One Year Later // Danny Wise traveled through the communities at the border of Gaza with a film crew, documenting how October 7 victims are rebuilding—and reviving their broken spirits. These are their stories.

In the sweltering stillness of southern Israel, near the border where Gaza’s horizon blurs into dry farmland, something curious is stirring. Amid the ruins of kibbutzim destroyed by Hamas, where anti-religious socialism thrived and shuls had no place, a new cultural seedling is growing—one rooted in faith. This is the story of a renaissance, not of factories or collective farms, but of sifrei Torah and shuls, as centers of Torah life emerge where none existed before.
At the start of the summer, I had been asked to create a documentary film capturing the story of these kibbutzim as they rose from the devastation. I accepted the assignment, perhaps naively, imagining that the story of loss and resilience would reveal itself in the usual fashion: in tear-streaked faces, in the melancholy quiet of empty homes. But the deeper story—the one that lingers in the folds of silence—was harder to bring out.
For weeks our crew toured the shattered kibbutzim, filming home interviews with survivors, former hostages and community leaders. Archival research helped inform the background of these multilayered stories and individual journeys, but the underlying theme remained elusive. We were standing amid tragedy, hoping to find a thread of redemption or hope on the barren horizon.
In these havens of secularism, where religion was an artifact of the past, we encountered during our interviews a shift—a subtle but undeniable turn toward tradition and faith. The story we were uncovering wasn’t just about rebuilding homes; it was about rebuilding souls.
It was when I found myself standing at the gate of Kibbutz Re’im, the ground still warm with the memory of violence, that I felt the first stirrings of something unexpected. The inside story began to uncover itself.

Kibbutz Re’im

Dafnah’s Story:

