A Gaza-border kibbutznik casts an eye homeward as temporary Tel Aviv relocation drags on
Textile artist Reut Nechushtan speaks about the challenges of city life for an agricultural collective forced to flee after the horrors of Oct. 7
Jessica Steinberg, The Times of Israel's culture and lifestyles editor, covers the Sabra scene from south to north and back to the center
On October 8, Reut Nechushtan and her family were fleeing their home in Kibbutz Re’im after Hamas terrorists had attacked Israel’s south when a customer pinged Reut’s phone asking about a dusty pink pillow.
“She didn’t know I was from Re’im,” said Nechushtan. “But really? Who cares about pillows on the day after October 7?”
As other customers ordered from Nechushtan’s home textiles website in the days after the terrifying massacre, she would sometimes send a text saying that she was from Re’im and wouldn’t be able to access her inventory for a while.
Some reacted compassionately, recalled Nechushtan. “But others said, ‘Okay, please give me back my money.’”
Now, 16 months later, Nechushtan, 56, her husband Michael and their two teenagers, along with her elderly parents and brother, are living in apartments on a single floor in one of two neighboring high-rise buildings in Tel Aviv, where they and the rest of Kibbutz Re’im have been ensconced since December 2023.
Boxes of pillow covers and sheet sets are stacked in Nechushtan’s small apartment. She now runs her business from the sleeper sofa of their living room, which functions as her office.
Nechushtan likes to gaze through the glass sliding door that opens onto their narrow balcony and gaze at the big Tel Aviv sky, or peer out to see which friends are sitting on their balconies.
“We stuck together as a community,” said Nechushtan, who spoke with The Times of Israel several times in the weeks leading up to the recent ceasefire and hostage deal. “That helped the healing.”
Re’im was one of the first kibbutz communities to move out of the hotel in Eilat where they had been evacuated in the frantic days following the Hamas attack, as it became clear that the arrangement wasn’t tenable in the long term.
As the kibbutz sifted through the options — including the southern town of Kiryat Gat, where the members of Kibbutz Nir Oz have collectively relocated, a Beersheba apartment building that lacked sealed rooms, and the northern town of Pardes Hanna — the Tel Aviv option, while the most unusual for a community largely composed of farmers, made the most sense.
It was more accessible to the south, and each apartment had its own sealed room.
“People said, ‘Tel Aviv, are you crazy? There’s no way we’re going to south Tel Aviv,’” said Nechushtan. “I wasn’t sure either. I knew Herzl Street and didn’t think it was a great place to live. It sounded crazy.”
Traumatized kibbutzniks in Tel Aviv
The two residential towers are located on Herzl Street in Tel Aviv’s Florentin neighborhood, an area that’s undergone much gentrification in the last years. At the time, the buildings weren’t quite ready to accept residents, but the developers were willing to fast-track the process for the kibbutz.
There was also a communal building next to the towers known as Beit Be’er, a historic, refurbished house that could function for the kibbutz as a community space, with space for two kindergartens, a health clinic, rooms to hold activities, and a small communal kitchen and dining room.
It was somewhere for everyone to go when people would feel too cooped up in the 50-square-meter (538-square-foot) apartments.
“That’s what sold everyone,” said Nechushtan.
Nechushtan, a textile artist and the Israeli importer of the Australian home textiles label Kas, grew up in Re’im and moved to Tel Aviv as a young adult to attend the Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art. She then worked in textile design, where she met her husband.
For years they lived in Tel Aviv, where their two children were born and raised, until they decided in 2008 to move back to Re’im, looking for a quieter lifestyle and to be closer to Nechushtan’s parents and brother, who still lived on the kibbutz.
On October 7, Nechushtan’s entire family survived the onslaught as thousands of Hamas-led terrorists invaded communities across southern Israel, slaughtering 1,200 people and kidnapping 251 to the Gaza Strip.
That morning, about 100 terrorists invaded Kibbutz Re’im, where they burned houses, killed seven residents and took five hostages to Gaza. The road outside the community, Route 232, was taken over by the terrorists and filled with bodies, many of them partygoers from the nearby Nova music festival who had attempted to escape the killing grounds at the rave.
One of those killed on the kibbutz was Varda Haramati, 80, whose daughter, Ayelet, is Nechushtan’s best friend.
