Abeba Hadgu, the cook in charge, invites us to dine with her in the adjoining room, accompanied by her daughter, Bena. Bena’s charm and charisma belie the turmoil the 9-year-old has experienced since the October 7 Hamas atrocities.
On that day, thousands of Hamas-led terrorists stormed the borders with Israel, brutally murdering 1,200 people and abducting roughly 240 more, under the cover of a deluge of thousands of rockets fired at Israeli towns and cities. The vast majority of those killed as gunmen seized border communities were civilians — including babies, children and the elderly. Entire families were executed in their homes, and over 360 people were slaughtered at an outdoor festival, many amid horrific acts of brutality by the terrorists.
As it happened, an evening church prayer that went on until the morning ended up playing a crucial role in saving members of the Eritrean community in Sderot from the terror that unfolded in their city.
“On Friday night, my parents prayed in our church in the industrial area of Sderot, and we played nearby,” Israel-born Bena tells The Times of Israel’s Hebrew sister site, Zman Yisrael, in fluent Hebrew that surpasses that of her parents, who came to Israel seeking asylum.
“I had a gut feeling that something bad was happening,” Bena says. “I’m used to sirens, but that morning, my heart sank because there were many more rockets. We were lucky to have been in the church on Friday night and Saturday morning because otherwise, we would have been playing in the park in Sderot at the time — and we wouldn’t be alive now.”
Bena says that as they huddled in the church, her friends sent her “scary videos of bodies and people who looked like soldiers in the streets of Sderot.” She didn’t realize what she was seeing until her friends told her they were terrorists.
On Saturday afternoon, Bena says, the family walked home to their apartment in a two-story building. She shouted to her parents to lock the door and close all the windows.
“We stayed home and never left, and on Tuesday, they told us to evacuate the city,” Bena says. “I don’t know when we’ll be back, and I miss my friends from school.”
Now, living about 100 miles from Sderot, she must acclimate to an entirely new environment.
From Sderot to Hanaton
These evacuees, who initially arrived in Israel from Eritrea via Sudan and Egypt, find themselves refugees again. On October 10, a group of 26 members of the Eritrean community departed Sderot for the Beit Kama junction, where volunteers transported them to the more northerly town of Pardes Hanna. That night, they slept on mattresses on the ground, a temporary solution to their displacement.
During this period, Kav LaOved, an Israeli nonprofit committed to safeguarding the rights of marginalized workers, encountered numerous challenges in securing a more permanent relocation for them. Many places didn’t want to host the asylum seekers until they finally found refuge in Kibbutz Hanaton, where they were warmly embraced.
Since then, the 26 Eritreans, including 11 children and two toddlers, have been in Hanaton, receiving round-the-clock support and care at the educational center, which is run by the Masorti Foundation for Conservative Judaism in Israel.
At this time of year, the Lower Galilee is at its most beautiful as autumn rains helps yellow landscapes transform into lush greenery. The tranquility is made all the more peaceful by the fact that the area has as yet been untouched by rocket attacks or sirens since the beginning of the war.
As we sit on the wooden porch with its north-facing overlook, Hajer Tespa, one of the Eritrean evacuees, describes the day she left her home, joining up with some 200,000 other Israelis who faced displacement at the start of the war.
“The evening prayer on October 7 included guests who had come from Tel Aviv for our special holiday, which happens once a year. It’s a joyful day, a time to communicate with God. In the morning, we were awakened by the sounds of loud explosions and gunfire, and we realized that something extraordinary was happening. A friend texted us that she saw terrorists on the streets and warned us not to leave the church. Thank God, or else we wouldn’t be here,” Tespa says.
The mother of two children, aged 8 and 3.5, Tespa arrived in Israel from Eritrea in 2012. She was held for a year and four months at Saharonim — a detention center in the Negev Desert for asylum seekers — before moving to Sderot with her husband in 2014. They worked as cleaners, as factory workers, and in agriculture, alongside 13 other families who were similarly facing life’s challenges without the support of extended family. Like other Israelis, nothing prepared them for the events of Saturday, October 7.
“In the first hours, there was no phone reception, nothing. Later, when we could, we called the police, but no one answered. Our friend told us of bodies on the street,” Tespa says. “Two Eritreans, friends of ours, were killed. We locked ourselves in the church until about 2 p.m., when one of us went on foot to the city and told us that it was safe to return. On the way home, we passed bodies scattered on the roads.
“My husband waited until Monday morning to go to the only supermarket open in the city to buy food. On Tuesday, we reached Pardes Hanna and asked for help, and from there, they drove us to Hanaton. When we got here, I thought to myself that it was the middle of nowhere. We gradually got used to it, and realized how quiet it was here,” she says.
‘A 25-star hotel’
In the Hannaton Educational Center, about 90 pre-military preparatory students live, close to the kibbutz center and the nearby expansion neighborhood where Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli resides. The center has assigned six vacant housing units and a shared kitchen for the evacuees.
Recognizing the complexity of this relocation for a community already dealing with the challenges of adjusting to Israel, the center enlisted the support of Yedidya Ben Yair, a medical student at Haifa’s Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. He’s on call for the Eritrean evacuees and takes care of all their needs.
