“There are videos of bodies two minutes from me…it’s a catastrophe”
– Ron Kalman’s interview with Kan 11 on October 7, 2023.
As someone who observes Shabbat, I would not normally spend a Saturday morning scrolling on my phone or watching television on my laptop. Yet, on October 7, 2023, that is exactly what I was doing.
My family had been crammed in our shelter room since 6:30 a.m., with siren after siren blaring outside. As the hours dragged on, it became clear that this was not one of the typical short-lived rocket attacks from Hamas that we had, unfortunately, grown accustomed to in Ashkelon. Sensing that information could be a matter of life and death, I opened Kan 11, Israel’s public broadcaster, on my laptop to grasp the scope of the attack. Unexpectedly, I heard the voice of Ron Kalman, a friend from my college, calling in from Sderot, about 12 miles south of me. He was detailing the horrors unfolding just minutes away from his home.
While Ron was live on air, another classmate of ours, Amir Alfassa, was sheltering alone in his home in Gan Yavne. When he heard that terrorists had infiltrated Kibbutz Nir Oz, where his family lived, he messaged the family group chat. One cousin, Bar, replied, “I’m alive.” Another, Dekel, wrote, “Me too.” But his aunt and uncle, Maya and Avner Goren, were silent.
Three years later, I met with both of these friends — not just to reflect, but to ask what rebuilding means to them, and whether they feel able to write the next chapter of their lives.
The places they called home
“Tzeva Adom,” Hebrew for “Red Alert,” is the warning that signals incoming rockets. It became part of Ron’s vocabulary at an early age. His bedroom was in the family’s reinforced shelter room, and when the sirens sounded, his mother and his younger brother, Ro’i, would hurry to him.
“I grew up in the thick of it,” he told me. “The first rocket [to ever hit Sderot], it fell right across the street from my house.”
Still, Sderot was always home. “Before and after [October 7],” he said, “Sderot is a part of me and I am a part of Sderot.”
When his parents divorced and his father relocated up north, Ron took on responsibility for the household. His mother lives with several chronic illnesses, and Ro’i, who turns 24 this December, is on the autism spectrum and cannot read or write full sentences. Ron adores his brother and has spent most of his life as the one Ro’i and their mother lean on.
Amir’s ties to the Gaza border ran through his mother, Smadar. Her only brother, Avner, lived at Nir Oz with Maya and their four children. The family was close, gathering for holidays, birthdays, and Shabbats.
Avner, the kibbutz accountant, was known for the songs and skits he wrote. His writing became part of the Nir Oz Passover Haggadah and was read aloud at kibbutz celebrations for years. Maya was the caregiver and kindergarten teacher at the kibbutz’s daycare. By all accounts, she was warm, steady, and endlessly optimistic. When her own children came home from the army for the weekend, she would put chocolates on their pillows.
The morning everything changed
The first siren pulled Ron out of sleep. He registered the sound, assumed his mother and brother would come to his room as they always had, and stayed in bed. But they didn’t come, and the sirens didn’t stop. As one wave of rockets followed another, his mind began to catch up with what he was hearing.
Searching for his family, he found his mother standing frozen at the kitchen window. When he urged her toward the shelter room, she motioned for him to be quiet. So he listened. Then he heard the rattle of automatic gunfire.
Ron had served in a logistical and intelligence role in the army. He had never seen combat, but he had been around weapons enough to know one basic rule: “The IDF only shoots single rounds,” he said. “The moment it’s automatic, it’s not the IDF.”
He later learned that the shots came from near the municipal library, where terrorists had opened fire on a group of elderly people whose minibus had stopped in Sderot on the way to the Dead Sea.
He grabbed his phone. Videos were flooding his group chats: terrorists in pickup trucks, driving through the streets he had grown up on. He turned on the television, saw the numbers of victims begin to climb, and understood what he was looking at.
Knowing he was the family’s only line of defense, he took a knife from the kitchen and stationed himself at the front door. If terrorists tried to come in, Ron decided he was going to take one with him.
“There’s no way I’m just going to wait and say, ‘OK, they’re coming to kill me, so this is my fate,’” he said. “I’ll at least wait at the entrance, and I’ll be ready for that scenario.”
Later that day, Ron went on air on Kan 11. He didn’t know I had heard him until I told him, three years later.
In Gan Yavne, Amir’s morning had begun with something ordinary: a walk with the family dog. He woke up early for no particular reason, so the first sirens caught them by surprise in the street. He lay flat on the ground beside her and waited for the barrage to end. But the rockets kept coming, so he made the decision to run home to his shelter room.
