She settled on a compromise: She wouldn’t go on the vacation to Israel’s border with Jordan — but she also wouldn’t remain hunkered down at home.

“I’m not going to play with destiny to that degree,” she said about her vacation plans.

“But I am going out,” she added. “I don’t want to stop my life because of a ‘what if.’ We’re living in a situation but the best we can do is understand we’re not in control and just surrender to that fact.”

For months, Israelis across the country have faced similar decisions, as daily life goes on amidst a multi-front conflict that has regularly spilled over into population centers and left once-popular recreation spots deserted. Israelis have gotten used to a constant cognitive dissonance — surrounded by reminders of the war and all those who have been killed or taken hostage — while they go to work, send their children to school and, often, go out to eat or enjoy themselves despite the risks. That tension has only mounted as Israel braces for an attack from Iran after a strike on a Hamas leader in Tehran.

“It’s like living in 2 realities at the same time here,” Karin Hershkovitz, an Israeli influencer who lives in the United States but is visiting her family in Israel this summer, posted on Instagram last week. “Working, kids, ‘routine,’ partying and living life — while dealing with grief, actual threats and uncertainty constantly.”

Sometimes the contrast is striking. Hours after a drone shot from Yemen exploded blocks away from the Tel Aviv beach last month, killing a local worker, the shore was crowded with locals enjoying a weekend in the sun.

A group of families gathered for a weekly surfing class — only one had canceled in the wake of the strike — and the traffic of cars, bikes, scooters and pedestrians continued as normal. A passerby, surrounded by busy cafes and shops, would be forgiven for not knowing the bustling area had been the site of an international terror attack that morning.

“I thought about not coming for like half a second but to be honest, I’m far more concerned about jellyfish,” Ofer Zimri said laughing.

The overcrowded beach indicated that others shared Zimri’s sentiment. Near the water, a couple sat on the sand drinking beer.

“Life here happens at such a crazy pace, that you forget. One day, there’s an attack, and the next it’s business as usual,” Amit Mizrahi said.

But like many Israelis, he had made some life changes following Oct. 7. He obtained a license for a weapon, then the gun itself, and stays vigilant in public places, constantly scanning for exits and monitoring for suspicious activity.

“Just last week there was a terror attack near my house in Rishon Lezion,” he said, referencing a car-ramming attack in which a soldier was killed and three more wounded. “But it doesn’t matter what happens, I still feel safe. Because it’s our home, you know?”

For many Israelis, the losses of Oct, 7 and the war have been close and personal. A man named Ziv had a childhood friend who was killed at the Nova music festival, and another friend who lost both legs fighting in Gaza. Ziv said he is waiting to be called up to the army again.

In the meantime, Ziv was skateboarding at a nearby park. During a rest between kickflips, he waxed lyrical about life in the shadow of war.

“Life is the medicine for the opposite of life, which is loss,” he said. “My life is on pause but I’m trying to go back to routine as much as possible. I go to the psychologist, I go skateboarding. The movement is good, it brings down the pain and the stress.”

Some Israelis see going out as a demonstration of defiance. At a recent concert headlined by Jewish American rapper Kosha Dillz, Michelle Long said she feels a responsibility not to give way to depression or, as she termed it, “drop the ball.”

“We’re all living double lives. You see something bad has happened, your heart flips and then you put your phone back in your pocket and continue,” she said.

“Well, sometimes you can continue like normal,” she continued. “Other times you act completely crazy. And sometimes you don’t even know what’s affecting your behavior any more.”

Noah Shufutinsky, one of the night’s opening acts who performs under his rap name Westside Gravy, said his music has changed significantly since Oct. 7.

“The new normal means that I’m not going to go and perform regular songs that I perform at any other time. I’m not going to make music just for the fun of it,” Shufutinsky said. “A lot of that for me has shifted to talking about the issues that Israelis are going through and trying to reflect a little bit of the society that I’m a part of now, through music.”

For Kim Feldman, going to a rap concert or any other event involving tickets and advanced planning has become too daunting since Oct. 7. Instead, she said she enjoys simpler evenings with friends, such as a screening of “The Princess Bride” in a local park, part of a free weekly outdoor movie series.

“I can’t plan to party. I can plan to sit in the park,” Feldman said. “It’s really nice to go somewhere super relaxed and social but without going out of your way. It’s a comfortable socialization, with less pressure and less expectations.

Gesturing around her, she said, “Just look at the amount of babies and dogs there are here.”

Many Israelis say that the atmosphere in public is not the same as it was in the first couple of months of the war, when the shock of Oct. 7 was still raw. “Everything felt tainted and weird,” Feldman said.

“The thing that freaked me out was how few young men there were on the streets and then, how many of them were injured,” Feldman said of the hundreds of thousands who reported for military service. “It’s nine months later and in a way, the longer it goes on the harder it is. You’re not trying to be disrespectful but you’re trying to find a balance where you can continue to live as normally as possible.”

At a standup show, popular comedian Udi Kagan was interrupted by the sound of a newborn crying. He asked the infant’s mother how she could have planned to attend the evening when tickets sold out months in advance. The woman answered that she got the ticket from a reserve soldier who was called up to Gaza at the last moment.

“It just reflected the whole mood in the country,” said audience member Idan Cohen, who recalled the exchange. “You used to take things as a given, but now you can’t. From the smallest thing — like whether you’ll end up going to the standup comedy you bought tickets for — to the biggest thing, whether you’re safe in your bed at night.”

Cohen added, “But life carries on, especially for the kids. During the holidays it’s the hardest.”

Israelis have perhaps been quickest to change their plans when it comes to traveling and vacations. Anat Shihor-Aronson, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Tourism, cited two main reasons for the trend: many airlines have canceled flights due to the war, and many Israelis are reluctant to travel abroad, a feeling fueled both by increasing antisemitism overseas and a strong desire to be near their loved ones.

“If God forbid something happens, they’re staying in Israel so they can be close to home,” Shihor-Aronson said.

As a result, hotels in Israel are operating at 90 to 100% capacity, despite having only about 10 to 20% of the usual number of foreign tourists typically present during the summer months. The occupancy rates are also higher due to approximately 24,000 evacuees, mostly from Israel’s embattled northern region, who are currently residing in the hotels.

Shihor-Aronson expressed optimism about the future of foreign tourism, noting a steady rise in numbers even during wartime. While most of those arriving are Jewish and evangelical Christian tourists, whom she described as the “loyal market,” there have been more and more volunteer and solidarity groups visiting — at least until most airlines scrapped flights this week in response to the Iran threat.

Some Israelis, like Tamir, are canceling their trips altogether. Cohen nixed an annual family trip to a campsite in the north due to frequent Hezbollah attacks in the area.

“There are so many spots we can’t go to, Cohen said. “it’s just too dangerous.”

And while life has in many ways returned to normal in Israel’s cities, one visitor said that shift also reflects a dreary reality.