Waiting for me at the gate of Kibbutz Re’im was Dafnah—her posture resolute, her eyes reflecting the solemnity of one who has seen too much. She had been the cultural director of the kibbutz, the one who, only days before the massacre, had helped organize the Nova Festival, now infamous as the epicenter of horror. The kibbutz stretched out behind her like a dreamscape distorted by memory, the buildings still standing but gutted, hollowed out by flames and grief.
There was no fanfare, no need for dramatics—the landscape spoke loudly enough on its own. Walking through the main gates was like entering a painting where all the color had drained away, leaving only the stark lines of what once was. There was a stillness in the air, as if even the land itself was holding its breath. It was impossible not to feel the weight of history pressing down, suffocating the present.
She led us past the charred remains of homes and the singed children’s playgrounds until we reached what had once been her house, a single-story villa cradled in the embrace of fig leaves, a child’s swing hanging from one of its branches. It was an elegy for a vanished world waiting faithfully for life to return.
“In this room,” she said, pointing toward the charred remains of her living room, “my mother and my children, Shira and Meir, were found together.” Her voice was steady, but there was no mistaking the sorrow beneath it. Dafnah had grown up in this house and raised her own children here. Now she was the only one left, the lone survivor of a life that had been swallowed by the flames.
We continued through the vanquished streets, past the ruins of the dining hall—once the heart of the kibbutz, now a heap of concrete and steel, a tomb of memories. She gestured toward the ruins. “This,” she said softly, “this is the Shoah.”
I thought of Kristallnacht, of shuls engulfed in flames, of the brutal erasure of Jewish life in Europe. It was an impossible comparison to escape, yet something gnawed at me. Where were the shuls here? Where were the symbols of Jewish life? I asked her if the terrorists had destroyed the beit knesset.
Dafnah laughed, though there was no humor in it. “Of course not. Not a single beit knesset was damaged in all 21 Gaza kibbutzim.”
Her answer left me puzzled. How could it be that not a single shul was damaged, no sifrei Torah charred? And then, with a kind of bitter irony, she explained, “It wasn’t a miracle. How could they damage something that doesn’t exist?”
It sounded absurd to me. How could there not be a single shul in all the kibbutzim along the Gaza border?
“But I will tell you,” Dafnah said, “I took upon myself the new beit knesset project. When we rebuild, our beit knesset will be the most beautiful structure on the kibbutz.”
I was mystified. How could someone like Dafnah, who had fought for decades against any kind of religious influence, now be talking about building a beit knesset here in Re’im? It seemed incongruous, if not impossible.
Dafnah, with the patience of someone accustomed to explaining the inexplicable, began to unwind the threads of the story.
“If you want to understand ‘the day after’,” she said, “you have to understand ‘the day before.’”
It was then that she spoke of the basketball game.
The Basketball Game
that Never Happened
The week leading up to October 7 was already fraught with tension. The country was on the verge of civil war, with months of mass protests tearing at the fabric of Israeli society. This is a country with a low boiling point, and the temperature was rising. We know now that the mass display of discord and belligerence among Jews did not go unnoticed by those seeking Israel’s vulnerability.
Yet amid the storm, there were a few who fought to heal the divide. Rabbi Shlomo Raanan was one of those at the forefront of that effort.
Rabbi Raanan, a chareidi rabbi who dedicated the past 25 years of his life to building bridges between the secular and chareidi communities, has a reputation for unconventional outreach. For decades, he has quietly worked at the edges of these kibbutzim, introducing Torah study and prayer into communities that had long and fiercely resisted any semblance of religious influence. His organization, Ayelet Hashachar, in partnership with the Wolfson family, employs dozens of young kollel families who live on secular kibbutzim and yishuvim throughout Israel. His chavrusa program matched over 10,000 secular Israelis with yeshivah students and seminary girls who studied Torah with them by phone. He even managed to build around 60 shuls in secular communities. In 2019 he helped build a small shul in Be’eri. But the majority of the Gaza border kibbutzim maintained their antipathy to formal religious representation, meeting his overtures with hostility.
In an effort to bridge that gap, Rabbi Raanan organized what he called a kiruv levavot (bringing hearts together), with the idea of a basketball game between yeshivah bachurim and the kibbutzniks of Re’im. The game was set to take place on Chol Hamoed, October 2, just days before the massacre.
Dafnah had led the charge to cancel the game. To her, the match wasn’t just a friendly contest; it was a Trojan horse, a way for religious influence to creep into the kibbutz.
“I was furious,” she told me. “This was outrageous. We didn’t need outsiders telling us who a good Jew is,” she said, pulling out her phone and scrolling through old messages. She showed me the texts she had sent to Rabbi Raanan, warning him not to bring his religious mission to her doorstep. “Cancel this game immediately,” she wrote. “If you don’t, we’ll all block the entrance with our bodies.”
In the spirit of peace, Rabbi Raanan canceled the game.
But five days later, the massacre came. Just over the border, in the tunnels of Gaza, Dafnah found herself held hostage, face to face with the forces that had torn her world apart.
“I said to an older guard in Arabic, ‘Why do you torture me? For 20 years, I’ve made programs for Arab and Jewish kids. The Jews are your cousins.’” As she pleaded in the darkness for some recognition of their shared humanity, she was met not with empathy but with a cold dismissal.
“You are not a descendent of Ibrahim! You are not a Jew!” he spat. “You are a European colonialist who stole our land!” It was in that moment, Dafnah said, that something broke. Or perhaps, something began to be repaired.
The accusation hit hard. Like many in the kibbutz movement, Dafnah had spent her life defining herself more as an Israeli than a Jew, and more dedicated to reconciling Arabs and Israelis than healing the divides between different groups of Jews. Religion had always been secondary to her identity. But now, in the depths of that tunnel, being denied her Jewishness by a Hamas fighter, she experienced a crisis of self.
“I started screaming, ‘Ana Yahudiun! Ana Yahudiun! I am a Jew! I am a Jew!’” The guards restrained her, taping her mouth. But for Dafnah, the internal shift had already occurred. “For the first time in my life I saw my soul; I saw that I am a Jew.
“All my life,” Dafnah reflected, “I’ve been part of this community. We didn’t see ourselves as Jews, in the traditional sense. When I traveled overseas and someone asked if I was Jewish, I’d correct them. ‘No, I’m Israeli,’ I’d say. But when he called me a colonialist, it hit me. He didn’t see me as a Jew—because I didn’t see myself as a Jew.”
Dafnah paused for a moment, her eyes wandering over the ruined landscape. “Every Arab village has a mosque. Christian settlements build churches. And here, we have nothing. Nothing to say that we are Jews. And in that moment, I realized that if we were going to rebuild, we needed to reclaim our identity.”
I asked her how the decision to build a shul might affect the rest of the community. Would others accept it?
Dafnah shrugged. “The social structure of the kibbutz is based on cohesiveness and equality. We will return, maybe in another year. But when we do, we will return as a community of Jews. Whether secular or religious, Torah will be the heartbeat of our communities.”