Once he was inside, the phone calls began. His parents, who were abroad, had been woken by alerts on their phones and wanted to know he was safe. Amir wrote to the extended family group chat to check on everyone else. Nir Oz was under fire too, and his cousins replied that they were in their shelter rooms. At first, it still looked like one of the periodic escalations in the south, the kind they expected to be dealt with by the end of the day.
At 8 a.m., his aunt Maya called from Nir Oz. She knew he was home alone, and wanted to make sure he was safe. She reassured him that she was fine and had been instructed to lock herself inside the daycare’s shelter room.
Maya had also risen early to prepare the daycare for the children returning from the Sukkot break the next day. She was alone when the sirens began, and still there when she called to check on her nephew. It would be the last time Amir ever spoke with his aunt.
Around 10:30 a.m., Amir’s mother wrote to him. She had been in touch with Avner, who was alone at home. Terrorists had broken in.
“Only then did it finally sink in that something truly abnormal and terrible was happening,” Amir recalled.
Amir checked the family group again. His cousins answered; Avner and Maya did not. For most of the day, the family held on to the hope that poor reception in the shelter rooms explained their silence, and that they would write back eventually.
At around half past seven that evening, one of Amir’s cousins said no one could find Avner or Maya.
“They did not answer,” Amir told me, “because they could not.”
Amir emphasized that no one came to fight for his aunt and uncle. By the time the first soldiers reached Nir Oz, the last terrorists had already gone. A quarter of the kibbutz’s residents had been murdered or kidnapped.
“Not a single IDF bullet was fired at Nir Oz that Shabbat,” he said.
In Sderot, Ron states, the people who fought at the city’s police station saved his life. He is convinced that, had the battle gone the other way, Sderot would have become another Nir Oz.
“In the ‘good’ case, I would have been a hostage,” he said. “And in the bad case, my parents would have come to visit me at the cemetery.”
Unlike many residents who evacuated in the days that followed, Ron and his family stayed, despite weeks of rumors that terrorists were still hiding in the city.
Learn more — Two Years Since October 7th: A Conversation with Amir Tibon
For nearly six months, Ron stationed himself by the front door at night, knife in hand, listening. Only in the mornings would he allow himself a few hours of sleep, reasoning that this was when terrorists were least likely to try anything.
When he finally let himself sleep through the night again, it was a deliberate decision: “I said, if I continue on this path, I’m going to reach self-destruction,” he recalled.
While Ron and his family stayed in Sderot, Amir’s family went to Eilat to join his cousins, who had been evacuated to a hotel with the rest of the Nir Oz community. For months, that hotel became the center of the family’s life.
On October 18, eleven days after the attack, the family learned that Avner had been murdered. Terrorists had taken him from his shelter room while he was wounded. His body was later found in the fields between Nir Oz and Gaza; the family still does not know exactly how he died.
“There aren’t answers to this,” Amir said. “No one has any idea about all the chaos that happened that day.”
Avner was buried at Nir Oz. The family sat shiva for him while Maya was still listed as a hostage.
In early November, the family was told that Maya had been severely wounded at the daycare, and that the terrorists who shot her had taken her with them. The news didn’t take away their hope, but it did change its shape. They understood that the odds were worse than they had allowed themselves to believe.
Later that month, the first hostage-release deal began, and people Amir and his family knew and loved from Nir Oz started coming home. Keren Munder, Ohad Munder, Lena Trupanov. As a civilian woman, Maya was among those the family expected would be released. But as the days of the deal passed, she did not come back.
On the last night of the deal, as hostages from Nir Oz were coming home on the television screen, the army called Amir’s mother. He asked her if it was about another family, and she shook her head. Then he asked about Maya, and she nodded.
The army had called rather than come in person, fearing Hamas would circulate photos of Maya’s body before the family heard.
The family kept fighting, now to bring her home for burial. Amir marched, protested, and traveled abroad with other hostage families, carrying her picture alongside those of their neighbors from Nir Oz.
Related post — Live with Rachel Goldberg-Polin: Grief, faith and Hersh
Maya’s body was returned in a military operation in late July 2024. The family had been waiting for her for 292 days. She was buried at Nir Oz, next to Avner. At the funeral, one of his cousins said she was happy to have the privilege of burying her mother. Amir would not call it happiness, he told me. But it was closure.
Sixty-five members of Nir Oz were murdered on October 7, or in the days, months, and years that followed, 14 of them in captivity.