“The beach volleyball courts are full. Life goes on,” Jonathan Jaffe, a New York-based rabbi in the country for the third time since the outbreak of the war, wrote on Facebook after the Tel Aviv attack. “You can see this as either an uplifting story of resilience displayed by a community that refuses to bow to terror, or a less optimistic tale of a region that has become all too accustomed to mornings like this.”

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The concert was the first official event held by the Tribe of Nova since Oct. 7, when the trance music community became synonymous with Israel’s catastrophe.

Many survivors of the Oct. 7 massacre attended as part of an ongoing reckoning with their trauma. But others in the crowd, which organizers claimed exceeded 40,000, stood out as noticeably different from the typical attendees at the festival on Oct. 7. Families with young children ate potatoes next to septuagenarian couples waving their arms in sync with the music.

Even the musical lineup broke away from Nova’s signature fare. While big-name trance DJs such as Captain Hook and Astrix took the stage, the lineup also included a mix of rock bands like The Giraffes and HaYehudim, Noga Erez and Ninet as well as Mizrahi music from pop star Zehava Ben.

And in the VIP area, there were several visibly religious concertgoers — people who were likely not survivors of the Oct. 7 massacre, which coincided with Shabbat and the holiday of Simchat Torah.

Two of them, Tamar and David Amar, had 15 Shabbat-observant family members who attended the festival overnight Thursday but returned home on Friday afternoon.

Their brother Hanan, however, a 37-year-old father of three, attended Simchat Torah prayers at the synagogue on Friday night before heading out to the party. He was murdered while hiding out in a roadside bomb shelter.

For Tamar, the Nova healing concert was her first time attending the kind of gathering that her brother frequented.

“I wanted to feel him, to understand what made him love events like this,” she said. “He wasn’t a person with his feet on the ground and I’m the total opposite, but I’m learning from him. He was a person who spread light, a child of love and music. He showed us what it means to live for the moment.”

Nova survivor Nir Haddad admitted it took him some time to return to attending trance parties, which have been muted across Israel since Oct. 7.

“At the beginning it was very triggering even to hear the music,” he said. “But now we’re back, we’re here to remember those we’ve lost, and guess what? We’re even stronger than before. If we stop, they win.”

Nir Shoval, a teenaged trance music and heavy metal aficionado, said that while he wasn’t at the original Nova festival, he felt a strong pull toward the community. “They’re crazy but in a good way. They’re just amazing and fun people to be around. What happened on Oct. 7 deeply affected me.”

Sophie Barrs said she went through a gamut of emotions throughout the night.

“It was quite extreme. One minute we’re doing guided meditation and I’ve got tears streaming down my face, and then all of a sudden the DJ comes back on and yells, ‘We will dance again!’ and this mad, happy music comes on,” Barrs said, referring to a phrase that has become a slogan for the Nova community’s resilience. “It was an emotional rollercoaster. But ultimately I thought it was just such a powerful display of unity, brotherhood, and love.”

Darwish, a well-known DJ in the trance scene, told the crowd that his craft helped channel the pain of losing his son, Laor Abramov — an aspiring DJ himself — on Oct. 7. “You can dance [to] hurt, pain, joy and love,” he said. “More than ever these days, we need a place where we can bring our whole selves to, just as we are.”

Mia Schem, who was abducted from the festival and released after 55 days in a hostage deal, also addressed the crowd, calling on them not to give up on the 124 hostages still inside Gaza.

“We cannot lose faith, they will return and we won’t stop fighting for them,” said Schem. She recounted being in the tunnels in Gaza and holding hands with other hostages and reciting a psalm for their release. “It was one of the most powerful moments I’ve ever experienced.”

Schem famously had the phrase “We will dance again” tattooed on her body after her release from Gaza. Many attendees at Thursday’s event similarly had gotten fresh ink since the massacre, tapping into both a trance community aesthetic and a powerful symbol among Jews for whom tattoos are often associated with the tragedy of the Holocaust.

Kfir Azulay, who was there with his mother Linda, had his late brother Yonatan’s last text message turned into a tattoo on his forearm: “I’m also feeling down, but happiness is the source of all blessing.”

His mother, Linda, wearing a T-shirt featuring a collage of Yonatan’s face overlaid on an Israeli flag, was on the phone with her son when an RPG hit him. Nearly nine months later, Linda said there was no solace in her grief.

“It gets harder with time, not easier. He filled the house with light and now it’s Tisha B’Av every day at home,” she said, referencing the Jewish day of mourning.

Uzi Yochananof has gotten several new tattoos since the massacre. Yochananof was volunteering there together with his sister, cutting watermelons and handing out water.

Mona Chen-Tov, a self-described trance superfan in her sixties, had a yellow blacklight tattoo on her forearm of the date of the Hamas attack. Chen-Tov was dancing and giving out handwritten notes at the concert, and many of the recipients recognized her from the Oct. 7 Nova party when she did the same.

Others, including Alejandro Lopez and Elad Jolles, had tattoos with the date and Nova logo.

“The tattoo is sort of like a milestone. You get it put on and you move on,” Jolles said.

Another attendee, Omer Shitrit, had a tattoo inspired by the Marvel character Groot paying homage to a murdered friend, fellow Nova attendee Segev Shoshan. Like Shitrit, Shoshan — who was murdered with his girlfriend Anita Lisman — was a photographer. Since Oct. 7, Shitrit has attended several trance parties to document them with his camera. “We’re showing that we’re still here and we won’t forget,” he said.

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After some deliberation, Richard Binstock, a British-Israeli from Rishon Lezion, decided to attend a rooftop party in Tel Aviv but noted that the roads into the coastal metropolis were unusually empty. “I’m sad to say there’s no traffic,” he said. “It’s been one of my quickest journeys ever.”

Nicole Barrs from Kiryat Ono said she had declined an invitation to a party. “I didn’t feel like going out to celebrate so I’m with family, having a small gathering,” she told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Nataly Peleg from Tel Aviv said she was staying indoors this year because she was “in no mood to go out at all. I just can’t do it this year.”

Worshipers at a synagogue in south Tel Aviv voiced similar sentiments. “It’s not a celebration this year,” Itzik Cohen, a leader of the Zichron Baruch synagogue, told JTA. “We don’t want to celebrate it but we have to. I don’t have the privilege of saying, ‘I’m not doing it this year.’ It’s a religious obligation, much like Passover.”

Cohen said the leaders of the synagogue had held several discussions about how to mark the holiday this year. Ultimately, they decided to proceed with the synagogue’s annual plans for a communal prayer followed by festivities, albeit a more toned-down version without bringing the music and dancing outside to the street as in previous years.

“It’s hard to admit this but I’m not feeling anything. I’m emotionally disconnected,” Yasmin Ishbi, who is not religiously observant but who brought her children to the synagogue’s event, told JTA. “Some people like living the ups and the downs in deep ways. I prefer not to feel the ups so that way I don’t have to feel the downs.”

