To the end of the descent between Arad and the Dead Sea, everything seemed routine. Tractors hoist rocks, heavy vessels work the dirt, beyond them is the strip of salt hotels and the land of spa pebbles. But a closer look reveals that nothing is the same inside. At the entrance to the Leonardo Hotel, a DJ with a kippah bombards the anthem of the hour: "Am Yisrael Chai." Several men are sprawled on the sofas, with their mobile phones in one hand and Israeli flags in the other. In the sun-flooded lobby, the women dance as if creating the time.
Somehow, everything connects to the order of the day - moving forward, living and not falling. An elderly woman in a wheelchair waves a small flag in a monotonous motion. One of the dancers notices her, walks over and moves her chair in small ripples of joy. A shy smile shines on an Eastern European face. Beyond the slides in the large lobby windows, even the Sea of Death admits that the people of Israel are alive, and with great power. Welcome to Tamar City, a new city that has been joined together from all its evacuations on the shores of the Dead Sea.
The real hustle and bustle is below the lobby. Abandoned pool table surrounded by strollers. Toddlers run around the hallways, a gentle girl paints on one of the walls, which turns out to be a wooden divider behind which are tiny classrooms. Another Israeli startup has come into the world - the first "spa" nursery of its kind in the world. Two stern young volunteers ask to install security cameras after several games disappear from the game, "and who knows what else could happen..."
Inside the "Star" event hall, the dividers who redefine the concept of "school" and "classroom" are attracted, small niches in the walls of the hall. "This is the first school that Chabad established in Israel," marvels Oren Amit, volunteer coordinator for Sderot evacuees. Empowerment phrases were written on the dividers for the children, and at the entrance a picture of the Lubavitcher Rebbe smiling at the menorah.
In the only partition open works Editha Ibn Aryeh, a supervisor from Be'er Sheva. "Neither ultra-Orthodox nor religious-Jewish. In times of war, everything blurs – the borders, the roles, the differentiating values, everything becomes for that matter. The children here need frameworks, Tomer Oshri recruited me, and I help them establish the education system in the hotels pedagogically. Right now I'm helping them organize the timetable."
, Photo: David Peretz
Throughout the day at Tamar City, I am led from one school to another so that I can see with my own eyes. What seems obvious in any other community is the anchor that grounded the displaced persons and refugees from the envelope to the time and place.
"At first it was such a mess, no one had any idea who was where," says Amit, "everything was complete chaos and people were thrown from their daily routine into an unstable situation. Without a home, without an agenda, everyone arrived as they could and how they evacuated. The first thing that began to bring them back to reality and stabilize the ground was to set an agenda for the children, to return them to frameworks."
The Redemptive Ringer
Rabbi Shimon Elharrar, a Chabad representative at the Dead Sea and one of the people behind the project, says: "My wife told me, 'Look what it is, we're sitting in Arad, there are no missiles and no sirens, just imagine parents and children in a 17-square-meter hotel room, three weeks together, and for sure someone here will freak out without school. Or the children or the parents.' So we immediately went down to the Dead Sea and checked how to open a school here. On one side a mountain, on the other a sea - and in the middle of hotels. But we swore we wouldn't get out of here until there was school. We spoke with Tomer Oshri from the Ministry of Education, and Rabbi Kaczynski, the director general of Chabad schools, and I told them that we need to solve an immediate educational problem here. We put them together and in the end we got a good cholent. Within a week and a day, the school stood, with 150 children.
"We have already established a synagogue on Masada, we have created an opportunity for Jews from all over the world to perform ceremonies there, we have brought in a scribe who will write there, and now, with tremendous efforts with countless volunteers who should be grateful to everyone, we have created a school for Jews of all shades."
Alarms at the Dead Sea Works | According to Section 27,A
It's lunchtime, parents come down from the lobby to pick up the kids. "In the first week we didn't know how to separate them, they clung tightly and didn't want to let go," says Rabbi Elharrar. I wonder if the kids didn't want to let their parents go a little – or vice versa. "It wasn't easy, some stayed with them all day in class, afraid to leave them alone for a moment. But here, look now, all the kids here are running around playing, and the parents have to call them. At first we didn't even need a guard, the kids didn't want to move. Now all the time the kids say, 'I'm going to the bathroom,' and run upstairs to drink hail for free in the cafeteria.
"We brought some soldiers here to guard them, came back to me and told me, 'Rabbi, they drive us crazy, would rather be in Gaza than guard them.' In the end, we brought in a motherly guard but such a Jeddah, and since then everything has been fine. But all their playfulness is fine, if there's anything we're proud of here it's that we've managed to give these kids back their childhood. It's a big thing."
Before we leave, Elharar shows us the "most important" thing he bought before they opened the school - a bell to ring for the start and end of school. Happy, he rings it again and again. The ringing echoes through the long hotel corridors, as if bringing the coming of the Messiah closer.
Mufalata for the soul
There is no city without a market, or a supermarket. But where is there a market in tourist complexes? Just below the Resilience for the Soul Center, in the large parking lot between the hotels, a Resilience Center for the consumer's heart was opened. There are two wide trucks with groceries for evacuees and a cash register for buyers. Shufersal on the go. Sima Cohen from Sderot came to buy "the things I miss most in the hotel - what do I need here? I have three meals, but mineral water or drinks, so it will be in the evening, I buy because I don't have the energy all the time to leave the room, wait for the elevator to go down to the lobby to get me water to drink. So I bought me some, and also some things to snack on. But what I want most - bleach - they don't have. I miss that smell of cleanliness so much. I'm tired of all the weird smells they put on us here. There are also no taxis here and I have no way to get to my hotel, it's far away, and my husband injured his leg and can't drive, so she's very lucky to have her, she's an angel from heaven." Cohen points to an approaching vehicle, from which Rachel Shai emerges and collects the groceries for the car. The two embrace.
