We will rebuild, survivors vow on Yom Hazikaron

The people of Israel aren’t victims, they want to rebuild, Liora Ben Tsur, the daughter of Marcelle Taljah, murdered by Hamas terrorists, told this year’s South African Zionist Federation (SAZF) Yom Hazikaron ceremony on 29 April.

Taljah was murdered on 7 October 2023 while visiting her daughter’s home on Kibbutz Ein HaShlosha on the Gaza border for a few days over the Simchat Torah weekend.

“The sun never rose on 7 October. It became our darkest day since the Holocaust, a wound that cannot heal, a horror that will not fade,” said Rowan Polovin, the chairperson of the SAZF at the Yeshiva College Campus.

“That morning, [members of] Hamas, an antisemitic death cult, tore into the land of Israel with savage intent. They came not for borders, not for grievances, not for land. They came for us, the Jewish people. They came for Israel, the Jewish state. They stormed homes and communities with methodical brutality. They burned families alive. They raped. They mutilated. They executed. They hunted civilians on highways, and murdered revellers at the Nova festival,” Polovin said.

“They dragged 251 men, women, children, and babies into Gaza. They slaughtered 1 200 innocent souls. And all the while, rockets rained down in Israel, not on military targets, but on Jewish life itself. Since that day, Israel has paid an unbearable price. Eight hundred and fifty fallen soldiers, officers, and reservists. These aren’t numbers. They are sons and daughters, parents and friends, each one a universe extinguished.”

He said it wasn’t just the Johannesburg Jewish community that was gathered at Yeshiva College campus to commemorate those who were lost during Hamas’s invasion on 7 October, but the 25 420 men and women whose lives were lost in the line of duty or at the hands of terror in Israel’s modern history.

Despite the horrors of what her family went through on 7 October, Ben Tsur set out to rebuild not only her life and the life of her family, but that of others in her community whose lives were ripped apart by Hamas terrorists.

Ben Tsur moved to Kibbutz Ein HaShlosha in Otef Aza (the Gaza envelope) with her husband Dor when they were still newlywed and their first child was only two months old. “We knew the problems in the kibbutz. And we knew we would get some rockets. But we didn’t know that on 7 October, everything would change,” she said.

She had given birth to her third child, Asif, a mere 29 hours before Hamas invaded Israel on 7 October 2023. Ben Tsur was the only member of her family, and only one of two people who weren’t on the kibbutz that fateful day.

When the alarms sounded at 06:30 that morning while Ben Tsur was sitting alone in her hospital room in Ashdod, she contacted her husband and was told that they were okay and were entering their shelter, but that her mother hadn’t come to the house.

She lost connection with her family for a few hours. From a small number of WhatsApp messages sent to her by her friends on the kibbutz, she realised that it had been infiltrated by Hamas terrorists.

In those moments of fear, Ben Tsur started a war room from her hospital bed and called anyone she could from her time as a journalist to try and get people to help her family. “I was holding Asif in my right hand, and my telephone in my left,” she said.

Her heart sank when a policewoman on the other end of the line eventually told her, “I’m sorry, the soldiers we sent to you are now dead.” Realising that her family and friends were truly alone, Ben Tsur called her brothers, Betzalel and Yedidiya, for help.

Ben Tsur would then guide her brothers via WhatsApp through kibbutz Nir Oz, kibbutz Nirim, and finally kibbutz Ein HaShlosha. It was as her brothers were outside the kibbutz that Ben Tsur heard from her friend on the kibbutz that terrorists had infiltrated her home and were trying to enter the safe room.

“That moment, I knew that we would be next. I sent my brothers running to Dor and the children, saying, ‘We have terrorists in our yard.’ Betzalel and Yedidiya saw my message. They were running together, taking care of each other, to our house,” she said.

When Dor opened the door, he was shaking while holding a knife, the only form of defence he had against the terrorists.

They then went to the guest house where Taljah was staying that weekend. “When they came to the guest house, they found my mother full of Kalashnikov bullets. Full of blood. Not one bullet, two bullets, but more than 50 bullets,” said Ben Tsur. “And when they picked up the body of my mother, my sweet mother, they saw that she was holding snacks for her grandchildren, for my children. At that moment, my brother, Betzalel, was screaming. He couldn’t believe it. He thought that they would get her alive.”

“My screaming that day was the loudest – over the newborns that had just been born and the mothers that had just given life into this world,” she said.

Ben Tsur buried her mother five hours after she left the hospital.

During shiva she told her children that they were going to go back to rebuild their lives on their kibbutz.

Two weeks later, Ben Tsur and her friends, also from the Otef Aza, established a movement called Atid Le’Otef (Future for the Otef).

“We need to get back home, make sure for our children, for ourselves, that the Otef will be the best place, the best place in Israel,” she said.