A moment after Rachel Glam finished listing the names of her ten sons and daughters, from Hai the eldest, who will be healthy, to little Inbal, "You must have seen her play on TV," the shooting at Ashkelon resumed. The shooting range experienced more than 24 hours of quiet, until last Monday, in the early afternoon, the red alert returned and a factory in the Ashkelon South industrial zone was directly hit.
All morning I hung out with her son, Tomer Glam, who has been mayor since 2017. This requires extreme caution, and even though the alarm was not activated in Rachel's neighborhood, we all went into the safe room, which is her bedroom. And we were there together, Mr. Mayor, Dana Gelbart the speaker, Reuven the driver, Rachel and Masouda, the caregiver from Uzbekistan who tried to smile at the panic that the noise of falling brings.
Fall in Ashkelon: Firefighters at the scene where cars were hit and caught fire // Photo: Spokesperson's Office South I shout, put Ashkelon in the envelope" // From the Knesset Channel
Rachel was 7 years old when she arrived with her parents at the Pardes Hanna immigrant camp. "We were Holocaust refugees who, thanks to French citizenship, were evacuated from Libya to Tunisia," she says to the sound of gunfire outside. From Gaza, on Gaza, the navy, the air force, artillery. "In Libya, my father was mayor and rabbi, spoke seven languages. People would come home and sit around embroidered mats. A few months after we arrived, I started working as a housekeeper. I was a curious child, asking questions all day. They would comment on it. Curiosity was not then considered a good trait for girls. Maybe if I had studied I would have been something," she says, tears welling up for a moment, and then, as if regretted by the thought, she hastens to add: "But thank God for giving me good children. I cooked, took care of other people's children, cleaned houses, all for them to come out educated. And thank God, everyone, girls and boys, are successful."
She was not yet 18 when she was matched with Yaakov Glam and she left Pardes Hanna and followed the man to Ashkelon. To a house surrounded by sands where goats and chickens walked in the yard. The house where the children were born and raised, where she lives to this day. An Ottoman building, a remnant of Al Majdal, the town built near the ruins of ancient Ashkelon and numbered 16,7 inhabitants in the <>th century. A large settlement in terms of the time, known for its spinning and weaving industry. Napoleon, it is said, on his way north in need of dressing materials, found soft cotton fabrics that fit him well. Pad gauze, they named the pieces of cloth in the occupying army, after nearby Gaza. Gaza, that all the bandaging materials in the world will not be able to bear the bleeding wound that opened at its borders on the morning of October <>.
Rachel Glam: "I was a curious girl and curiosity was not considered a good trait for girls at the time. Maybe if I had studied I would have been something. But thank God for giving me good children. I cooked, took care of other people's children, cleaned houses, all for them to come out educated. And thank God, they're all successful."
When Tomer Shala, 47, who worked at the Israel Electric Corporation at the time, came to tell her that he wanted to be mayor, she told him that if that's what he wanted, good luck. Let him know that it is hard work and that he will always listen to everyone, that he will try to help. As much as possible. She, too, saw him on television on the tenth day of the war, when Ashkelon, although it had already suffered hundreds of rockets and casualties, was not yet included in the grant program for the Gaza envelope. He was filled with pride and pain when he lashed out at the finance minister at a Finance Committee hearing.
"Evacuate those without protection," Smotrich said, "if you haven't protected those we asked for years, then evacuate. What answers do you have for those people who, apart from praying that they won't get hurt, have nothing?"
And you could hear in his cry of devastation the satiety of promises that have been made to him for years and the child he was, who knows that this world does not care for everyone equally.
"For seven years I've been shouting, and every time another government decision is rattled. Put Ashkelon in the envelope, it is part of the envelope unfortunately. Do I have to wait for the committee so that a few million shekels will be transferred? Businesses are closed, Ashkelon is a ghost town, these are losses of hundreds of millions. We understood that the Ministry of Defense gave approval and then they tell me that the Ministry of Finance does not approve? What can I do with 60 million when the cost of evacuation is 300 million?" he continued.
Mayor of Ashkelon: "Kibinimat, for 7 years I've been shouting, put Ashkelon in the envelope" // From the Knesset channel
"Leave you alone. The truth is that we don't interest anyone. We tell with their eyes," he tells me as we sit in the small office allocated to him in the municipality's war room, a protected space to which the municipal headquarters has been moved since the beginning of the war. Twice a day, in the morning and evening, there is an assessment of the situation in which educators and welfare personnel, representatives of the security forces and rescue services participate. The mayor opened the morning meeting with the dry data that on Monday morning, the 24th day of the war, there were 1,266 rockets launched so far at Ashkelon, of which 190 fell in the city. In assessing the situation this evening, the numbers have already increased.