According to Moshiko Balas, a municipality director, major celebrations all over Tel Aviv, including two major events that between them attract nearly 20,000 attendees, were canceled this year in light of the war. Even silent fireworks shows — which last year replaced the city’s traditional fireworks extravaganza out of deference to military veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder — were scrapped. The country also axed a traditional nationwide Independence Day flyover of military planes.

“Nobody is in the mood to celebrate,” Balas told JTA. But he added, “Having said that, we knew that even if we’re not celebrating Independence Day, we still have to mark it.”

To that end, the municipality conducted a poll in the city of Jaffa to gauge how people wanted to mark Independence Day this year. Fifty percent of those polled said they did not want to attend the large event that was planned and that included a concert by Israeli pop star Zahava Ben. The event, held in Davidoff Park in Jaffa, was modified and Ben’s appearance was nixed.

Instead, a small, unknown band took to the stage as did several representatives from local security and medical authorities, who were honored for their roles in the war. Balas noted that young singles and older people were noticeably absent from this year’s event and that several people had raised concerns about the possibility of rocket sirens, which also affected turnout. In the end, about 1,000 people showed up — half of last year’s crowd. Most were families with small children.

“Ultimately, people wanted it to be kids-oriented, to have a more community and unifying feel that was more intimate,” Balas said.

Doron Sabah, a teacher, said that he had “cried a whole lot” during the Memorial Day ceremony at his school earlier in the day.

“After that, my kids wanted to go buy Israeli flags and stuff but it felt weird. And friends invited us to a concert, but that also felt weird so we didn’t go. So we’re here,” he said. Referencing the war and the political turmoil reemerging in the country, Sabah went on, “The depressing thing about all this is that there seems to be no end in sight, like how do we get out of this mess?”

Maor Damasia said it was “hard not to feel guilty” about the families of victims of Oct. 7. “They can’t celebrate because they’re in mourning or because they have loved ones in Gaza. But I guess, everyone is affected in this war. Please God, next year we’ll be in a different time and it will be happier.”

Around 100,000 people gathered at an Independence Day rally in Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square to hear speeches from survivors of Oct. 7 as well as those with family members still  held hostage by Hamas in Gaza.

Another alternative Independence Day ceremony under the banner “no hostages, no independence” was held in the coastal Israeli town of Binyamina. Organized by Noam Dan, whose cousin Ofer Kalderon is a hostage in Gaza, the ceremony included extinguishing torches, conveying a somber counterpoint to the official state ceremony in Jerusalem in which torches are lit.

In a controversial move, the government-organized torch lighting ceremony was pre-recorded on Wednesday, without an audience. This year’s torch lighters include soldiers, medical personnel and civilians who saved lives on Oct. 7. One of the honorees is Youssef Ziadna, a Bedouin Arab who saved 30 people from the Nova music festival massacre.

“It was very very emotional. I can’t believe I was privileged for such a thing to happen to me. I’m very proud,” a teary-eyed Ziadna told JTA. “I’m thankful to the state for choosing me to light an Independence Day torch. We’re one people, Arabs and Jews, and please God we’ll live in peace and quiet in our country soon.”

At the synagogue in South Tel Aviv, Anne Dubitzky said that this year, the celebrations were largely in deference to Israel’s children. “If we don’t celebrate Yom Haatzmaut, then our enemies have won. And if the kids don’t celebrate, they won’t have the basis for loving and eventually defending the country,” she said, using the Hebrew name for Independence Day.

For radio personality Omer Ben Rubin, it was also all about the kids, who often also take center stage during normal years, playing with toy hammers and silly string.

“It’s just like on Oct. 8, we felt we needed to just get on with it for the kids. Is it natural to be celebrating? Of course not,” he said. “But you know what they say, happiness is infectious. So maybe our kids’ happiness will infect us also, you know? If it wasn’t for them, we’d all be in bed with the covers pulled over our heads.”

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Then, on Oct. 7, Hamas invaded Israel, perpetrating the bloodiest day for Jews since the Holocaust — and bringing another tragedy to Haim’s family: Yotam, her grandson, was taken hostage by the terror group. He escaped with friends, only to be killed by Israeli soldiers in a case of mistaken identity in December.

“I can’t believe I’m here. I’m shaking,” Haim told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency outside a barrack in the death camp. She said she believed the Holocaust would never repeat itself.

“But then it did,” she said, referring to the Hamas attack, in which roughly 1,200 people were murdered and 250 taken hostage, including Yotam.

“My walking here today is revenge against all the evil in the world,” she said. “The time has come.”

Haim was visiting Auschwitz as part of the March of the Living, an annual journey that takes thousands of participants, including Holocaust survivors, to Nazi concentration camps in Poland and then to Israel. The group always includes Holocaust survivors; this year, seven months after Oct. 7, they were joined by 23 survivors and relatives of victims of Hamas’ massacre, as well as by TikTok pro-Israel influencers who have battled antisemitism online. People in all of the groups told JTA that this year, the program carries an extra layer of meaning and urgency.

“Every year it’s important to be here,” said Thomas Hand, whose 9-year-old daughter Emily was taken hostage by Hamas and released during a ceasefire in November. “But this year it’s times a hundred more important. We’re living through another Holocaust. We’re actually in one. This is supposed to be never again, but this is again.”

The centerpiece of the itinerary is a march on Yom HaShoah, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, between the concentration camps Auschwitz and Birkenau, which the group completed on Monday. Budapest-born Laszlo Selly, who lives in Miami and came with a group of high schoolers from Florida, said he felt “tremendous sadness” being in Auschwitz, along with “tremendous hope” for the future.

“Since Oct. 7, it is now more important than ever for these kids to learn about what happens if people with hate in their hearts gain control so that they do everything in their power to prevent it from happening again,” he said.

Born in 1937, Selly was 7 years old when he and his twin brother were rescued from Budapest and hidden during the Nazi occupation of Hungary. Selly’s father escaped from a work camp and returned to Budapest. He and his sons were eventually saved by Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who issued diplomatic papers to thousands of Jews, preventing their execution.

“I remember an awful lot,” Selly told JTA. The woman who hid the brothers, he said, was a member of the Nazi-allied Arrow Cross fascist party. Selly said she wore both a swastika and the arrow cross symbol on her uniform. “But maybe she wasn’t a real Nazi,” he added.

Some actions on the march drew connections between the Holocaust and Oct. 7 as well. Near Selly, across from the barracks, Jacques Weisser, a hidden child survivor, broke down in tears as he dedicated the final letter in a Torah scroll that was being completed at Auschwitz. Completed by emissaries of the Chabad Hasidic movement, the scroll’s writing had been initiated at the site of the Oct. 7 Nova music festival massacre .

“It’s very special,” said Weisser, who came with the march’s British delegation. “I dedicated the letter to the family that I lost here. It means a lot, obviously. An unbelievable experience.”

The trip also marked a first for Walter Bingham, a 100-year-old Kindertransport survivor who earned the Guinness World Record for being the world’s oldest working journalist three years ago.

