Little was left of Alumim by the time night fell on October 7.
Just over a mile from the Gaza border, the agricultural kibbutz had been one of the first communities to be infiltrated by Hamas terrorists. Within hours, they had reduced it to a smouldering wasteland. Twenty-two people were murdered and five were kidnapped. Residents took refuge in safe rooms, rooftops, cowsheds.
Only during a third wave of the assault did the IDF arrive. In the morning, soldiers told residents it was safe to come out.
Parents had to cover their children’s eyes from the bodies on every corner and blood-stained walls. But there was no way to mask the smell of burned animals that filled the air.
All residents were evacuated to Netanya, where they stayed in two separate hotels for ten months.
Charred debris and objects are scattered inside a building in Kibbutz Alumim, following the October 7 attack (Photo by GIL COHEN-MAGEN / AFP) (Photo by GIL COHEN-MAGEN/AFP via Getty Images)AFP via Getty Images
But despite the massacre and the monumental damage to the kibbutz, hope has survived. This is the story of how the people of Kibbutz Alumim are rebuilding – and re-growing – what they once had.
The kibbutz has one of the largest poultry farms in Israel and it is run by Michael Huller.
Huller is no stranger to the terrifying threat from Gaza – his oldest son was severely injured while on a tour of duty in the Strip a decade ago.
“On October 7 at 6.45am, I heard alarms from the poultry houses,” he said. “They were being burned and the cameras had gone down. Two of my workers ran from the houses and hid in the nearby cowshed. One of them covered themselves in cow dung and stayed there for 28 hours. He survived. The other worker got killed while he was talking to me on the phone.
“The poultry houses all burned to the ground – and with them, nearly 350,000 chickens.
“Hamas came to do damage. They just burned everything and opened fire and threw special bombs with accelerant into the poultry houses so that even the metal melted. There was nothing left of the buildings at all.”
A gutted chicken house and Huller in a new shed[Missing Credit]
Huller had taken refuge with his family in their safe room, one hand on the door, the other on his gun. Most Israeli safe rooms are designed to protect citizens from rockets, not terrorists, and usually do not have locks so that rescue teams can easily free those sheltering after a rocket attack.
Some Hamas terrorists disguised themselves as IDF soldiers and, the following morning, when real Israeli soldiers knocked on the door saying it was safe to come out, Huller’s wife told him not to open the door.
“I just said ‘Shema Yisrael’... and the soldiers said it back. I knew they were Israeli,” Huller said.
He and his family emerged to a scene of horror; there were 122 dead bodies lying on the ground, 100 of them terrorists.
Huller’s second son, who had been part of the security team helping to defend Alumim, was injured, but alive.
Not long afterwards, the family was evacuated to Netanya.
In the two years that followed, Huller oversaw the rebuilding of the chicken houses. It was a mammoth task and one which was made even harder by the restrictions put in place amid the war.
Today, two years on, the chicken houses have been rebuilt – and there are 350,000 new chickens.
“Everything is finished,” Huller said. “My Zionism means ‘to make everything better’. We have improved everything and made it all look newer. Hopefully we will improve further and make even more chicken houses.”
Esther Marcus, another kibbutznik, is a therapist who runs “resilience” centres across Israel, including in Alumim.
Before October 7, there were 17 therapists in her network supporting 200 people. In the years that followed October 7, the group has grown to 200 therapists and helping 3,000 people.
Even during the massacre, Marcus was working on the phone from inside her safe room.
“All hell had broken loose,” she said. “People were calling me on our emergency hotline having anxiety attacks, looking for their children in Nova... someone was bleeding out... I was having to keep my voice down while in the safe room so that we weren’t found.
“One of our therapists sent me a message at 7.15am saying she was available if I needed her, and I did need her because of the number of phone calls we were receiving.
“She was then murdered in her home.”
Marcus’s birthday is on October 6 and, at the time of the attack, her family were visiting. “My daughter and her husband and their two young children were with me and my husband Stevie as was my son and his wife. There were eight of us in the safe room.”
Marcus’s son, who was caught between worrying about his friends who were at the Nova festival and trying to protect his family in the safe room, kept his hand on the door all night.
Meanwhile, Stevie, who ran Alumim’s dairy farm, was on the phone to his workers advising them on what to do, trying, like Esther, to keep his voice down.
“We had a baby and a toddler, and we had been told to keep them quiet,” she said. “I had quickly run into my room to get my computer. Fortunately, my grandson had not watched a lot of television as his mum didn’t let him. That day, he felt like his birthday, Christmas and Chanukah had all come at once. He spent the day watching Disney and Pixar films.
“My granddaughter was a month old and my daughter kept rocking her and kept feeding her, making sure she wouldn’t cry.”
The family joined the evacuation the following morning and Esther continued to run her resilience centres to make sure that “everybody who needs help was able to get it”.
Stevie went back to Alumim to look after the cows that remained. Hamas had shot and killed 30, and the ones that had survived were traumatised, starving, and having not been milked, in pain.
A cow shot by Hamas on October 7 and thriving livestock in a barn today[Missing Credit]
“They were very happy to see him when he arrived back on October 10,” said a family friend.
Stevie worked around the clock for two months to bring the cows back to good health. Then on December 11, he died of a massive heart attack.
Authorities officially listed Stevie’s death as being a direct result of October 7.
“We couldn’t have a big funeral on the kibbutz because the war and my son and son-in-law had been called up to go and serve.
“After Stevie’s death I had no reason to stay in Netanya seeing as he wouldn’t be coming back from Alumim on the weekends. I travelled across the country running the resilience centres, sleeping on couches and spent a lot of time in the car.