"A crazy barrage woke us up"
He was home on a Saturday morning when the gates of hell opened on us. With Tali, his wife, and their three children – Shilat who was recently discharged, Dvir, who is soon enlisting, and 12-year-old Nahorai.
"A crazy barrage woke us up. By 06:32 A.M., I had already informed the commander of the Home Front Command that I was opening the shelters. For 48 hours we are alone in this story. There is no one to explain, no one to say what is happening," he says quietly, and I want to tell him that Ashkelon has been alone in this story for many years. Nearly a quarter of the apartments in the city have no protection, for years he goes in and out of ministers and committees, promises and numbers fly over his head and exit through the window. In February 2022, Lieberman put on the cabinet table a proposal to approve a budget of NIS 320 million to finance the protection of apartments in the city's older and weaker neighborhoods. Glam then announced a historic achievement, but the move fell through due to a dispute between the Ministry of Construction and Housing and the Ministry of Finance.
"Why make promises that you can't keep them?!" he says, sounding like he really believed that time. "They changed their launch system. When you fire 140 missiles at once, there's no way Iron Dome can intercept them all. Response time is 30 seconds, people die from this carelessness. I continued the struggle to put Ashkelon in the envelope category. We managed to get frontier settlement status, at least temporarily. This has significance when it comes to the compensation that business owners in the city will receive. The state is still not doing enough for Ashkelon to get what it deserves by right, not by grace."
Tomer Glam: "Everything will look different after we get out of this. I believe we have lost interest in extremism, in hatred. Revenge is not a way of working. This must stop. But if you ask about peace between us and people who from the age of zero are taught to murder us, then the road is long."
When the NIS 160 million came to evacuate the residents, it was already after most of the hotel rooms were occupied, and Glam, who no longer trusts anyone's word, did not want to leave the money in the treasury. "We built a compensation-construction program, in which each person receives NIS 200 a day and an additional NIS 100 per child for self-evacuation to live outside the city. The municipality, at its own expense, added checkpoints at all entrances to the city and networked the coastline with thermal cameras to prevent infiltrations, because we understood that the military wouldn't do that."
The 40 million shekels allocated for the renovation of private shelters before the war came after the opening of the fire, and these days they are being painted and renovated with hands full of good intentions. "Come, it's nice that they take care of private shelters, but the truth is that they were suitable for short wars with long alert," he explains. "60 people crowded within 3-2 meters is beside the point, and there's no way a building can be evacuated to such a shelter in 30 seconds."
He controls the numbers, does a good job of drawing the red tape. He has no doubt that if the state had released the handling of protection to the local authorities, everything would have looked different. "We proved that with COVID." "So why isn't this happening?" I ask. "Ego," he replies.
"It's not that we're miserable. We are a city in development with positive immigration, but in order to maintain it, benefits must be given during and after the war. Do not harm the city itself. We reap prizes when it comes to proper management of the city. There are good conditions here, high-quality education, discounted after-school programs. In my childhood I didn't know what a class was, today there is a class here for every child," says the man who sees education as the first thing of importance in the soul of a city.
The war caught him in the final stretch of the municipal election campaign. On Chol Hamoed Sukkot, in an ongoing festival of several days in which Eco Sport was launched, an artificial lake that drains floodwaters in the south of the city. Jogging tracks, cycling trails and green grass with a rocket hole inside, like a finger in the eye for a project he's so proud of. Now everything is quiet and only a few geese are floating in the water, sending their necks to the Agamim neighborhood surrounding the park, construction to the glory of the renewed Ashkelon.
In the campaign, there were those who used the project to bash him, as if he were busy with decorations instead of life-threatening things. "Budgets are not money that the municipality gets to do whatever it wants with it," he responds to criticism. "There are education budgets, there are cultural budgets. Each budget and its mission. The Likud governments, and this too should be said, have allocated nice budgets to the development of Ashkelon."
We drive through the streets of the city, through the windows of a completely burnt grove, a direct hit from the third day of the war. He knows all the scenes, where there were wounded and where they were killed. In the current war, two residents were killed by direct hits.
Were you surprised?
"After Guardian of the Walls, I'm not surprised by anything, but it was a disgrace. I am disappointed in the country that such people lead. Poor those who paid with their lives and poor kidnappers. After all, no commission of inquiry has yet caused anyone to pay a significant price. It is by no means simple everything that this country has experienced. Everything will look different after we get out of it. I believe we have lost interest in extremism, in hatred."