“It’s extraordinary being here but very difficult,” said Bingham, who moved to Israel from the United Kingdom two decades ago and lit a torch and said the Mourner’s Kaddish at the event.

Bingham also served as a bridge of sorts between young and old. Hundreds of university students were on the trip, and a gaggle of TikTokers surrounded Bingham, hoping to film a clip on the video social platform with the centenarian.

The TikTok influencers were part of a group of 30 influencers, Jewish and non-Jewish, who came on the March. Five content creators from the United Kingdom, Israel and the United States, who have approximately 30 million followers among them, filmed a video with a call to release the hostages. The company, which is facing regulatory pressure in the United States in part because of concerns about antisemitism on the platform, brought the power-users on the trip, according to posts that some uploaded from Auschwitz.

American-Israeli influencer Shayna Heidi said Oct. 7 underscored the need to continue remembering the Holocaust.

“Up until now, the Holocaust felt very far. We thought it was in the past and that we’d be won. We had a state,” said Heidi, who has more than 100,000 followers on TikTok. She added, referring to Oct. 7, “But since then we now know we need to carry on spreading the message.”

The march also encountered protest. As the marchers walked over a bridge on the two-mile stretch between Auschwitz and Birkenau, roughly a dozen pro-Palestinian protesters lined the street below, chanting at the marchers.

“To counter a peaceful march just like that, I’m sorry for my expression, but this is so f—ed up,” Youssef Elazhari, the Morocco director of a Middle Eastern dialogue group called Sharaka, told JTA. “I will never tolerate that.”

There were several Muslim and Arab delegations, including from Israel. One was Atidna, which brought a group of Arab Israeli youth. Its leader said he’s seen global perceptions of Israel shift.

“When we first came on March of the Living in 2021, Israel was known as the Startup Nation. In every place in the world, Israelis were in demand,” Suleiman Suleiman, Atidna’s co-CEO, told JTA. “But we chose to tie our fate with the state of Israel and the Jewish people in good and in bad. This is the test.”

The trip also included Israeli celebrities. Noa Kirel, who represented Israel at the Eurovision song contest last year and lost relatives in the Holocaust, told JTA it was “meaningful and powerful” to participate.

Adir Miller, a popular comedian and actor, came on the march with his family and mother, a Holocaust survivor who was born in Budapest during World War II. They also visited that city on the trip, which gave Miller an uplifting takeaway amid the discussion of tragedies past and present.

Miller said it was moving “to come here and to Hungary with my mother, who was a baby who they tried to destroy.” He added, “That baby has made it here, three generations later, with her kids and grandkids.”

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For 12 hours, Golebowicz was trapped with his son, Gideon, in his safe room. His son fashioned a basic wooden contraption to secure the door, which does not have a lock. Five people from the kibbutz were murdered and five were kidnapped, of whom two remain hostages in Gaza. Zvi Solow is another Holocaust survivor to survive the attack on Nirim.

In the weeks after Oct. 7, Golebowicz was the subject of multiple news reports, including CNN, which invariably linked his Oct. 7 survival to his experiences in the Holocaust. Others who experienced horrors on that day — when 1,200 Israelis were killed and about 250 taken hostage — made similar comparisons.

Yet Golebowicz has significant reservations about making such a connection, saying it diminishes the memory of the Holocaust as a singular event in history.

“I’ve always felt we shouldn’t mix the two,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “While of course it was vicious, barbaric and horrendous, [Oct.7] was a one-day terrorist attack.”

Golebowicz is one of several Holocaust survivors to be caught up in the carnage on Oct. 7. All elderly — the youngest survivors are in their late 70’s — they say they have an important perspective to share, though they don’t all believe the same things.

Haim Raanan, who as a child survived the Budapest Ghetto, has no reservations about calling the Oct. 7 massacre “a second Holocaust.”

A founder of Kibbutz Be’eri, one of the Gaza envelope communities that was struck hardest on Oct. 7, Raanan said it was “pure luck” that he and his family members survived. More than 100 Be’eri residents died that day.

“I never thought that as a Holocaust survivor, I would need to hide for my life again,” Raanan said at an event at the residence of EU Ambassador to Israel Dimiter Tzantchev to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

“I was shocked to see that eight decades after the Holocaust, the Star of David symbol has been painted once again on Jewish homes all across Europe and the United States to target and frighten them amid the devastating Oct. 7 massacre,” he said, referring to graffiti found in some cities that in some cases authorities have attributed to Russian agitators.

“It echoes the antisemitic persecution I suffered as a child,” Raanan said. “I never imagined that something like this could ever happen again.”

Raanan called on the European diplomats in attendance to do more to combat antisemitism. The event also launched a new installation of the Humans of the Holocaust photo exhibition, in which Raanan features.

Erez Kaganovitz, the photographer behind the project, said attendees at the event were “awestruck” as Raanan recounted his stories of survival.

“How much suffering can one person go though in one in lifetime?” Kaganovitz told JTA. “Listening to him made me realize that when we say never again, it has to mean something.”

Holocaust survivor Gidon Lev, 88, shot to fame during COVID-19 when he became a star on TikTok. He launched his account, which racked up over 460,000 followers and millions of likes, together with his life partner Julie Gray in an effort to combat Holocaust disinformation and to promote his book. Three years later Lev closed the account, citing antisemitic harassment in the wake of Oct. 7 and the social media giant’s reluctance to take action.

“Before the war, we got antisemitic hate from garden-variety Nazis. Oh, how I long for those days. That was easy to refute and dispute,” Gray told JTA. But after Oct. 7, the “turning of the tide was abrupt and powerful,” she said.

“The same young people who had been following Gidon and cheering on his Holocaust education and messages of tolerance and critical thinking started calling him a supporter of genocide and even a ‘baby killer,’” Gray said.

“We both felt utterly defeated. We saw that many Jewish creators on TikTok stood up to this abuse and stuck it out but for us, living in Israel, dealing with the shock of all of it, and the sirens and the running to our shelter, it was too much,” she said. “It wasn’t the worst thing that happened, Oct. 7 was the worst thing that happened, but it really hurt. All the work we’d done seemed to have been meaningless.”

After Oct. 7, Gray wanted to leave on one of the evacuation flights for American citizens. But Lev, whose son and grandson were serving in the reserves, insisted on staying. “I will not run again,” Lev told Gray.

The first time Mira Talalayevsky’s life was saved was on Sept. 29, 1941, when she was not yet 2 years old. Mira’s mother escaped with her from their home in the Kyiv ghetto the night before Jews were ordered on a death march to Babyn Yar.

The second time occurred on Oct. 8, 2023, when Talalayevsky’s home in Ashkelon received a direct hit from a Hamas rocket. Talalayevsky miraculously survived the rocket attack but sustained shrapnel cuts to her face and burns on her body from a fire that broke out in the house after the impact. Her house, and all her possessions, were completely destroyed.

“In my old age I am left with nothing and I have to start over,” Talalayevsky said.

