The strangest WhatsApp message I have ever seen was received by my husband one evening almost a decade ago.
"Some men are urgently needed to dig a grave, who volunteers?".
The sender was one of the righteous Kadisha members of the regional cemetery in Kfar Etzion.
We lived in a kibbutz at the time, and realized that the planned night funeral caught the cemetery staff off guard.
Since then, many hardworking hands have dug new graves in Kfar Etzion, but no one imagined what would happen when the war broke out.
The tiny military plot, which was founded only seven years ago and had a total of three graves, gradually filled up with no less than 11 fresh graves.
The sons of Gush Etzion and Efrat fell in the heroic battles of Simchat Torah, on the northern front and deep in the Gaza Strip.
From Yonatan Elazari the rookie, who among Ofakim used a weapon he didn't recognize after taking it from a fallen policeman, and to GDSr fighter Yuval Nir, a 43-year-old veteran reservist, father of five. The road to Kfar Etzion is crowded again and again with people standing in the wind and cold with Israeli flags, accompanied by another neighbor Beloved in his last way.
The harsh and beautiful mountains grow people of earth and spirit, people of labor and research, people of Torah and kindness, all of whom are first and foremost human beings.
It's no wonder that even the most disturbing initiatives for Jewish-Arab partnership were born in the small space between Tko'a and Alon Shvut
Two kilometers away from the cemetery, just two weeks ago, a memorial to the fallen of a different kind was marked.
On the wind-swept "Battle Hill" 76 winters have already passed since the fall of the Haganah's "Mountain Division", the Hela convoy, in the mythical battle. The convoy went out in the winter of 48 to reinforce the besieged Gush Etzion, but the Arabs of the area discovered it and besieged it. The members of the division fought Until they ran out of ammunition. Four months later, just one day before the establishment of the state, the entire bloc fell, and the fighters of Kfar Etzion were slaughtered. Only at the end of the war were they buried in a mass grave on Mount Herzl. After the fall of the Mount Division, Haim Gori wrote his chilling words:
"Look, here are our bodies lying, a long, long line. We did not betray. Look, we kissed close and empty of bullets, our ashtray is empty."
A long long line of graves of Gush Etzion martyrs in the 1958 war joins a long line of Gush Etzion martyrs in the Tashpad War.
Your trash can is empty.
They gave it their all.
Those who know Gush Etzion and its wonderful people, absorb the blow to the heart time and time again, but are not surprised.
Not surprised at all.
The left sees them as settlers, the right sees them as bourgeois who even on their road is not really dangerous to drive.
In Gush Etzion they don't shout.
They speak firmly but quietly, with a passion wrapped in business.
Get angry at the state or the army and rush with a pot of soup to the nearest soldiers' post.
The number of groundbreaking educational institutions, special education frameworks, midrash schools for men and women - countless.
The harsh and beautiful mountains grow people of earth and spirit, people of labor and research, people of Torah and kindness, all of whom are first and foremost human beings.
It is not surprising that even the most disturbed initiatives for Jewish-Arab partnership were born in the small space between Tko'a and Alon Shavut.
Between the vineyards and the cherry orchards, between the barns and the chicken coops, what really grows in the block is the salt of the earth.
And luckily, not just in the block.
The good things of our sons and daughters are growing in the north and the south, in cities and towns, inside and outside the green line.
About 1,500 times since October 7 we have buried our hearts among cypress trees.
Heroism and evil came from all sides.
The row of graves dug up in the military cemetery in Kfar Etzion only reminds us that the "long long row" continues far beyond Israel 24, far beyond the painful and grieving here and now.
In the Land of Israel the Jewish people arose, declared in a text that has been quoted constantly in the past year.
And he rose thanks to those who said, in the words of Guri, "We did as much as we could".
"Then we will bloom," promises Gori.
"At the time of dawn in the mountains, a last shot is shouted."
Until the sounds of war die down, we can only look with love and gratitude and pride at our long line, and promise to remember where they went and for whom we emptied their trash.
were we wrong
We will fix it!
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