Kibbutz Nir Oz

Yelena Trufanova:

Just a few kilometers away from Re’im, Kibbutz Nir Oz was founded on October 7, 1955. But 68 years later, October 7 would be remembered for something far darker. On that day, Hamas terrorists attacked the kibbutz, killing, injuring or abducting over a quarter of the community’s 400 residents.
Among those abducted were Yelena Trufanova, 50, her mother, Irena, 73, her son, Sasha, and her daughter-in-law, Sapir. Yelena’s husband, Vitaly, was killed in a firefight defending his family.
Yelena’s story, like Dafnah’s, is one of loss, survival and, ultimately, faith.
When I met Yelena in the newly restored lobby of her kibbutz’s factory, she was still processing the events of the past year. After 54 days in captivity she was released, along with her mother and daughter-in-law, at the request of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Her son, Sasha, remains a captive.
“Our kibbutz wasn’t a community that identified as Jewish,” Yelena began. “Most of the people in the community considered themselves ideologically secular Israeli leftists. However, in recent years, many of the people who grew up here but moved to the city, got married and had children ended up moving back here. Their spouses were from all kinds of backgrounds, and there were also some traditional people among them.”
Yelena paused, as if collecting her thoughts. “I don’t know whether the secular kibbutz members will be more respectful to the others in the community who’ve become more religious when we return. But I know that they all respect my choice to become shomer Torah umitzvot. After what I endured and am enduring, no one can say anything to me. I can do whatever I want. So the fact that I was chozer biteshuvah, that I started observing halachah, studying Torah, that I’m working with Rabbi Raanan to build the beit knesset here, after 70 years—no one commented on it. They respect me. What they think about the others, I don’t know yet. But eventually the kibbutz will find a way to become a unified family, a cohesive unit. So even those who were anti-religious before will feel compelled to be more open.”
What struck me most about Yelena’s story was the role that faith played in her survival. Her time in captivity opened her eyes to the importance of her Jewish identity.
“I was taken captive as a completely secular person,” she told me. “My mother, who was also kidnapped with me, had kept Jewish traditions. Before we emigrated from Russia, she was close to the Jewish community there, in Rostov. She went to the beit knesset and attended women’s gatherings. But I was distant from all of that. I didn’t observe anything.”
Yelena paused, her voice steady but tinged with emotion. “I was kidnapped alone and kept in isolation. I was alone, completely alone. Later, I met some other hostages there. But I think, in retrospect, I must have always been a believer, because I was never really afraid of missiles or the sirens. I don’t know why. Somehow, I always believed it would be okay. And be’emet, it was okay.”
She recounted how, after her release, she and her daughter-in-law, Sapir, decided to start observing Shabbos and keeping kosher. “We also began studying Torah and reading Tehillim every day. Later, I received a siddur and Tehillim with Russian translation from Rabbi Shlomo Raanan—who made amazingly beautiful siddurim for all the released captives.”
She smiled faintly. “I also received very beautiful Shabbat candlesticks from Rabbi Raanan’s wife, which we put aside. Sapir’s mother also received the siddur and Shabbat candles from Rabbi Raanan, and she started keeping kosher too. We are saving the candlesticks for the day when my son Sasha will return from captivity, b’ezrat Hashem, and we will all celebrate Shabbat together as a family.”
Yelena’s story took an unexpected turn when she began to speak about her captors.
“During my captivity,” she said, “the Hamas terrorists, our captors, were really interested in learning about our Jewish faith. On the very first day, they asked Danielle and me to recite the Ten Commandments. At first, we didn’t understand them because they spoke Arabic. Then we realized they wanted us to tell them the Aseret Hadibrot.”
Yelena shook her head in disbelief. “Danielle and I were secular, and between the two of us, we could only remember five of them. Disappointed, our guards went to a different group, where my daughter-in-law Sapir was being held, and they asked her to tell them the Aseret Hadibrot. Sapir remembered all of them. They came back to us, all fired up, berating us, saying, ‘Sapir knows all ten commandments and you don’t! That’s not okay.’”
The interrogation continued day after day. “They kept asking us different questions about the Torah. We couldn’t answer much because we simply didn’t know. Then they began interrogating us repeatedly: ‘Do you read the Torah?! Do you read the Torah?!’ We said no. They were incensed. ‘How?! How can it be that you don’t study your own Torah?! This is not okay!’”
Yelena’s voice grew quieter. “They berated us about this every day, that we were wrongdoers and that All-h would punish us for not studying Torah. It was bizarre. All they wanted to talk to us about was Torah and different aspects of Judaism.”
When Yelena was finally released, her experience with her captors left her with a profound realization. “It was only after I was freed that I thought about what I had said to Danielle during our captivity. I told her, ‘Hakadosh Baruch Hu wants me to continue my life as a Jewish woman.’ At the time, it just came out, but now I realize that it was true.”
Since her release, Yelena has fully embraced Yiddishkeit. “I study Torah every day. I keep Shabbat. I kashered my home. I’m living my life as a Jewish woman now.”
She stood quietly for a short time, gazing pensively out the window at the remnants of her community. “This is what Hashem wants from me,” she said quietly. “To live as a Jew.”