Talalayevsky, 85, was too young to remember the night she was spirited away from the clutches of the Nazis, but said that over the years her mother had revealed every detail to her. When the Jews of Kyiv were rounded up to be transferred to the ghetto, Ukrainian guards were ordered to collect all their valuables. Her mother, an educated woman who knew German, was instructed to record every item that was taken.

Her mother built a rapport with a guard she had witnessed secretly pocketing some of jewelry for himself. The guard later warned her that the Germans were coming in the morning to kill everyone in the ghetto and that night helped Talalayevsky’s mother escape on a freight train. “I only remember the constant feeling of hunger and cold from those years. My childhood was taken from me, but at least I stayed alive,” Talalayevsky said.

Eighty-two years later, Talalayevsky climbed into her bathtub when she heard the rocket siren. It seemed like the safest place to be in her apartment, which was old and without a safe room. A violent explosion shattered her house and Talalayevsky lost consciousness. She was eventually rescued from the rubble by her neighbors. The event has left her with lasting nightmares and without eyebrows, she said.

Three months later, Talalayevsky is still waiting for her apartment to be rebuilt. In the meantime, the government has transferred her to a newer apartment in the city. Talalayevsky credits the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews with being the first organization to reach out after the attack, providing Talalayevsky with material and emotional support. “As a woman of faith, it is very moving to hear that there are many Christians in the United States who care for me.”

Golebowicz, too, is living in temporary accommodations — a retirement home near the coastal city of Netanya, together with some of the other evacuated residents of Nirim. He said he fully intends to go back and live in Nirim as soon as possible.

“I shall return to my home where I have lived for 70 years and help in its restoration,” he said. “All the destroyed kibbutzim will be rebuilt and will flourish again, because the determination and spirit in Israel is strong.”

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Around 350 participants, students and young adults primarily from the United States, are expected to travel to Israel beginning the week of Jan. 5, 2024, the organization said in a statement.

The 350 participants are a small fraction of the 23,000 Birthright had planned to send to Israel this year. Still, the resumption of the programs is a powerful symbol of a potential return to normalcy for Israel, which has been in war mode since Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7. Even as Israeli leaders say they are unwilling to put an end date on their military operations in Gaza, universities are gearing up to reopen Dec. 31 and on Monday, the government raised limits on gathering sizes, citing reduced concerns about rocket attacks.

The decision to resume Birthright trips was made after “careful consideration and conversations” with the group’s local partners in Israel, the group’s statement said, and will “operate under strict safety and security standards” set by the Israel Defense Forces’ Homefront Command.

Birthright CEO Gidi Mark said that while the trips will continue to prioritize the organization’s goals of “positive Jewish identity building,” they will also incorporate a focus on the Hamas attack and its impact on Israeli society and Jewish communities around the world.

“Everything is different post-Oct. 7 from an educational perspective. The people of Israel are different and the young adults arriving to Israel are different,” Mark told JTA. “We are preparing the educational teams to deal with broad discussions and an open dialogue. We believe that participants will come to explore and learn about what happened and what is occurring now, and also share about the reality back home and the rise of antisemitism.”

Travel to and from Israel has been limited to Israeli carriers since Oct. 7, and the war has taken a steep toll on tourism.

Last month, Birthright announced the launch of volunteer programs in Israel after it canceled its regular scheduled trips for December amid security concerns. More than 3,300 of its alumni had applied to volunteer in kibbutzes and other Israeli communities “to harvest crops in the absence of the thousands of foreign field workers,” the organization said in a statement at the time.

Even with the resumption of its regular programs, the two-week volunteer trips – which are exclusively for Birthright alumni – would continue in tandem, Mark told JTA.

“Naturally, alumni of January classic trips will be able to extend their stay in Israel, for an additional two-week volunteering experience,” he added.

Birthright Israel has brought some 850,000 young Jewish adults to Israel on a free tour of Israel since its launch in 1999. The organization had previously canceled trips only once before, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Facing financial woes, it has scaled in the years since.

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“If we want the south to flourish after the October 7th pogrom, we must invest in the south, beginning in its capital of Beersheba,” Adams told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Adams, a real estate magnate who moved to Israel in 2015, is perhaps best known for his support of cycling in Israel. He established the country’s first cycling institute and velodrome, created an eponymous commuter bike path in Tel Aviv and brought the opening stage of the Giro d’Italia competition to Israel in 2018 — at a personal cost of more than $20 million. He also owns the Israel-Premier Tech Cycling Team and won the world championship in cycling for his age group last year.

Aside from cycling, Adams and his family foundation have also supported the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities; SpaceIL, Israel’s nonprofit space organization; and multiple medical centers in Israel. He also played a role in bringing pop star Madonna to the Eurovision song competition in Israel in 2019. He has given widely in his native Canada, as well.

The latest donation dwarfs any of that giving. The $100 million donation is the largest ever to an Israeli university and on par with some of the largest made to any university, matching splashy gifts that have been announced recently at Harvard and Duke universities in the United States. (The largest-ever gift to an American university was $1.8 billion to Johns Hopkins University in 2018, by Michael Bloomberg, the Jewish businessman and philanthropist who has also donated prolifically in Israel.)

It will go to boost a university that lost 82 members of its community on Oct. 7, including students, staff, faculty and their family members, according to a statement released by the university. The university has 20,000 students enrolled and employs 6,700 members staff, most of whom reside in the southern region.

The funds will focus on six key areas, including the future of the Negev and Israel, technological advancements, climate change, sustainability, and global health, BGU President Daniel Chamovitz told guests at the Negev Strong gala, which was hosted by the university’s Canadian fundraising arm, according to the statement.

Describing BGU as Israel’s “most important university,” Adams cited its research in several sustainability arenas, including water management, solar energy, desert ecology, and climate change solutions – especially through its campus at Sde Boker, the desert kibbutz that was the retirement home of the country’s first prime minister and the university’s namesake.

Adams pointed to David Ben-Gurion as someone who “understood that the Negev is the beating heart of Israel.”

“One of our responses to the terrible October 7th attack and the rise of lies about Israel and antisemitism around the world must be to dedicate ourselves to Jewish values as a force for good,” Adams told JTA. “We build, while Hamas destroys. We teach our children to love, while they teach theirs hatred.”

The donation marks a significant investment in the future of Israel’s southern region and is seen as a beacon of hope and renewal after Oct. 7, according to Mitchell Oelbaum, president of Ben-Gurion University Canada. It comes as the country has a strengthened attachment to the region and as the mounting costs of war leave open questions about how prepared the Israeli government can be to make unrelated new investments in the near future.

“Our students, staff, and faculty persevered in the face of one of our country’s darkest moments,” Oelbaum said. “This gift comes at the perfect time for renewal.”

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Now, seven weeks later, the child has joined Asnafi and the rest of his class in a makeshift school housed at Israel’s Holocaust museum, which has opened its doors to evacuees from the south as part of a widespread repurposing of available space across central Israel.