Also between Arabs and Jews? Aren't you bothered by what's happening in Judea and Samaria?
"Revenge is not a way of working. This must stop. But if you ask about peace between us and people who from the age of zero are taught to murder us, then the road is long."
"Moral listening"
Like everywhere else in Israel, Ashkelon also has its own volunteer war room, one that operates at the municipal community center. In Ashkelon, as in Ashkelon, there too there was a fall, before which there was an alarm and everyone ran to the shelter. "The last ones came in from the blast and then the door slammed," says Kati Amira, CEO of the municipal corporation, who can still be seen playing basketball. She, who took over the volunteer work in the city, says she didn't fall asleep all night because she was afraid the volunteers wouldn't return in a panic. But they came, and more how.
The whole complex is full of packers. Teenagers, veterans of the city, municipal employees and brothers in arms unloading equipment that came from Tel Aviv. Each space and its specialty. Baby food and diapers, dry food packages, arts and crafts kits, new clothes and secondhand clothes, which are Simcha Abu and Simcha Maman's department - both immigrants from France. The first, which will soon turn 91, immigrated from Strasbourg, the city that was once the largest center of French Jewry. Maman immigrated from Paris because "there's nothing we can do, it's not the same anymore."
The whole complex is full of packers. Crates of clothes for children in the volunteer war room, photo: Etiel Zion
Every day the number of applicants increases, Glam says the appeal to food also comes from the middle class. "People obey the instructions of the Home Front Command, don't leave their homes. We do everything to take care of everyone. What kind of people we have, what people."
We continue to the houses on Yehuda Halevi Street, which were built in the 60s and suffered a direct hit. When rockets fall on such structures, miracles are required. "Luckily, the father and the two children managed to get to the stairwell," Glam says, "the father was moderately injured, lost his legs. Luckily, the children came out with a slight injury."
What was once a wall is now two huge holes. What was a house looked like preparation for mosaic work from hell. Here and there you can identify among the ruins something of the life that once existed there. Door handle, tallit, washing machine.
A redhead cat walks in what used to be a living room, I wish he could find something to eat. I look at him and think of this disturbed species of ours, which devoted so much of its creative power to destruction and destruction. Those now facing them armed with a camera are Andrei Vitalsky, a musician who immigrated to Israel from Russia 30 years ago and documents the aesthetics of the destruction on his YouTube channel.
The aesthetics of destruction. Musician Andrei Vitalsky documents the city, photo: Etiel Zion
Some 60,170 residents have left the city, which normally numbers about <>,<>. In the morning at Cafe Eden, one might think that in Ashkelon there were only men left. Already in the first days of the war, Tomer and Yogi returned to operate the place, the one that even in peacetime is said to serve the best coffee in the city.
Around the tables, like parliaments of varying ages, the men of the city analyze the situation. They offer advice and scribble materials for laughter, like the one sitting at the end of the bar asking someone to explain to him why Tripolitan women are so afraid of alarms. "How does my wife, who isn't afraid to fight with the neighbors, kill me every time?" he wonders. "They force me to arm myself in the safe room because maybe someone will come. It's as if someone would want to be pushed between me and her."
The beautiful Moshiko, born in Merom Golan, overlooks everything, caresses the beard and smiles. 50 years ago he married Ashkelonit and has been in the city ever since. "I was born for the Six Days, grew up in bomb shelters, and then came the Yom Kippur War. In '82 I was in the Golani Patrol, I was wounded in the war and then Ashkelon with the rounds of fire on it, a kind of ongoing security routine," he makes sure to smile the words.
"I hear a lot of mayors talking about themselves, about how heroic they are. In our mayor there is something calm, moral listening that comes from within. The city's leadership knows how to look into the eyes of the resident. We are a city with a high percentage of a low socioeconomic stratum, many people whose only response they can get is from the mayor. He's not a magician who can pull out his answer to everyone, but he and the people around him try really hard."
The beautiful Moshiko was born in Merom Golan. 50 years ago he married Ashkelonit and has been in the city ever since. "I was born for the Six Days, grew up in bomb shelters, and then came the Yom Kippur War. In '82 I was in the Golani Patrol, I was wounded, and then Ashkelon with the rounds of shooting at it," he makes sure to smile the words
I take a bite of a dream sandwich – an omelet, cream cheese, slices of tomato and a spicy bite of arisa – and as if gathering the strength to ask how come no one yells at him?! Not swearing, even in a small way.
"There are some of them," he says, "but I'm not angry with them. I swear by you. People are scared and rightly so! I know the problems and the coping, the sense of division injustices. I experienced this as a child. But I want to distribute fishing rods to my residents, not fish. I just want the state to give me the tools."
