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In the nursing home in the north they survived the torments of the previous century, now they are suffering a death blow

The "olive house" in Kibbutz Shomrat managed to get through the first wave of illness without patients.

For the past month, the residents of the small home, most of whom even survived the Holocaust, have been living under siege after six of their friends contracted the virus and died.

"Conduct like reservists on the line"

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• Corona virus

• Retirement homes

Yoav Itiel

Friday, September 25, 2020, 8:45 p.m.

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In the video: The Beit HaZayit nursing home, which lost 6 of its members to Corona disease (Photo: Yoav Itiel and Shlomi Gabay)

The residents of the small nursing home "Beit HaZayit" in Kibbutz Shomrat near Nahariya have been living as in a siege for a month.

Six residents have died so far in the corona plague that most commonly affects the elderly.

Most of them survived all the torments of the previous century, some came to Israel from the ghettos and concentration camps of Europe and here went through the hardships of the establishment of the state, army, wars, austerity, and what not.

Among the survivors fighting to stay healthy, as much as possible, is also an elderly woman who has celebrated a hundredth birthday since the plague broke out.

The 36-resident nursing ward has so far had 18 people - who are half the residents.

18 remained in the institution.

Eight of their 25 caregivers also fell ill.

The situation has somehow stabilized, but the battle for survival is far from over.

Prolonged wars are not foreign to this kibbutz between Acre and Nahariya in the Western Galilee.

Next to the nursing home, a one-story building immersed in green from the kibbutz lawns and among trees, housed on the basis of a former home-class group building and studied and inhabited by generations of kibbutz children, there is also an underground bunker to which they would refer in the days when the area absorbed Katyushas.

It is perhaps no wonder that in military jargon every element of the campaign is described here.

The "Olive House" actually went through the first wave without patients.

"We held out for five months and even felt like we were defeating this virus," she told Walla!

NEWS Dina Mazen-Chertoff, a member of Kibbutz Shomrat who runs the nursing home and wins the battle.

"Every month we did a corona test for all the tenants, every week for all the caregivers, we followed the guidelines. We believed that if we did everything according to the book then we would be able to survive."

On August 26, it became clear that one of the tenants had a fever - a 96-year-old Holocaust survivor from Nahariya.

He was transferred to the Galilee Medical Center in Nahariya, where he was diagnosed with coronary heart disease and was hospitalized, but his condition deteriorated.

On September 11, he died.

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"We felt we were defeating this virus."

The Olive House in Shimrat (Photo: Shlomi Gabay)

Dina Mazen-Chertoff, a member of Kibbutz Shomrat who will be 63 next month, served for years as a nurse at the kibbutz clinic, until 17 years ago she moved to the management of the nursing home, which then had one ward.

Since then, a ward for the mentally debilitated and other family housing of the kibbutz have been added, which have so far remained intact.

"There is a large staff here and a lot of tenants and they are still trying to give everyone a homely, family and kibbutz feeling. At the heart of this pastoralism we are now at war," she said of the operation under her management, which treats about 70 people.

"This is the most horrible, scary, hardest and most frustrating time ever. Absolutely. I never imagined we would face something like this. We face something that is not clear at all how to deal with it optimally, with such a small staff and with such great anxieties of the tenants of Our families and ours. "

She lives 20 meters from the nursing home, a mother of five, one of whom is also a nurse, who works in the internal medicine department of Ziv Hospital in Safed.

"She's worried, too," she admits.

The moment everything changed

"Everyday reality is so intense that I already forgot what it was before. It feels awful and awful."

"It was a shock," she described the moment the announcement was received from Nahariya Hospital about the death of one of the residents.

"Inwardly we may have been afraid to admit but we knew this moment might come. We were constantly anxious towards it and when we got the message it focused the work in a completely different way with much more focus in front of the corona. She is with us and it hurts and we are fighting now in a completely different way. "So intense that I have already forgotten what was before. It feels terrible and awful. Part of the thing is that everything is said and treated here now 'before the plague' or 'after the plague'."

Following Mazen-Chertoff's report on the "Magen Avot VeAmot" hospital, the Ministry of Health's program for the protection of the elderly and disabled living in outpatient settings, two days later the MDA team arrived and conducted tests for all residents and all patients. Two more days passed and the results arrived. : Two more tenants fell ill. They too were hospitalized. Then, every few days they came again, and more and more patients were discovered.

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To the full article

"Everyday reality is so intense that I have already forgotten what was before."

Mazen-Chertoff (Photo: Shlomi Gabay)

The nursing home in the heart of the kibbutz has become a kind of closed base with demarcated isolation circles.

Only those who need to enter the nursing ward, only when needed, and only when they are protected with a dedicated protective suit and two face masks.

Temporary services were brought to the workers and placed in the yard.

The visits were stopped immediately.

There is no going out and no coming in.

As is also experienced in other nursing homes, apart from the mental difficulty involved in disconnecting with family members, so when relatives cannot come to visit a greater burden rests on the shoulders of caregivers.

Of the ten caregivers of the "Olive House," two remained because seven had fallen ill.

Even the social worker who comes daily from the Krayot no longer enters the nursing ward and does her work from the more external circle in the office area of ​​the nursing home.

"There are fewer tenants, but the remaining caregivers still work 15 hours a day," Mazen-Chertoff said.

