saying it is doing so to support Gaza amid the war there. That war broke out on October 7, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists stormed into Israel by land, air and sea, killing some 1,200 people and seizing 253 hostages, mostly civilians.
Unlike many of the communities in northern Israel, the 7,000 residents of Hurfeish have not been evacuated, yet the village, usually bustling with visitors, feels empty. Druze men serve in the IDF and many of them are away; so far, two soldiers from Hurfeish have been killed in fighting since October 7.
In Israel, the mushroom foraging community brings together Druze, Muslims, Christians and Jews who exchange information about wild mushrooms — both edible and toxic — and where to find them. People from around the country often join Faris for foraging in his familiar woods but few are willing to make the journey now.
When he invited The Times of Israel to go foraging, Faris, a former IDF soldier, said that although “there is danger,” he wasn’t afraid. The wooded hillside, which Faris has known since he was a little boy, seemed eerily peaceful although it is so close to the border. Still, throughout the two-hour walk, he was alert, aware of where he was in relation to the north. Not entirely joking, he said that if there were sirens indicating incoming rockets, there was shelter behind the largest tree.
Then, pointing to Mt. Adir in the near distance, he said, “On an ordinary day, we could go there and find lots of mushrooms, but now we’d only find anti-tank missiles.” Nowadays, Faris sticks close to his village, where he and his wife were both born and where they raised their five children.
The Druze religion was founded in the 10th century as a divergent branch of Islam. There are about one million Druze living mostly in Syria and Lebanon and an estimated 150,000 in Israel. It is a close-knit community.
Broad-shouldered with white hair and a thoughtful smile, Faris wore a flannel shirt, his pocket knife hanging from a string around his neck as he walked. He said that foraging for edibles in the woods is a tradition he learned from his parents and grandparents. He worked for many years as an instructor of industrial engineering at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, and now teaches technology at two Arabic-speaking high schools.
“Isn’t that the most important thing in life?” he asked rhetorically. “To teach other people and to learn from them?”
aris took knowing steps around massive boulders, under branches of oak trees and circumventing brambles. He said that he belongs to the “third group of hunters” — after those who hunt for fish and animals, there are those who hunt for mushrooms. Indeed, the popularity of foraging for mushrooms in Israel has risen dramatically in recent years. A group on Facebook now has 60,000 members; the WhatsApp group for foragers in northern Israel numbers 200.
The air in the woods was damp and cool, the bare trees glistening with dew. Splashes of purple cyclamens and red poppies were scattered here and there. Walking slightly bent, observing the ground layered with acorns and fallen leaves, he stopped to examine a patch of tousled dirt.
“The boars passed through here,” he observed. “I’ve found black truffles that boars have dug up. They dig for them, but don’t eat all of them.”
There were no truffles to be found and few other kinds of mushrooms, but Faris wasn’t disappointed. “I just like being in nature,” he said. “Sometimes I go out during a break at work and don’t even pick anything.”
He held back a thorny branch and then apologized.
“I try to make a path, but the forest grows at a faster pace,” he said. “After the rain, everything wakes up.”
Wild mushrooms are fungi, originating from minuscule spores that are carried by the wind or fall to the ground. After rains, they pop up as if by magic, sometimes doubling their size overnight. He pointed to a purplish mushroom, Lepista nuda, that was nameless in Arabic until Faris chose its new name, “Banafsagi ailaziz,” or “Tasty purple,” which he has heard is now being used in Syria as well as Jordan.
Faris follows the way of his parents and never collects more mushrooms than he needs for that day’s meal. He added that the taste changes when he puts mushrooms in the freezer.
He recalled foraging as a boy and bringing home a box of mushrooms for his father, who then weeded out the inedible and poisonous varieties.
The Society for Wild Mushrooms in Israel reports that there are some 750 known species of mushrooms in the country. About 135 are edible; the others are sometimes edible or suspected to be toxic.
In December, a woman was hospitalized at Rambam Hospital due to severe poisoning from a wild mushroom that she picked. She was treated and released. There are several cases of mushroom poisoning each year. Faris emphasizes the importance of looking for mushrooms with people who have experience and can distinguish between the edible and the toxic.
Faris, like other villagers in Hurfeish, also forages for wild plants and herbs. He stopped to pick some end-of-the-season wild asparagus and then offered a taste of a plant he called “Cours ani” in Arabic, which he said cleans out toxins in the body and is good for salads.
Then he knelt down and cleared away some leaves. There, underneath the dirt was a mushroom called Helvella crispa. It was only recently recognized as edible, but he now eats it after sauteeing it in oil.
ut I’ll die from a mushroom,” he joked.