The symbolism of educating children whose experiences echo famous stories from the Holocaust isn’t lost on anyone involved in the enterprise.

“We’re all inspired about what we teach and learn about the Holocaust, about how people were there for one another, about how educators in the Holocaust taught,” said Shani Lourie-Farhi, who heads the International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem and is serving as the acting principal of the newly established school, called B’shvilei Hachinuch.

“I don’t think we’ve ever had a discussion about it but it’s an unspoken inspiration,” Lourie-Farhi said. Using the Hebrew word for mission, she added, “We’re very connected to our past and there’s something there that brought us into this shlichut.”

The impromptu school at Yad Vashem is part of a sweeping effort to make sure that the children among the estimated 300,000 people evacuated from Israel’s southern and northern communities can continue learning while their home schools are closed. Students are not obligated to attend school right now, and the national high school exam has been postponed. Even in areas that were not hit hard on Oct. 7, schools remain shuttered or limited in their operations, particularly, if they do not have adequate bomb shelters for their students. But families and educators know that getting back to school is a key element of providing stability for children at a time when it is gravely needed.

To fill the gaps, individuals, nonprofits and local organizations have turned fallow space into classrooms, gathered school supplies, collected donations to pay educators and even volunteered to teach themselves. The newly reopened National Library of Israel, for example, is using some of its seminar rooms to host evacuated students, while educators have held lessons for students living in Dead Sea hotels at Masada, the site of a first-century resistance by Jewish patriots.

Asnafi was off work for three weeks after the Oct. 7 massacre but returned once Yad Vashem made the decision to convert its unused space into a regular school for some 400 children, ranging from grades 1 through 12, who were evacuated from Kfar Maimon and three other southern border communities to Jerusalem and the surrounding areas.

Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan said in a statement that he felt it was the Holocaust memorial’s “duty to extend a helping hand and do what we can to support those affected.” The museum’s public display remains open.

The metamorphosis didn’t come without snags. Despite its name, the International School for Holocaust Studies is more of a teacher training institute than a school and its 25 classrooms are more suited to seminars than activities for children.

“The educational space is actually geared towards adults,” Asnafi said, adding that the Yad Vashem staff were making “tremendous” efforts to adapt it in the maximal way possible.

To that end, the first things to go were Holocaust posters and memorabilia — a move that aimed at turning the building into a “safe zone,” Lourie-Farhi said.

“Bringing first- and second-graders, and even high school kids, into a place like this when they went through such a traumatic event [led to] the choice to say that while of course our role is to commemorate the Holocaust, we’re excluding the Holocaust in this building for this period,” Lourie-Farhi told JTA.

When the school initially opened, many of the children struggled with separating from their parents as the school bus departed each morning from the hotels where evacuees have been staying. While Kfar Maimon was not directly infiltrated by Hamas, the majority of children were traumatized from the ordeal of hiding upwards of 12 hours and then having to escape in a hurry, especially with the presence of terrorists in the vicinity in the days following the attack. Asnafi said she and her children and grandchildren were in her safe room for hours, with one son training his gun on the door.

Lourie-Farhi said she believed the new school could help the children recover. “We want to make the school part of their process of building resilience and finding some sort of routine.”

But staffing has been a challenge. While some teachers, like Asnafi, have continued in their roles as usual, many were unable to for a range of reasons. Some were too traumatized to teach; others relocated elsewhere within Israel and could not get to the school; others yet had spouses called into military service, making it impossible for them to work.

Some 50 Yad Vashem staff members volunteered to fill in the gaps.

“Suddenly you’ve gone from being [a Holocaust studies] educator to a second-grade teacher,” Farhi said. Her staff members took on the onus of adapting into their new roles themselves, including reaching out to other educators to learn the curriculum and how to teach it.

“They’re all very invested. Everybody’s heart is in this project,” she said. “We’re a link in the chain. Some time when this is over —  and it will be over — at least this aspect will not be broken.”

Lourie-Farhi said she was also inundated by calls and messages from people wanting to help, including retired teachers or those on sabbatical, some of whom came on board.

In another case cited by Asnafi, the Holocaust memorial’s bookkeeper became the person who greets the children every day on their arrival. “If she doesn’t come to the bus, the kids cry,” she said.

The warmth and dedication of everyone at Yad Vashem went some ways in mitigating some of the challenges, Asnafi said. She did, however, issue sharp criticism of the Israeli’s education ministry, which she said had not adequately supported the schools or their students as they reestablished themselves in new locations.

Anati Manshury, a spokesperson for the ministry, said the government had allocated millions of shekels to setting up new schools for students who were displaced across hundreds of locations. The ministry has hired new teachers, added psychologists, delivered thousands of computers to families and authorized the construction of new buildings in a handful of locations, she said.

For B’shvilei Hachinuch, the challenges are ongoing and speak to the ongoing nature of Israel’s current crisis. The student body comes from existing schools and a yeshiva high school from four religious communities from the Eshkol Regional Council, but new children from other evacuated areas are joining every day, including from the north.

“We have to integrate new kids all the time and it can be disruptive,” Asnafi said. “Not only do they not know their peers, but they’re from completely different backgrounds.”

Asnafi gave an example of a boy who had joined her class from the northern border town of Kiryat Shmona. He sat crying silently and it was a while before Asnafi was able to decipher that the boy, who hails from a secular family, was upset that he was one of only a few boys without a kippah.

“When I came the next day with a kippah my daughter knitted for him, he was overjoyed,” she said.

With exams delayed and so much in turmoil, some in Israel say they would be satisfied with a school year in which children simply feel safe and supported. But while Lourie-Farhi recognized the significance of warmth and support from ancillary staff, such as counselors and psychologists, in creating a secure environment, she stressed the necessity to “emphasize that this is still a school.”

“It’s about being serious, there’s math, there’s English, we’re going to learn,” she said, adding that she saw her new role as a part of the country’s war effort.

“So many people have been recruited, everywhere you go there are people wearing uniforms,” Lourie-Farhi said. “This is our call to duty. This is what we know how to do. We know how to teach.”

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The crew traipsing through Kibbutz Kfar Aza had been brought together by the historic horror placed on the community of 750 on Oct. 7, when Hamas terrorists burst in. Between 52 and 60 people were murdered. Seventeen are believed to have been taken hostage in Gaza.

The residents returned to retrieve belongings. The world leaders — former British prime minister Boris Johnson and former Australian prime minister Scott Morris — and journalists had come to bear witness. And the volunteers were doing the same work they had been doing since days after the massacre, when they arrived to retrieve and prepare bodies for burial according to Jewish tradition.

They all carried on their work as the war that Israel launched in response to the attack carried on just kilometers away, its sounds audible and shadow palpable.

The bus carrying the press delegation stopped at the entrance to the kibbutz. David Baruch, who was accompanying the group on behalf of the Israel Defense Force’s spokesperson’s unit, instructed the 40 or so members of the press to walk the rest of the way, explaining that the IDF had received an alert for anti-tank missiles in the area and that the bus was a sitting target.