“Once I took them for a job interview at a factory in Beit She’an. I mentioned on the phone that they were evacuees from Sderot, and in the factory, they said, ‘Sure, we’ll be happy to hire them.’ But when we got there and they realized they were Eritreans, they kicked us to the curb,” Ben Yair says, sitting with the evacuees on the expansive lawn.
Ben Yair says the evacuees came to Hanaton “with nothing.” The kibbutz buys them groceries and provides them with clothing, coats, shoes, diapers and baby formula, he says, along with psychological care, a social worker and shiatsu treatments.
The children attend the local kindergarten and elementary school and receive help with homework and Hebrew lessons with a communication therapist. The kibbutz is also helping the new arrivals with medical care, scheduling appointments and providing transportation, and a family health nurse came to the kibbutz to provide services for young children and new mothers.
“For women, we arranged jobs in cleaning, and for the men, work in the avocado orchards and other occasional jobs,” Ben Yair says. “Representatives from the Home Front Command were very enthusiastic about what we do here, and said we were providing them with a 25-star hotel.”
The Home Front Command may have been impressed, but it has itself made no concrete contribution. Although the education center arranged for the evacuees to meet with a lawyer who would assist them in activating their rights, the problem is that as asylum seekers in Israel they are not entitled to the same security benefits as Israeli evacuees from the south and north.
“We host them here without receiving state vouchers for them, and they themselves are not eligible for rent and expense subsidies,” says Rabbi Yoav Ende, founder and CEO of the education center’s pre-military preparatory academy.
Consequently, they need to continue working, says one of the evacuees, Avram Kidani.
“It’s very difficult. We continue to pay rent of 2,500 to 3,000 shekels [$670 to $800] per month for our apartment in Sderot. A new year is about to begin, and we need to make the payment. We didn’t get a rent discount. The state forced us to leave the city and we didn’t think it would take so long, and most of us haven’t worked enough to cover these expenses,” Kidani says.
“The state needs to help us; [the kibbutz] helps us here at a level that can’t be measured in money,” he says. “The children feel good here and have a routine much like at home. It’s hard for me to think about what we saw that Saturday in Sderot. The fear doesn’t leave my mind, and the children feel the same. It does fade as time passes, slowly.”
Pinan, another asylum seeker, has already returned to work at the plastic factory in Sderot.
“There are still red alerts [warning of incoming missile fire], but not as frequently. I have no choice; I have to pay rent,” he says.
Describing Kibbutz Hanaton and the education center as “the best,” Pinan notes that the asylum seekers were provided with everything they needed.
“We have friends who were killed and we saw things that shouldn’t ever happen,” he says. “Our wives saw terrorists shoot at our houses and the soldiers only came around noon. These are things that cannot be forgotten. Even in our dreams, it comes back; they did bad things there. Hopefully, we will one day return to where we were and live there safely.”
‘This is our duty as Jews’
During the conversation, Ende reveals himself to be a person who prioritizes action over criticism. For the educational institution under his leadership, there seems to be nothing more natural than taking on a task that others did not and that the state shook off.
“The [Hannaton Educational Center] is fighting for the image of Israel as Jewish, democratic, and humanistic,” says Ende.
Describing how his institution was initially paired with the asylum seekers, Ende says that in the first few days after the October 7 massacre, everything was chaos.
“There was no government — nothing — so the connection was coincidental. I don’t exactly know how it happened. The Hamal Ezrahi [the so-called Civilian War Room put together by the volunteer organization Brothers in Arms] contacted us and asked if we could take in the Eritrean asylum seekers, and we immediately said yes. It’s a marginalized community during peacetime, and even more so in an emergency,” he says.
“The story of asylum seekers is complicated,” Ende says. “Some call them ‘infiltrators,’ a result of the state not looking into their asylum requests and not granting them refugee status. I operate from a Jewish perspective. We were refugees once, and a nation now — how can we not take them in? We are not recognized as a hotel, and they are not citizens with rights, but we understand that it is our duty, and we benefit from it in other ways. Our students see them and what we do, and it makes a difference.”
Ende says that at first, it was difficult to comprehend the magnitude of the requirements — that taking in the evacuees was about more than simply providing a roof and a bed. The asylum seekers need money, help finding work, health insurance, dental care, student mentors for the children, and caregivers. After all, he says, they have been through a lot and arrived having undergone trauma that needs addressing.
“They’ve been here for more than two months and do not have access to news, so they also need to be connected to current events,” he says. “This is an at-risk population, and we are happy to reach out; it is our Jewish duty. In Judaism, the bystander must come to the rescue of his fellow man who is in peril.”
Ende’s motivation comes largely from the state’s leadership vacuum. He is a positive, optimistic person who knows how to channel his optimism practically.
“Too many people dreamed and built this state for us to despair,” he says. “Today we have a state, and we have forgotten how to dream. Our leadership does not provide a horizon, and it led to social unrest, and then the war broke out.”
Ende hopes people can find strength from the situation, noting that civil society has been “extraordinary” since the massacre. While he doesn’t know how things will go with the Eritreans, he is sure that they want and need to return to their homes in Sderot.
“Representatives of the Home Front Command came here and tried to re-categorize us as an absorption center, but I know things are chaotic right now,” Ende says. “In the end, they need to be part of the [multi-year strategic plan for the rehabilitation and development of the area adjacent to the Gaza Strip]. I want to believe this country can be stronger. I want to contribute to its strength, believe in it, and believe in ourselves.”
