As northern evacuees settle in for long haul, hotel dwellers dream of home

The four grandmothers from the northern border of Israel who were knitting hats for soldiers in the lobby of Haifa’s Dan Carmel Hotel on Tuesday all raised their children in the shadow of wars and terror attacks.

Residents of Kibbutz Dan at the foot of Mount Hermon in the far north of the country, they survived Palestine Liberation Organization raids into Israel from Lebanon from the late 1960s, the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the tumult of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and the 2006 Second Lebanon War, which brought Hezbollah rockets raining down on the north.

But all agreed that the newest threat from the Iran-backed terror organization, including a suspected tunnel network thought to be significantly more vast than Hamas’s in Gaza and a cache of guided missiles, was a different, far more terrifying prospect. The main fear: a massive cross-border infiltration into northern Israel, like the one that took place in southern Israel on October 7.

Until that black Saturday, when thousands of Hamas terrorists crossed the Gaza border and went on a killing spree, murdering 1,200 people, mainly civilians, in cold blood and taking over 240 hostages, Kibbutz Dan was growing. It had absorbed 27 new families over the past year, the women said, and had a long waiting list of people seeking affordable housing, a good education system and a high quality of life.

But, said Ruti Fried, whose daughter had organized for 800 knitted hats to get to the army so far, “if I had young children now, I’m not sure I’d go home… any time soon.”

Since October 8, Hezbollah-led forces have attacked Israeli communities and military posts along the northern border almost daily. Six Israeli civilians have been killed, along with nine IDF soldiers and reservists.

So far, Kibbutz Dan, some 2.3 kilometers (1.5 miles) from the Lebanon border, has not been touched.

Whether a full-blown military operation will take place to push Hezbollah away from the border remains to be seen.

In the meantime, the 80,000 residents the army evacuated in October from communities located up to 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) south of the Lebanon border live in limbo, scattered to hotels, kibbutz guest quarters and other temporary homes.

“The hardest thing is the uncertainty,” a woman from Kibbutz Dan, who did not want to give her name, told The Times of Israel.

Haifa has taken in around 2,800 evacuees, the vast majority of them from the Lebanon border region, said Yaira Tampesco of the northern bay city’s municipality.

Around two-thirds of Kibbutz Dan’s 900 residents have stayed together at the Dan Carmel. (The dovetailing of the names is mere happenstance, Dan being one of Israel’s largest hotel chains.)

Of the 600 who arrived in October, 100 have since found alternative accommodation. Members in essential jobs have stayed on the kibbutz, managing security, or looking after the honey-producing apiary and fish farms. Kibbutz Dan produces trout, along with sturgeon and highly-rated caviar.

Kibbutz spokesman Shmuel Gardi said the community was highly organized and that the level of cooperation among members and between them, the hotel and the city, was “beyond imagination.”

Pre-schools have taken shape inside the hotel. Older children are bussed to an elementary and a high school nearby.

But the luxury hotel is still a far cry from the private homes and expansive lawns of the kibbutz.

“For families with kids to be in a small room when the ‘lounge’ is the lobby, isn’t easy,” said Gardi. “There’s no intimacy or privacy here and it can be maddening and tiring.”

He added that most people in the hotel were out of work due to the displacement.

In the much smaller lobby at the Leonardo Plaza Hotel, also in Haifa, groups of residents from the border town of Shlomi sat in groups, apparently with relatively little left to talk about. “Tell people it’s crap,” said Lior, who has kept his job at a company that makes beverages.

At 9 p.m. — after the young children had gone to sleep but before the teens colonized the armchairs for their late-night meets — the lobby sprang to life. With many bringing their dogs out for walks along the nearby beachside promenade, a young man had come down from his room with a miniature Maltese puppy.

Everyone wanted to handle and hug Punch, a little white ball of fluff, just two and a half months old.