The Future of the Kibbutzim

The journey from tragedy to faith is never easy, and for the survivors of October 7, that journey is still ongoing. But as I left Kibbutz Re’im and drove back toward Tel Aviv, I felt a sense of hope. The people I had spoken to—Dafnah, Yelena and countless others—were finding strength in their faith, in their community, and in their identity as Jews.
The kibbutzim will rise again. But this time, at their center, there will rise the newly built batei mikdash me’at—testaments not only to survival, but to a new understanding of what it means to live and to believe. The old divisions between the secular and the religious, the devout and the indifferent, are blurring, reshaping these border communities from the inside out.
As the sun sets once more over the plains of Gaza, it is not hard to imagine that, in some quiet corner of the kibbutz, the sounds of prayer will soon rise alongside the winds of change.
As we wrapped up Yelena’s interview, I noticed a framed quote up on the bare wall: “Do not go gentle into that good night.” The anthem of Dylan Thomas echoes in Hebrew letters, even here. On the train back to Jerusalem, I scribble my own version of that anthem:

“Out of the Ashes, a Beit Knesset Rises.

Do not go gentle into the ruins’ light
Where shattered homes lie still beneath the sky
And blood-soaked earth drinks deep the fires of night
But rage, rage against the death that will not die.

Here once stood laughter, children’s fleeting breath
In fields of fig trees whispering their names
Now only silence fills the mouth of death
And soot-streaked walls remember what remains.

Yet from this dust, a stubborn seed takes root
A spark of faith, beneath the charred remains
Where once was doubt, now prayers rise like fruit
Against the hopelessness of Gaza’s plains.
For in the hollow of this broken earth
A synagogue will stand, defiant, high
Built from the cries of grief and songs of birth
Its walls will hold the soul that would not die.

The sun sinks low, but still the light endures
And voices once opposed now dare to pray
The faithless, too, find hope in what is pure
And rage, rage against the end of day.”

To be continued...