Maybe you just don't belong to the right electorate?
"Budgets are not a sectoral issue. They should be divided fairly. If they were conducted correctly, our country would look different. The child of the ultra-Orthodox should study in an institution and not in a container, the secular should receive the education he wants to receive even if it is not close to my worldview, because I keep the Sabbath and am religious."
It's a beautiful aspiration, but in the end it's all personal. People care about those who are close to them.
"It can be implemented. Fact, this is happening in Ashkelon. A leader belongs to everyone, otherwise he is not a leader."
On the work street, inspectors block the street. A crane that heralds a shield on the way brings some joy to all the shops. It will beautifully replace the shield Barzilai arranged for himself between two refrigerators in the appliance store.
His neighbor, "Bukhara delicacies," sells Chiburki beauty. At the back, Bukhari bread is baked in an oven that is like this small room, which heats up to 200 degrees Celsius. The walls of hell on which saline solution is sprayed, prevent the shedding of the bread attached to them. Outside walks Yohai, who came to the city from Samarkand 30 years ago. His girlfriend, who came from Ukraine, panicked and went to her family in Canada. That's how it is now, in the sky there are missiles and planes moving frightened people from place to place.
"You came from the Bukhari, didn't you?" smiles Keren, whose shop, Alamitu and Abuhi, is an Ethiopian cuisine paradise. For several days now, she has been looking for a glazier to come and fix the windows of the house, which were shattered by the blast of a direct hit. "I arrived in Tel Aviv, no one is willing to come. I'm scared."
"What kind of people we have, what people." Ashkeloni Street, this week, photo: Etiel Zion
"That's also part of the problem. Professionals are reluctant to come and if they do, it's at crazy prices," Glam explains to me, making sure Keren's number is recorded, and even before we parted we heard how his team was solving the matter.
"You came from the Bukhari, didn't you?" smiles Keren, whose shop, Alamitu and Abuhi, is an Ethiopian cuisine paradise. For several days now, she has been looking for a glazier to come and fix the windows of the house, which were shattered by the blast of a direct hit. "I arrived in Tel Aviv, no one is willing to come. I'm scared."
"All day pacha pacha"
The first time I spoke to Glam was last March. Shortly after Hanni Heinicke and Defi Rotenberg, her beloved, opened Hanni's Victory restaurant. A restaurant where the windows face the parking lot between the indoor market and the new market. Crochet curtains flirt with sunlight and gorgeous Romanian food is served on the tables. That day, it rained in our windows and a flood of vodka down our throats, and Chani put the mayor on the line to convince me to move to Ashkelon.
We knew so much joy that day. People came and went, and we arranged with Daffy's sister that in November we would meet her in the strawberry fields of Netiv Ha'ahara. We didn't pick any strawberries together, but on the third day of the war we met with them in Ashkelon. A family that miraculously managed to escape after 12 hours in the safe room. Father, mother and three daughters.
We stood with them on the porch of the house, with Hani and Defi, watching the fires in the city caused by rockets and the thick smoke rising from Gaza.
That same day, Chani's brother, the sweet Reuven Heinicke, went to feed the cows in the cowshed of Kibbutz Kissufim, which he had managed for the past few years. There, between sirens and airplane noise, he was murdered by a terrorist hiding in his office. And now the beautiful Chani dreams at night that she fights, waking up every morning anew into the nightmare of reality. She keeps asking, "Why? Why do people choose bad?! Why are the Arab countries playing it that they care but are not willing to absorb the people of Gaza?!" It betrays the religion that drowned everything in a lot of violence, and everyone who turned us into pawns in the war games of all the greats.
And I look at her beautiful eyes and think of Rachel Glam, who has so much faith that holds her hand. And how, as we entered her house, the mayor suggested that she give me a blessing.
Every candle is fat and righteous that it burns in its honor. Rachel Glam, Photo: Etiel Zion
I followed her to the small room where candles were lit. Every candle is fat and righteous that it burns in its honor. Rachel lit the fuse I had placed in one of the glasses and began greeting me and my children and the abductees who would return home, and then the soldiers who would return safely, and I mumbled to her artist and artist with full intention. Then she said she was so angry that they didn't guard properly, that they didn't look after enough. "The main thing is that he and his wife Pecha Pecha all day, go from place to place."
And I looked into her eyes and started crying, because I missed my grandmother who wasn't long ago, and I cried about the fact that I didn't have any righteous people to ask for, and that I couldn't find any God for 24 days.
shishabat@israelhayom.co.il
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