"The nurses do 12-hour shifts. There is no day and no night. I am here all the time, we work non-stop and endless hours and with this very limited staff. I once in a while change one of them so you can take some day off."

"The nurses do 12-hour shifts. There is no day and no night."

The Olive House in Shomera (Photo: Shlomi Gabay)

"It feels a bit like war, but this time not in front of something we can see"

Amir Ben-Zvi, the 46-year-old director of the kibbutz, who is the center of the farm and a spokesman for the nursing home, testified,

He tries to recruit another capsule of caregivers to ease with the staff working around the clock, and amid all the grief, task adherence and patriotism he conveys he also does not hide his frustration.

"We understand the load, but up there we need to understand that we depend on them," Ben-Zvi said.

"Right now all of a sudden there were no samples for corona tests for a week. This also delays the introduction of new therapists to work and may lead to another outbreak within the ward. How can the infection chain be interrupted in this way? On September 15 they sampled and should come every three days. At 22 again for further examination. There are no words to describe our concern in this matter. Such a week in the ward with an outbreak leaves us in complete fog. The great stress stems from the fact that we have already seen here that some of those who turned out to be positive were completely asymptomatic. "That is impossible. It turns out that there are private tests that people with money do immediately. There is such a solution and it is not accessible to the people who need it most."

The outbreak in the nursing home flooded hard feelings.

"What a shocking grand finale, who would have thought," Mazen-Chertoff said.

"It's true that in a nursing home people die all the time. But certainly not in these classes and in general our attitude has always been that we do not send the residents to die in a hospital if they can not help him, that a person dies in his bed, with his family, that we wrap him and them around in love, We give them their privacy and their time to end their lives with dignity as much as possible. "

"It feels a bit like war, but this time we are fighting not against something we can see," she added.

"During the Second Lebanon War we were all here, no one stayed home but there was something that was clear. It started but it was clear that it would also end sometime. Here the feeling is that it is only getting worse, and I am also talking about what we see outside this nursing home. "What is happening in the country. We are not on some lonely island. The whole country is getting infected and it is very difficult to deal with it."

"It breaks the heart."

Mazen-Chertoff at the Olive House in Shomera (Photo: Shlomi Gabay)

The second wave is hitting intensely in the Western Galilee.

Four corona wards at the nearby hospital, the Galilee Medical Center, are already full of about 100 patients and the hospital's director, Prof. Masad Barhum, is considering opening a fifth ward within a week.

Some of the patients from the Olive House were transferred to the Italian Hospital in Nazareth and the Fliman Hospital in Haifa, where the Corona ward was reopened.

Patients were also transferred to hospitals in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

Meanwhile, caregivers also have families and they are also dealing with personal tragedies against the backdrop of the corona plague.

The 60-year-old sister of the Jadeida-Makr brewery died of corona.

The 73-year-old father of the therapist from Mizra, died in the corona ward of the hospital in Nahariya, on Wednesday.

Inside the besieged house try to maintain as safe a routine of life as possible.

Since only half the population of the house remained, they were scattered so that one lived in the room.

But not all seniors agree to lie isolated in their room.

Two even insist on going out and smoking occasionally near the side entrance.

In this house when you get up in the morning then the first thing you take a shower.

In the morning most seniors go out for breakfast in two dining rooms at home.

Most of them sit alone at the table.

Those who share a table sit at a careful distance separation.

"Their girlfriends died," Mazen-Chertoff said.

"Sitting with them at the same table three times a day sometimes for seven years. Some talk about it. Not much but the feelings are not simple. It breaks the heart."

There are those who are left in isolation in the room, some are demented who are not really active.

But the team is trying to somehow employ everyone, "let them draw, show them videos, call families on the tablet," she added.

"There have been several attempts by families to reach out and communicate with their loved ones through the window, but it is problematic, also because of vision and hearing and speech problems, and in general. There are families who sit on benches outside to feel close and communicate on a tablet."

"We have been denied something very basic by the families and we hear a lot of concern from them," she continued.

"Naturally people worry when they can not come and touch. It is something very human that is denied to them and they are tormented within themselves because they do not feel safe to come, take risks and take risks. There was a 30 year old girl who came to visit her grandmother and talked from ten meters away. It is very difficult."

Both Dina and Amir point out the main asset that excels in its dedication: the staff, most of whom come from outside.

"Everyone comes to work without a bill of hours. It is reminiscent of their enlistment in the Second Lebanon War. With endless devotion they do not leave the elderly alone for a moment, with diaper changes or escort to the bathroom, with feeding and bathing. There was not even one who did not come among the workers. "We have to understand the burden that fell on those who remained. We were left with two caregivers, a substitute kitchen worker because one was ill, two cleaners, two nurses and a housewife."

Although half the number of the elderly, but the difficult tasks remained as they were.

The Ministry of Health offered to shower only once a week.

"We do not give up a daily shower. For some of the tenants it is simply part of mental health, in our opinion."

On Tuesday, after a week-long wait, corona tests were again conducted for all tenants and staff.

"The heart is fluttering," Mazen-Chertoff discovered.

"We open the app and wait to see who is red and who is green and who has not received an answer at all and we have to wait a little longer and a little longer. It's just a big anxiety every time again. Somehow we wait for everything to be green at last."

On Thursday, it became clear that the long-awaited end is still far away - another tenant, about 74 years old, was found positive for the virus.

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