In contrast to Kibbutz Dan, Shlomi is a town, home to 9,000 souls and zero traffic lights. Starting October 16, residents began to evacuate, and two and a half days later, all but a few hundred who had decided not to move were gone. Most of the evacuees are split between Haifa, Tiberias and Jerusalem.

But as war drums on the northern border beat ever louder, and the threat posed by allowing Hezbollah to remain on the border becomes ever more frightful, few are entertaining the idea of a swift return home.

Diaspora inside Israel

Instead, many are moving out of hotels to alternative accommodations more suitable for long-term stays. The government provides a daily NIS 290 ($78) per adult and NIS 100 ($27) per child to help those going into private accommodation to pay the rent. People from Shlomi are now spread as far as Israel’s southernmost city, Eilat, creating challenges for the maintenance of any sense of community and the town’s education system.

An effort has been made to keep pupils in Shlomi’s ORT high school together, with those who moved to Jerusalem, Haifa or Tiberias being placed together in ORT schools there.

But others are spread across the country. A week before this reporter visited, some 50 Shlomi tweens and teens had traveled from far and wide and reunited at Haifa’s Dan Panorama Hotel to celebrate their bar and bat mitzvahs together en masse.

According to Tamar Meir, appointed by Shlomi’s town manager to manage educational and social welfare affairs for the community in the broader Haifa area, the town’s roughly 700 elementary school-age children are dispersed countrywide across more than 200 schools, with the Shlomi school principals trying to visit them all.

“Our principals are working day and night out a commitment to ensure the children integrate well,” Meir said.

Elia Fridman, nearly 11, is the only evacuee child in her Haifa school class and was scared about moving there, recalled her mother Svetlana, who immigrated from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in the 1990s. Svetlana Fridman, an elementary school teaching assistant in Shlomi, moved to the town 17 years ago to be with the man she met at work and fell in love with.

Elia said she misses her father, who died of an illness three years ago, and her dogs — one is with her grandparents in Haifa, the other is being fed in Shlomi — though she was drawn to Punch the puppy like everyone else.

She has made a few friends in school — “three girls, and a boy,” she said. But her best friend from home was among those leaving the Leonardo Plaza for an apartment.

“They’ve been together every evening,” her mother said.

Special concessions are being made for evacuee 11th and 12th graders taking matriculation exams this year, such as more project work and fewer external exams, Education Minister Yoav Kisch announced in October.

Plans are currently being finalized for a Haifa learning center, staffed by teachers and volunteers, to help high schoolers study for the matriculation exams. It will be open “for as many hours as the kids need,” said Meir.

The Haifa city education department has also established learning and youth activity centers at the Dan Panorama and the Leonardo Plaza. There, youngsters can do their homework, and enjoy informal activities and classes in arts, sport and more, often by the same staff that taught them at home.

Home sweet home cooking

Naomi Ftecha, one of the Kibbutz Dan knitters, has been home once since leaving. While there, she used the time to bake cookies, which she brought back to the hotel to give to her grandchildren, who are also living there.

Many of the women who spoke to The Times of Israel said they most missed cooking and sitting around the dinner table with the extended family on a Friday night.

Ziva Krief, from Shlomi, said she showed up at her sister’s door in Kiryat Shmuel, a religious community to the northeast of Haifa, with one demand: “I’m a woman who has cooked all her life. I said ‘Just let me cook,'” she recalled. “I like to make soups and dishes like spicy fish. I miss the smells.”

Cooking meetings are being held at a Haifa cookery school to help evacuees scratch this particular itch.

Dinner at the Dan Carmel was a sumptuous buffet. A young girl, helping herself to more crispy sausage rolls, said she enjoyed the food.

“But I miss daddy’s pasta and mommy’s cream sauce,” she added.

Everyone this reporter spoke to had only praise for the hotels and the Haifa Municipality.

But there was nobody who didn’t long for home.

Kibbutz Dan’s Ruti Fried wore a T-shirt with the words “Ticket to Anywhere” emblazoned on the front.

That sentiment has expired. Asked where she would like a ticket to now, she replied: “Only to home.”