Tamar City complex at the Dead Sea, photo: David Peretz
"Look what it is, she's also broadcasting and I didn't know her at all, only here we met," Cohen marvels. Shay smiles broadly. I ask how she feels here. "It's a golden cage, but a cage," says Shai, "I have everything, the municipality goes above and beyond and really well done to them, and my child is in special education, but I miss doing basic things like cleaning, doing things myself, I miss cooking the most."
Cohen is amazed. "But I cook, I have an electric cooker." How do you cook in a room with all the smoke detectors? Shay wonders. "I go out on the balcony, make myself ejected, so I don't go crazy."
I wonder if they're thinking about coming home. "I told my husband we would go on Thursday together, we came back, it was great, but then there was one volley and suddenly everything came back to me and I understood what it meant. I told him, 'Let's get out of here quickly.' I don't know when we'll be back but I'm sure it will be different. They will not return us to a state of fear. The children look toward Jordan and say, 'Mom, won't they come from there?' It's always in our eyes, it doesn't leave us."
Inside the mall, a well-groomed cosmetics seller is waiting for buyers. "The evacuees come to the mall a lot, but they don't buy like tourists," she notes, "It's something else, they're not at home and they're not tourists, and it's killing our businesses."
On the second floor of the empty mall, Amit established the lowest public library in the world. All the books, used and new, were donated. The volunteer librarian is not here to recommend which book to read, on the wall of a McDonald's advertisement hung a sign stating that you can take all the books and return them whenever you want. Trust, that's the whole method at Mac-Library. "What's most in demand right now is, of course, novels, crossword puzzles and fantasy series like Harry Potter or Twilight," says Amit. And books about the conflict? He laughs. "Not at all, but Bergman's book about Israel's treatment of abductees is hijacked within a second as soon as it arrives here." Digits of the hour.
Life, air - and respite
Peace or war, the Israeli future is real estate. Like an ingrown toenail, a strip of soil enters the water. At some point, a unique stilt hotel will be built here, but now on the bare ground, the Tamar Council has established "Tamar Belev", a youth entertainment complex. A stage and huge speakers behind a security fence, food and beverage carts, chairs and lounging mats, an Israel Ninja track, something between a respite zone and survival training.
"We saw that the youth were getting lost here. After we created educational frameworks and extracurricular activities, we also built an entertainment area for them, so that they would have something to do in the evening," says Tamar Regional Council head Nir Wenger, "The first evacuees arrived at three o'clock on the night between Saturday and Sunday. Even for the weekend, a person goes out with a phone charger, they came with nothing and had to take care of everything. It's not easy to live in a hotel for two months straight. We established six elementary and secondary schools here, six clinics, each of which received and treats all the staff of the various health plans, and we established a resilience center and a mental health center. There is a mobile veterinary clinic and Shufersal are also coming, and in order to integrate all these things, we created the Tamar City app, which will provide a solution for all evacuees. It's like Maslow's pyramid of needs – after they got life and air and food and clothes, now they get a break."
, Photo: David Peretz
Some of the things that stand out in the new city are the rapid organization and the many initiatives that address the problems of the evacuees, while the government has lagged behind. "Apart from the Welfare Ministry personnel who started working almost immediately, it took the government quite a while to get into the event, but they came to their senses," says Wenger, "and this whole event is happening today with the help of the relevant government ministries: welfare in the Negev and Galilee, health, interior, education, transportation and tourism, each of which has a representative who integrates this activity here. And by the way, the government's field personnel acted almost immediately, those headquarters who did not internalize the magnitude of the hour. This event proved that strong local authorities are a huge advantage for the country. Both in emergencies and in routine.
"That's what I say to all those who come to us with talk of social justice – when someone is strong and someone is weak, the worst thing is to make them both mediocre. If Tamar wasn't a strong authority that within a month knew how to establish a city and educational frameworks here, and take out 600 respite trips, there would be catastrophe after catastrophe."
I tell Wenger that one of the things that stands out is that the evacuees rarely hang out there. "Obviously, last night someone said that walking into Barry's hotel is like going into a shiva that lasts two months. Not all localities received the same blow, and each copes differently. The main difficulty is for local businesses that have been hit hard, this is a decline of fifty to eighty percent in activity. The evacuees are not a resort crowd, our agriculture is also harmed because the foreign workers are fleeing. Every taxi that brings an employee spends five. I hope that the government will understand the need and the time and will know how to compensate businesses and get the economy back on track."
Wenger says that the residents of the Tamar Council, in a reality where they have had guests for more than two months, give the strength to keep doing. "There are always complaints in the business sphere that has been damaged, but from the residents there is only reinforcement. For the first two weeks, all our teams worked 24/7 continuously. The idea that Tamar is a council of 1,600 residents is wrong – apart from education and welfare, we take care of 20,000 people every day, and there are good things happening. Here, now we are completing the construction of the youth center and a cooperative work area in Neve Zohar. For fifty years it was an abandoned building with the most beautiful view in the world, and now we are finishing a co-working space there for 70-50 offices." Wenger turns his ear to me: "Look, it's the only earring I've been wearing since I was 25, it's yin and yang. There is no good without evil, and there is no evil without good. This is the situation and this is the period, the only question is what do we do with it."
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