Varda’s grandson, Roy Mizrahi, was hiding in his kibbutz apartment on October 7, while the terrorists used the yard outside as their headquarters for their battle against the Israeli security forces.
“My friend feels that her dead mother watched over her grandson because he was hiding right there as the terrorists used his kitchen as their operations room,” said Nechushtan.
Two kibbutz teenagers were murdered that day, and while her own kids survived, it feels like “the kids murdered are my kids, it’s impossible to imagine life without them,” Nechushtan said.
Nechushtan thinks about the kibbutz emergency squad, a group of regular people who armed themselves to protect the rest of the kibbutz.
“You think about them and what they do for you,” she said. “You think about the power of community and what that feels like in a kibbutz, where you’re still committed to one another.”
City spaces
Nechushtan was part of the committee handling the preparation of the Tel Aviv apartments where the members of Kibbutz Re’im eventually sought haven after the massacre. Most of the apartments were very small, with two apartments given to larger families — one for sleeping and one to use as a family space.
“It’s not comfortable,” Nechushtan said. “It’s not like living on the kibbutz.”
Israeli donors from local tech companies and banks funded and helped organize the purchase of furniture and household goods for each apartment, including beds, closets and sleeper sofas along with every kitchen and household utensil.
“Everyone got the same items,” said Nechushtan. “We had to arrange it so that people would enter their new house and see everything they could need, down to milk, butter, bread, eggs and vegetables, so that they wouldn’t need to go out at all on the first day.”
Some kibbutz members didn’t leave their apartments for days after moving in, said Nechushtan.
Eventually, they began walking around the neighborhood, discovering the local stores, the nearby beach, the parks and playgrounds. Their new neighbors placed flowers and loaves of challah outside each door the first Friday.
“The beginning was hard,” Nechushtan said. “The apartments weren’t great, but you get used to anything. You can’t imagine what you’ll be able to manage, but we have our strengths. We don’t use them always because hopefully, we won’t need to.”
Nechushtan had her own set of personal issues during those weeks. Her husband was undergoing surgery in Beersheba’s Soroka Hospital while she was readying the new apartments for the kibbutz. Her kids had trouble eating and sleeping in the weeks after October 7.
“I stay cool, that’s what I do, that’s what works for me,” said Nechushtan.
She credits her ability to remain calm even in the face of tragedy and upheaval to the years of becoming accustomed to rocket attacks in the south.
“All the people from Eshkol have this sense of resilience,” said Nechushtan, referring to the northwestern Negev region that is part of Israel’s Gaza envelope. “We all know how to deal with terrible strife.”
“When there were missiles in Tel Aviv, people would go crazy,” said Nechushtan. “But we’ve learned how to deal with it, we know how to talk to our kids about it. We’ve learned, in times of trouble, to find our own strength and resilience and it’s what makes you feel more powerful.”
The next chapter
Some of Re’im’s 400 families have already moved back to the kibbutz. The Tel Aviv apartments are only available to them for a few more months.
Others decided to wait until the end of the school year, while some spend weekends at Re’im and weekdays in Tel Aviv, where their kids are in school.
Nechushtan and her husband will stay in the Tel Aviv area for another year, as their older child is studying at Shenkar in nearby Ramat Gan, where Nechushtan’s husband teaches, and their younger son will also be out of the house next year.
She’s not sure she’ll keep her textile business going. She was able to move the inventory from her storage unit on the kibbutz to several nearby storage facilities, but it has gotten harder to rely on imports from Australia.
She is sure, however, that she wants to return to Re’im. The family went back on a recent weekend so her younger son could take his tractor driving test along with the rest of his high school friends — a rite of passage for kibbutz kids.
At this point, each kibbutz family is choosing its own path. One family has been living in Thailand for over a year, while another was in Greece for six months but is returning home to heal.
They’re already marked the anniversary of those killed on October 7, and families and friends now tend to gather on the birthdays of those killed because there are too many memorials to attend on October 7.
Right now, said Nechushtan, she has no big vision, no dreams.
“I’m in the middle of it still. All the hostages aren’t back yet,” she said.
“Everything looks okay, we seem normal, we’re living, we’re working,” she said. “When you go to Re’im, it’s like you’re back in that day, and it’s one big cemetery wherever you go. But I still like it there, it’s my home.”