“There wasn’t time to do much grieving. We just had to get up and get on with it. Survival is in Jewish people’s DNA.”
Marcus is originally from the UK, like many of Alumim’s residents.
She said: “As well as the Jewish mindset, there is also a lot of Britishness in us – a stiff upper lip – you get up, get on with it. I learnt that in Brownies and I learnt that in JFS... It helped push us forward.”
Esther is currently expanding her resilience centres with the aim of supporting more people psychologically damaged by the attack.
One of these is Ayal Young, the son of Kibbutz Alumim’s founder, Cyril Young. Cyril has lived in Alumim since 1971 and is in charge of the archives, having started his career at the JC in the 1960s.
His oldest child and four of his grandchildren also live in Alumim, and he said that they keep him just as busy as the archives.
On October 7, as he hid in his safe room, he found out that his youngest son, who was defending the kibbutz, had been shot four times by terrorists.
“We didn’t know what was going on,” Young said. “We were in a state of suspended animation... stuck in the safe room.
“When we were allowed out the following morning, my wife helped our daughter-in-law with the children as we evacuated.
“My son had been badly inured and he was hospitalised.”
Young said that his son was now nearly back to good physical health but the trauma took a toll on his mind – something he is now having therapy for.”
Looking after the archives while in Netanya was hard work, with much of the materials needed for building the collection back in Alumim. Young returned there once a week to collect what he needed.
He spoke about the importance of maintaining the archives. “It is a historic record which is very important to keep. This includes October 7 of which I have amassed a lot of stuff. It is very important to do that.
“As Geroge Orwell said, ‘he who controls the past controls the future’.”
Young kept multiple copies of material so nothing could be lost.
Alumim community co-ordinator Sarah Jane Landsman also played a key role in the restoration of the kibbutz. While its residents were staying in two hotels in Netanya, 70 miles away, she worked hard to keep community bonds alive.
“What do you do with a community of 500 people divided, traumatised and in shock, who don’t know if there coming or going, put into hotel rooms with little bags and not knowing how long they are going be there for?” she said.
“You have to take control.
“We needed programmes for education, for older members needing to go to the doctors, activities to keep the children amused, everything needed to be managed.
“We went from pandemonium and chaos to some kind of structure within a month. We set up a school and nurseries, activities, shuls, everything. We slowly tried to recreate what goes on in Alumim in Netanya. We needed to give strength back to the community. We needed something to hold on to.”
When, ten months later, the authorities announced members would be allowed to return, the question came up: should they? It was decided that “Alumim could only be Alumim in Alumim” – and they returned.
Landsman has continued as a community co-ordinator since returning, helping to rebuild the social structure of the kibbutz.
Kibbutz Alumim had long been Israel’s largest producer of several vegetables and had one of the country’s largest dairies and chicken houses.
The damage done by Hamas hit the economy of Alumim hard, but farmer Eran Braverman was determined the kibbutz would not go bankrupt.
Land flooded by Hamas and Braverman in a regenerated field[Missing Credit]
“Since the first ceasefire in January 2024, we got permission to return to work on the fields. We planted wheat as it was the easiest to grow on the damaged land,” he said.
Swathes of crop fields had been destroyed by floods after Hamas wrecked the irrigation systems. IDF tanks then used the fields en route to Gaza.
Terrorists also destroyed greenhouses and the netting inside them. “Whatever they couldn’t burn, they cut with knives,” Braverman said.
“We were the biggest supplier of sweet peppers in Israel. The terrorists destroyed eight acres of sweet pepper crop inside our greenhouses in the middle of the harvest.”
Braverman’s oldest daughter, Mor, and her husband of 16 years, Alon, also live in Alumim with their four young children.
Speaking about the morning of October 8, Mor said: “We told our kids to put their heads down as we were evacuated because we were warned that there were bad things that they shouldn’t see.”
“Outside of the main gates was a total war zone,” Alon said. “The terrorists had blown up every car they saw and burned everything.”
The gates of Kibbutz Alumim are located along the route used by people fleeing the Nova festival. Terrorists had stationed themselves along that road, shooting them as they passed. In total, 37 people were murdered outside the gates.
“We could see the bodies lying on the ground that morning,” Alon said. “There were two tanks securing the road from opposite sides so our cars could come out to evacuate.”
When the family returned to Alumim from Netanya, Mor, a pastry chef by trade, whose coffee stand was destroyed in the attack, wanted to build back something special.
“I wanted to create somewhere that would be a place of peace and calm – a place where people who live here and around here can sit around and just have fun.”
For residents of Alumim, the cafe represents rebirth. Mor said: “When we look at it now, it is like a dream come true. Kids are on the grass laying around while their parents eat tasty food and drink coffee.”
Alon, who quit his job in tech to help Mor run the business, said that on some days they get 700 customers. “We try and think about Alumim in the present and in the future, not in the past,” Mor said.
Alumim has now rebuilt all of its chicken houses. It has installed secure doors and windows on homes. It has developed dozens of acres of fertile land under new greenhouses and erected a solar field with 17,250 cells which will feed into the grid and generate energy to grow 9,000 avocado trees.
There is still work to be done, however, including building a centre for the children, many of whom are traumatised, as well as replacing machinery that was destroyed.
Cyril Young’s son Ayal, shot four times on October 7, blew the shofar for Alumim on Rosh Hashanah, one year on from the attack.
“Ayal blowing the shofar was Alumim saying ‘in your face’ to Hamas,” Marcus said. “You won’t get rid of us. We are here. We will keep on being here – and we will keep on being Jewish.”
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