In addition to foraging for wild plants, Faris also has a nursery, Bustan HaShemesh, or Garden of the Sun, where he cultivates and sells blueberry, raspberry, blackberry and strawberry seedlings. He said he wants people to come to Hurfeish, but since October 7, visitors are rare.
The local council of Hurfeish has joined with other non-evacuated municipalities in the north to demand government compensation for the economic impact caused by the ongoing conflict. Until then, the villagers live under constant threat. During the last war with Hezbollah in 2006, a rocket exploded 30 feet from his house, which sustained heavy damage. Yet Faris still forages in the woods, sometimes twice a day.
“This knowledge that I have is a treasure, passed from generation to generation,” he said. “It’s how we increase awareness of Mother Earth and how much she can give.”
This is not fake news. An Arab girl and a Jewish boy play chess in a tournament as a Druze girl looks on. Credit: Olga Volkov
I love posting hopeful news from Israel. My article appeared in Times of Israel here.
Amid the war against Hamas, 132 chess players ranging in age from 9 to 78 competed in the Israeli Open Championship from January 21 through January 29 in Acre, northern Israel, including about 20 international masters and grandmasters, considered the highest ranks in the world of chess.The nine-day Israeli Chess Federation tournament drew people from all over Israel, including children from the Druze villages of Beit Jann and Peki’in in the Galilee. Despite the war — or maybe because of it — everyone was there to play chess.
“Instead of sitting around worrying about the war, it’s therapeutic,” said Avi Cohen, whose son, Israel, the tournament’s youngest competitor, won the eight-and-under Israeli chess tournament in 2022. “Chess is like an escape.”
The organizer of the event, Olga Volkov, runs the chess club in nearby Nahariya in addition to coaching chess players in Shlomi, a town on the border with Lebanon.
In the weeks after the war began on October 7 with the Hamas-led massacre that killed 1,200 people in southern Israel, mostly civilians, and saw 253 more abducted to the Gaza Strip, Shlomi’s residents were evacuated due to sympathy attacks from the Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorist organization stationed in southern Lebanon.
Since then, Volkov travels to Haifa each week, where she coaches her chess players who have taken up temporary residence there.
“We worry about the players and make sure to take care of them,” she said.
Volkov works at various schools in northern Israel as part of the educational program “Chess in School,” which began in 2016. The program has introduced chess to more than 300 schools around Israel, in the Jewish, Arab and Druze sectors.
Volkov says there are thousands of Israeli children now playing chess — a phenomenon that was well underway even before the popular Netflix TV series, “The Queen’s Gambit,” about a female chess player.
“She found that it suited her character in all respects, whether it’s patience, thinking, or competition,” Halbi said. “For her, it’s more than just a game, it’s a matter of falling in love, and it’s an addiction.”
During the competition in Acre, Halbi found herself in a match against a man more than four times her age. Her coach, Andrei Gurbanov, said that Halbi had a “big advantage during the game,” but her opponent won. Competitors in the tournament play a total of nine games, receiving 90 minutes for 40 moves. After that, each player receives an additional 30 minutes for the game’s duration.
Melan Halbi playing against Yuri Khokhlov at the Israeli Chess Federation tournament in Acre, January 2024. (Courtesy)
Chess has grown in popularity in Israel in recent years, said Gurbanov, who is the vice-chairman of the International Physically Disabled Chess Association (IPCA) and the founder of IPCA Israel, which he established in 2022.
Gurbanov, who was born with one arm, is a three-time winner of the Physically Disabled Chess Association Championship. And now, with so many soldiers wounded during the war, he feels that chess can help them. A few years ago, he helped to establish a chess club in the Beit HaLochem, the soldiers’ rehabilitation center in Haifa.
Playing chess during the war shows that we continue to live,” Gurbanov said. “We don’t talk about the war, we talk about other things.”
Many of the chess players at the tournament learned the game from their parents. Gurbanov said his father taught him to play when he was 6 years old; he has been a coach for the last 17 years.
Gurbanov is passionate about introducing the game to new players. With the help of IPCA Israel, he has opened clubs in many Druze settlements in northern Israel, including Peki’in, Yirka, and Beit Jann. Last year, he organized an international chess championship in Peki’in, attracting players from around the world, including Jordan. There were also tryouts for the national championship in which nearly 100 Druze participants participated.
“There is no Druze community without chess right now,” Gurbanov said.
The Druze speak Arabic, but they opted against mainstream Arab nationalism in 1948 and have since served in the Israel Defense Forces and the Border Police. Since about 1050, the community has been closed to outsiders. During the reign of al-Hakim (996 – 1021), the Druze creed came into being, blending Islamic monotheism with Greek philosophy and Hindu influences.