Baruch warned the journalists not to film any live reports. “The last time someone did that here ended up with four mortars fired from Gaza almost immediately,” he said.

When the group reached the “younger generation” zone, the area earmarked for young couples and families, the cruel capriciousness of the attack was laid bare. Around 40 houses, typical of kibbutz architecture in their modest appearance and size, had sustained varying degrees of destruction. Some were entirely blackened out, their walls pockmarked with holes made from grenade fragments. Others were left with gaping holes in their exterior walls from RPG impacts. All of them bore remnants of the lives that were once lived within their walls: a hammock covered with a thin film of dust, a handful of cards from a children’s game scattered among the rubble, a full mug of coffee on a kitchen table.

One house had the sentence “human remains on the couch” written in black paint on the outer wall. The adjacent wall featured yellow graffiti with the words “terrorist inside” and the date it was written, Oct. 11. One soldier at the site said Hamas terrorists were hiding in homes for days following the attack.

The couch inside the compact living room was stained with blood. Dann said his neighbors Sivan Elkabetz and Naor Hasidim were likely pulled out of their safe room and murdered on the couch.

“For the world this is maybe just another war in the Middle East. For Israelis this is a national tragedy,” Dann told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “But for me, this is a personal tragedy. These are people that are friends of mine.”

It was the second time Dann had toured that area of the kibbutz since the massacre. The first time he “lasted five minutes and couldn’t take it any more,” said Dann, a computer programmer who has been residing in the Tel Aviv suburb of Kfar Shmaryahu in the past weeks. His house, on the other side of the kibbutz, was spared and together with his wife, young children and parents, who had been visiting for the Simchat Torah holiday, he survived the hours-long ordeal in their safe room, reading terror-filled text messages from friends and neighbors, some the last they would ever send.

Dann recounted the harrowing story of the Almog-Goldstein family, in which it took a full week to determine, using DNA samples, that the father, Nadav, was killed alongside his eldest daughter, Yam, and that his wife, Chen, had been abducted to Gaza along with the couple’s younger three children.

“They couldn’t even count how many bodies there were after the murder,” Dann said.

“What would you rather hear? That your family has been all slaughtered and burnt to death? Or that they are being held captive by Hamas in Gaza? Which is the better news?” he asked. “This is the dilemma my friends are dealing with.”

The IDF’s tours of the kibbutz and other sites hard hit during the attack are meant to flood the world with firsthand information about what happened there to counteract the distortion and denial that have spread in the weeks since. As foreign news organizations rotate their staff in and out of the country, more journalists have been able to see what Israel wants them to share — but also locals are being asked to recite over and over the horrors they have seen.

“I saw heads, and I saw bodies,” said ZAKA volunteer Simcha Greineman after being asked by one reporter to verify IDF claims of Hamas beheadings. “I can’t say that I saw someone do [a beheading]. I collected heads without bodies, I collected bodies without heads, I collected children that were stabbed.”

He went on: “One child had his whole body burned but there was a knife stuck in his head from side to side.”

Images of decapitated corpses were shown to the group of journalists.

Greineman recounted a scene in which a family of five, including parents, two children and a grandmother, were found in the bedroom “standing in a circle, hugging each other, locked arms.” He and other volunteers from ZAKA, an organization that specializes in search and rescue for bodies, were tasked with detangling the family.

“We’re taking these last moments of life that they had, this circle, and we’re taking apart every body that was attached to each other, and putting them in the bag,” he said.

“It’s horrifying. People should not be mistaken about the savage attacks that occurred here,”  said Johnson, who resigned as British prime minister last July.

“You can’t help but be overwhelmed by the sense of that where we’re standing was once, a month ago, a place of innocence and now has been desecrated beyond comprehension,” said Morrison.

Both Greineman and Dann spoke about the kibbutz families who had helped Palestinian workers from Gaza. Dann said he had a friend who had become close with one of the workers whose daughter was ill with a heart defect, and helped them get medication and medical care.

“We were glad that workers from Gaza were coming to Israel with work permits to have jobs to meet Israelis, to see that we’re not all ‘those devils,’” he said, gesturing with air quotes. “We all really believed that things are changing. That Hamas has maybe matured from being this terrorist group to being the grown up; taking responsibility for their people, worrying for their welfare. And that concept really blew up in our face.”

Members of one family who had hired a Palestinian employee were now in Gaza themselves as hostages, Dann said.

“I can’t tell you if one of those workers was a spy,” he said. “We can assume that probably yes because they had intelligence. They came here with maps. They knew exactly where everyone was.”

Okev, another resident who had returned to the kibbutz to gather some belongings, said he and his fellow kibbutz members were struck by an overwhelming feeling of “disappointment.”

“These people — not people, terrorists — they came to kill you just because you’re Jewish. There’s no other reason. They worked here, they lived here,” Okev told JTA. “We had lots of faith in them. But after seeing them over [in Gaza] celebrating on the streets, we lost faith.”

Okev spent seven hours trapped with his wife in their safe room with the terrorists just on the other side of the wall on the couple’s porch. According to Okev, they used the porch as a kind of headquarters to issue commands. The area was strewn with soot and charred farming tools, the aftermath of a battle between the terrorists and Israeli forces that would later unfold.

During their time inside the safe room, the couple, whose adult sons were not on the kibbutz when the infiltration occurred, sat quietly, prayed occasionally, and set up a blockade by the door.

“It wasn’t a question of whether they would enter or not, it was a question of when,” he said.

But they didn’t. Okev has no explanation as to why his life was spared when 12 of his close friends were murdered.

“Divine providence, what can I tell you,” he said. “There’s someone watching over us. He didn’t watch over the others, apparently. Or they were too good so He took them.”

Dann is unsure about whether he will ever return to the kibbutz.

“Even though my individual house is intact, this place is so full of blood. It’s a question that is still too big for me and still too big for everybody,” he said.

Okev, meanwhile, has a different take.

“We will come back here and we’ll build this place and it will flourish and grow. It won’t stay like this,” he said. “We won’t let them move us.”

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A few days before World Water Day in late March, Bedein came upon a bubbling brook feeding into the sea, which he named the Jerusalem River. The stream, the animals surrounding it and the beach it flows through were submerged underwater as recently as the mid-2000s. Bedein and his partner, Ari Fruchter, believe they are the first people ever to set foot there.

It’s an experience Bedein keeps having, and for him, it’s a paradoxical one: His mission is to save the Dead Sea. But as it dries up, it reveals new wonders to him.

“Out of the devastation, life finds a way,” Bedein told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency during one of his boat’s first excursions.

Bedein is the latest activist to confront a problem that has bedeviled Israel — how to save this ecological marvel and tourist attraction that is being depleted by water scarcity, industry and climate change. Bedein’s approach with his and Fruchter’s nonprofit, the Dead Sea Revival Project, is to raise awareness about the disappearing Dead Sea by bringing people to see it for themselves.