Choosing to keep going
Three years on, both Ron and Amir are rebuilding. What that means looks very different for each of them.
For Ron, it begins with one word: choice.
“Everything in life, in the end, is a matter of choice,” he told me. “From the level of getting up in the morning and going to work and continuing the routine.”
Related post: On the anniversary of October 7, here’s how to practice self-care
To surrender that rhythm, he believes, would give the people who tried to break him and his city what they wanted. “If I don’t get up now and continue with my work and my routine,” he said, “I give those terrorists the victory of having gotten what they wanted.”
Ron showed me one of his first visible choices: a tattoo he got on November 1, 2023, less than a month after the attack. It depicts a map of Sderot, a Magen David, and the date. It honors a friend who was shot in the leg by a terrorist while entering the city on his way home from a party at the Forum in Be’er Sheva. Ron was supposed to have gone with him, but stayed home because his mother, whose birthday was the next day, had asked him to. The tattoo sits in the same place on Ron’s leg where his friend was wounded.
For Ron, it was also about deciding what to do with the fact that he was still alive. If the Boreh Olam, the Creator of the World, had decided he would remain here, he reasoned, perhaps he had a role to play. Ron’s grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, once tattooed his own arm so that he would be taken for a Christian and survive. Ron sees both tattoos as part of a larger story of survival.
Most of the time, that role has meant being the one his family can rely on. During the attack, Ron put on a song by Eyal Golan, whose music Ro’i loves, and recorded a short video for his brother from the kitchen. He knew that even a few seconds of something familiar could steady him. Sderot had lost power, and the phone’s battery was running low. Ron used it anyway.
“To broadcast routine to him as much as possible,” he said. “I knew the only one in this situation who could function was me.”
Looking back, Ron speaks about how the family helped Ro’i cope, and how that effort brought them closer.
“The fact that we gave him the strength to come and cope,” he said, speaking of his brother, “and showed him we’re strong mainly for him, is really worth a whole world. And I think, as much as it helped him cope, it also built us as a family.”
This past Simchat Torah, three years after the Simchat Torah that fell on October 7, Ron celebrated in a synagogue for the first time since the attack. He was staying with a cousin and was torn about whether to go. He almost didn’t. “Once I made the decision to go, I’m glad I made it,” he admitted.
I told him something I had learned growing up in Chabad: Simchat Torah is not commanded in the Torah. The Jewish people chose to celebrate it, out of love. By going back, Ron had made that same choice. “It’s one of my considerations,” he said, “not to give [the terrorists] that satisfaction.”
When I asked him whether his faith had changed. Ron, who describes himself as traditional rather than strictly observant, said it had not really been shaken. If anything, he finds himself in more of a conversation with the Boreh Olam than before. He has not stopped believing. He has questions now, and he chooses to hold them.
“Be together”
For Amir, rebuilding has been guided by his aunt’s words.
“Tihyu beyachad,” Maya would say whenever she said goodbye, whether after a visit or before a trip abroad. Be together. Stay close, look after one another. It was the kind of thing an aunt says without a second thought, which may be why it stayed with them. After October 7, the family began to hear it as more than a goodbye. “It’s a sentence we carried with us afterward,” Amir told me. “We try as much as we can to live by it.”
For Amir’s family, living by it has meant holding on to one another more closely than ever. His four cousins lost both of their parents in a single day. But Amir’s parents, Smadar and Shlomo Alfassa, stepped in as a mishpacha otefet, Hebrew for an “embracing family,” relatives who support children who have lost their parents.
They are not replacements, Amir is careful to say. His cousins’ parents were and always will be their parents. But Smadar and Shlomo are a constant presence. Every Friday, the family has dinner together, then plays games, often a trivia game they invented called “20 Questions of Israel.” They gather for birthdays and holidays and travel together when they can.
The experience has changed how Amir thinks about family. Before October 7, he said, he had probably taken those connections for granted, especially with extended family. Now he understands how much there is to cherish, and how suddenly it can be lost. He has always been the one behind the camera at family gatherings, and almost every photo of Avner and Maya is one he took. “It’s important to document, important to hug, and important to guard it together,” he said.
Alongside all of this, Amir has been building the rest of his life. Part of his motivation, he admitted, was seeing how much his father worried about him. “Getting on with my own life a bit does something for them,” he said. “It takes some worry off their heads.”