I love writing about things in Israel that most people don’t hear about. Please share what you read and speak up for Israel. There will be an immediate ceasefire in Gaza if Hamas releases the hostages and surrenders, giving up its totalitarian dictatorship in Gaza.
I wrote this article for The New York Times in 2007 and I feel compelled to repost it. Hamas’ brutal massacre of men, women and children on October 7 left 1,200 dead and some 235 people dragged across the border where many of them are still being held hostage. The death toll for soldiers killed fighting ISIS-like terrorists is 225. So I was thinking of all the grieving mothers . . .
I wrote the piece a year after the Israel-Hezbollah War in 2006. . . And sadly, there might be another war soon.
The border between Israel and Lebanon from a town that has been evacuated due to Hezbollah rocket attacks. Credit: Diana Bletterama
The other day, two mothers who had never met before stood on the Israeli side of the border that separates Israel from Lebanon.
Harriet and I were looking at a Lebanese village where our two sons fought during last summer’s war between Israel and Hezbollah.
My son, Shlomie, and Harriet’s son, Michael, were in the same paratrooper unit of the Israeli Army. During combat, Michael was hit by sniper fire. Shlomie, a medic, also received shrapnel wounds. He did everything he could to save Michael – but Harriet’s son died in my son’s arms.
I had never met Harriet until that day. After the war ended on August 14, I wrote a letter of condolence to her in Pennsylvania from my village in Israel’s Western Galilee. We began to correspond with each other and then, during a recent trip to Israel, she came to meet me.
We knew it was important for us to drive to the northern border, about a half-hour from my house. There we would be as close as we could get to the village where our sons – American-born Jews who had enlisted in the Israeli Army – had fought their fateful battle.
It was a bright, clear day. Except for an occasional house with shattered windows, you could not tell that a war had taken place just months before. Thousands of Hezbollah-fired Katyusha rockets had fallen around the region, yet everything was tranquil now. The sun was shining; birds sang and the air was filled with the aroma of blossoming orange trees.
Along the border, the road dipped through the green hills. We turned around a sharp bend and there, in the distance, was Aita al-Shaab, the Lebanese village where the battle had taken place. It sat on a hilltop, beyond a rolling valley. It looked so beautiful and so, well, peaceful.
Harriet got out of the car and took some photographs. Then she began to cry.
I thought of the night that my son had called to say he was about to leave for the war. After he said goodbye, I fell down on my knees by his bed and prayed. At the very same time, Harriet must have also been praying for her son.
When two mothers pray for their soldier sons during a war, does one mother’s prayer cancel out the other’s? And why does one son return and one son never comes back?
An Israeli Army jeep approached and a soldier told us we had to move on. He explained that if we stopped for too long, we could be targets for Hezbollah soldiers who might have returned to their positions just beyond the border. I said we needed a few more moments and we’d be on our way.
I then remembered Shlomie recounting that right before going into battle, he asked to borrow Michael’s knitted green kipah, his skullcap, to say the holiest Jewish prayer, “Shma Israel.” When Shlomie finished, Michael asked, “Are you ready now?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m ready.”
I looked at Harriet standing next to me. I wanted to ask, “Are you ready now?” but I knew that she would never be ready. No mother can ready herself for the loss of her child.
We gazed at the village one last time and then turned to the car. As we continued along the road, I wondered how many mothers on how many roads around the world have to take a journey like ours.
1. Who you are is life’s gift to you. What you make of yourself is your gift back to life.
2. To be more you, be less you. Do the opposite of what you're used to doing.
3. Your personal record is against yourself and nobody else.
4. Fear is Forgetting Everything’s All Right
5. Put gratitude in your attitude.
6. Live in day-tight compartments.
7. When agitated, pause and breathe deep.
8. Remember the problem in front of you is never as large as the power behind you.
9. Take care of your mind, heart, body and soul each day.
10. You only get to live once and if you do it right, that’s enough.
Diana Bletter is the author of several books including The Invisible Thread: A Portrait of Jewish American Women (with photographs by Lori Grinker), shortlisted for a National Jewish Book Award, a novel, A Remarkable Kindness, (HarperCollins), a memoir, The Mom Who Took of on her Motorcycle, and The Loving Yourself Book for Women: A Practical Guide to Boost Self-Esteem, Heal Your Inner Child, and Celebrate the Woman You Are, an Amazon top-seller in several categories, and The Loving Yourself Workbook for Girls.
She is the First Prize Winner of Moment Magazine's 2019 Fiction Contest. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, tabletmag, Glamour, The Forward, The North American Review and is currently a reporter for The Times of Israel.
Diana and her husband have six children and an unofficially-adopted daughter from Ethiopia. They live in a small village on the Mediterranean Sea in northern Israel.
DIANA BLETTER 