Bedein’s immersive boat tours provide visitors “with an intimate encounter that fosters deep connection and understanding” about the Dead Sea, he told JTA.

The odds of saving the Dead Sea are steep. Bordered by Israel and the West Bank on the west and Jordan on the east, it is the deepest point on earth, has almost 10 times as much salinity as the ocean and is renowned for its therapeutic mud. In 2019, according to records from the Israeli Tourism Ministry, it was the country’s third-most visited site, after Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, drawing a million tourists per year, reported Israeli business publication The Marker.

The Dead Sea is also an economic engine for Israel — something that, ironically, is a threat to the sea’s continued existence. A market research report published last year found that the Dead Sea mud cosmetics market is slated to be worth $2.6 billion by 2031. The chemical factories producing the cosmetics, which extract potash and bromine from the area, are found in both Israel and Jordan, and pump some 61.3 billion gallons of seawater per year in total as of 2018, according to NBC.

That extraction, plus a reduction in the inflow of water from the Jordan River, has led the Dead Sea to dry up in recent decades. A 2022 Israeli government report said that since 1980, the sea has lost some 40% of its volume and is retreating by more than three feet per year. According to Bedein, the Dead Sea’s water loss amounts to as much as 600 Olympic pools every day. He also said that 98% of the Israeli side of the Dead Sea is inaccessible by land, largely due to thousands of sinkholes that have developed in the sea.

The southern basin of the Dead Sea, which is called Ein Bokek and is lined with hotels, has been disconnected from the northern part. Today, the “sea” at Ein Bokek is actually comprised of 12 foot-deep evaporation pools that are entirely artificial. According to Bedein, most tourists at the hotels are entirely unaware that they are not actually at the Dead Sea.

“However you look at it, there isn’t a magic pill to fix this, and that’s the reason nothing’s been done so far,” Nadav Lensky, head of the Dead Sea Observatory at the Geological Survey of Israel, told JTA. “Every solution that is put forward comes with problems of its own.”

Hailing from the West Bank settlement of Tekoa, Bedein, 41, worked in Israel advocacy in the Gaza border town of Sderot before shifting his focus to the Dead Sea. He is an environmental photojournalist by training who has now trained his lens on this body of water, hoping to show people what it actually looks like — and the ecological damage that is caused — when a large saltwater lake disappears.

To do that, he convinced the Israeli government to allow him to sail a boat on the Dead Sea, a quest that involved more than a year of overcoming bureaucratic hurdles. It is only the second boat to take to the water since Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. The boat, which holds up to 13 passengers, makes up to three trips a day, three times a week, but as of September, its operations will be expanded to five days a week. In total, Bedein says he has hosted between 400 and 500 people on private excursions.

Bedein is acutely aware that the end goal of saving the Dead Sea is “way above my personal shoulders,” but, he said, that knowledge does not detract from his mission.

“The journey is fascinating and motivating for me,” he said.

The boat’s two-hour journey is filled with wonders. On a recent outing, the blinding white salt formations look like glaciers or penitentes, and clash with the backdrop of the Judean Desert’s brutal reddish rock. Graduated terraces hewn out of the cliff look manmade, but each three foot-high step represents another summer in which the waters of the Dead Sea have evaporated.

A salt cavern perched on a rock several meters above sea level elicits a gasp from Bedein. He has not been to the area in at least three years. Rifling through a wad of photographs, Bedein shows the passengers on the boat a photo of the same cavern from 2016, its mouth at sea level. He snaps a shot of the newly elevated cavern. The side-by-side images went on display as part of a timelapse photo exhibition marking this year’s Earth Day at the Cultural Center in Arad, a city 17 miles west of the Dead Sea.

“You can feel the density of the water lugging at the boat and the bitter, sticky spray on your face and lips,” said Naomi Verber, who was on board with her baby. “The salt rock formations are otherworldly, like seeing the transition between sea and land in suspended animation.”

(Bedein claimed that Verber’s child was “the first infant to sail the Dead Sea in at least 100 years.” Whether that is true is unclear. Orit Engelberg-Baram, an environmental historian who wrote her doctoral dissertation on the Dead Sea, told JTA that a baby may well have sailed its waters during the evacuation of Kibbutz Beit HaArava, located in what is now the West Bank, during Israel’s War of Independence in 1948.)

Fruchter, meanwhile, is spearheading an effort to promote awareness about the ecological crisis of the Dead Sea  by raising money to build the Dead Sea Museum of Art on a five-and-a-half-acre parcel of land in Arad. The museum, which hopes to attract half a million tourists a year once it is constructed, will combine exhibits on climate tech innovation and multimedia art installations in a carbon neutral building to both educate people about the sea and, in a grim but possible future, memorialize it.

While the industrial activity surrounding the sea often gets blamed for its depletion, Bedein says it isn’t the main culprit. He estimates that the chemical plants contribute to 30% of the problem, while the other 70% is due to the reduction of the source of the water in the Jordan River.

According to Lensky, 60 years ago, a billion cubic meters of water flowed from the Jordan River into the Dead Sea. Today, less than 10% of that amount reaches it, partly because of the construction of dams around the Yarmouk River — which flows between Israel, Jordan and Syria — and partly because Jordan, one of the driest countries in the world, cannot afford to both provide water to its population and regenerate the Dead Sea. Jordan, Syria and Israel all draw water from the Sea of Galilee basin that would otherwise be flowing into the Dead Sea.

The chemical plants, Bedein said, also draw attention to the Dead Sea, which he sees as a positive.

“It’s not about how much water is being pumped out of the Dead Sea, it’s about how much water is coming in,” he said. “It’s very reductive to blame the factories. If you close down all the factories tomorrow, there goes the entire industry in Ein Bokek, and you will have reduced awareness even more.”

The key to saving the Dead Sea, researchers say, is to bring freshwater back into it, or what Bedein terms as “restoring its historical flow.” According to Lensky, bringing freshwater back into the Dead Sea is easier said than done.

“We have no freshwater in the region and if we wanted to create some, it would come at a high price, environmentally and economically speaking,” he said.

Several projects – planned within the Israeli government and between countries – to mitigate the Dead Sea’s evaporation have been launched, including a proposed plan to construct a canal to replenish the Dead Sea with desalinated water from the Red Sea — called the Red-Dead Canal. That plan, like others, has attracted its fair share of controversy, in part because of the environmental risks it poses both to the Gulf of Aqaba and the Dead Sea itself.

Bedein is not optimistic about those initiatives. The last meeting of the Knesset committee on saving the Dead Sea, which Bedein attended, took place in 2017. The five rounds of elections Israel has held since 2019, he said, haven’t helped. “The government changes every year or two, this isn’t a priority and there’s simply no one to speak to,” he said.

In the meantime, Bedein will keep taking passengers out on his boat, and will keep marveling at the new features that come to light as the sea level dips lower.

“We have the opportunity to explore uncovered landscapes for the first time,” he said. “It’s inspiring.”

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