He finished his degree and began working as a social media editor at a news outlet. He also runs Nir Oz’s social media accounts. That work began as a volunteer effort at the Eilat hotel in the earliest weeks after the attack, when sitting still was unbearable. It has since become a paid job, one that draws him back into the community’s grief every day. He does it anyway. For him, not helping was never an option.
Even before Maya’s body came home, her daughter had found a way to carry her care for others forward. She partnered with an Israeli organization called Tinokot shel HaChaim, Babies of Life, on a fundraising project in her mother’s name, packing food baskets for babies in need. Maya had spent most of her working life caring for the babies of Nir Oz. For her daughter, Amir said, caring for babies was the most fitting way to remember her.
When Amir speaks about his aunt and uncle, he often returns to the smaller things. Avner loved playing with the children in the family and sitting beside them over their crosswords. Three years on, the kibbutz still tells the family there are parts of his accounting work that no one quite knows how to do without him.
Maya was the warmth of the house. She made her children her own version of hot chocolate, a cup of milk with a square of Mekupelet, the flaky Israeli chocolate bar, warmed in the microwave for 30 seconds. The family still associates it with her.
Before October 7, Nir Oz was Amir’s safe place. “Everything green, everything calm,” he said. After the attack, he came back to ruins. Avner and Maya’s house had been ransacked, every room destroyed. It has since been torn down to make way for new homes.
When I asked what gives him hope, Amir spoke of wanting a change in Israel’s leadership and a state commission of inquiry into October 7 and the events leading up to it. But most of what he described as hope that afternoon was quieter. His cousins advancing in their degrees. The Friday dinners that keep happening, week after week. People slowly returning to the kibbutz where, for a long time, no one could have imagined living in again. His sister among them.
Earlier this year, Amir visited her. Looking at the small vegetable garden she was tending, he realized that, for the first time since the attack, something about being there felt different.
“I felt that there is life at Nir Oz again,” he recalled.
Seeing their parents anew
At the end of each interview, I asked Ron and Amir a version of the same question: whether there was something I hadn’t asked that they wished I had.
Ron’s answer turned toward his father. On October 7, his father had been in shul in the north, two hours from his sons in Sderot, when the first reports began reaching the congregation. Ron told me he had rarely stopped to ask his father what that day had been like for him. So much of Ron’s account had focused on caring for his mother and brother. Now he was considering his father’s fear, too: being far from his sons, unable to help.
The next day, Amir paused when I asked the same question. Then he said there was something that hadn’t come up. His parents.
Since the attack, he told me, he had discovered what they were truly capable of. His mother, Smadar, had lost her brother and her sister-in-law in a single day. She stopped working for a long stretch and is only now returning. His father, Shlomo, reduced his work hours to half-time and threw himself into a new cause: recognition for families like theirs.
As Amir explained it, Israeli law does not adequately recognize the relatives who step in to support adults who have lost both parents. Shlomo took the issue to the Knesset, working with other families on legislation that would give embracing families legal and financial recognition. The bill drew support across the political spectrum, including from lawmakers Amir and his father would never have expected to find themselves working alongside.
“They’re truly strong people, warriors, fighters,” Amir said of his parents. “They went through hell these three years, and they’re still going through it, if a little less, now that there are no hostages left in Gaza.”
Then he kept going.
“At times like these, you understand that they’re human beings,” he told me. “They’re not just the mom and dad who shelter you. That fades a little, because they’re human, and they make mistakes, and they’re fragile, and they cry, and it’s hard for them. They’re people like me, just older, with more responsibilities. They’re not perfect, and you can’t expect them to be. But like all of us, they’re doing their best in this unreal reality we’re living in.”
Writing the next chapter
Two interviews, in two different parts of the country, with two very different experiences behind them. When I gave them space at the end, both of them turned the conversation toward their parents.
Three years on, rebuilding lives in the choices Ron makes each morning and in the closeness Amir’s family continues to nurture. It means going to work, gathering for Friday dinners, and learning to see the people who have always cared for you as people who need care, too.
None of this is finished. The last hostage was returned from Gaza only in January of this year. The country is still living in the aftermath of October 7, and will be for a long time to come. These two conversations don’t resolve that, and they don’t try to.
These conversations do, however, add to something Ron began that Shabbat. He went on air so that there would be some record of what his family went through. Amir, who photographs his family and tells Nir Oz’s story online every day, has become one of the people keeping that record, too. This piece, in its small way, is part of it.
And in that record are two of my friends, three years in, still choosing to write the next chapter. Ron, in the city that is part of him. Amir, with what remains of his mother’s family, and in what they have chosen to build together.
