Prosper Elhadad is the only tenant left in the building at 13 Yehuda Halevi St. in Kiryat Shmona. All other tenants evacuated to hotels and rented apartments throughout the country. He remembers very well the morning of April 11, 1974. At that time he lived on the underground street and every morning he got up to work. "There were shots and they said there were terrorists in the city," he recalled. At that time, at half past seven in the morning, three terrorists infiltrated Kiryat Shmona. They came down from the mountain in the west of the city and entered the Janusz Korczak school, except that it was a weekday, the Passover holiday, and the school was empty of students. Then the terrorists crossed the street and entered buildings 13 and 15 on Yehuda Halevi Street and carried out a terrible wildfire in them. 16 residents of the city, half of them children and teenagers, were murdered that morning as well as two policemen who arrived at the scene.
In the chronicles of Kiryat Shmona that morning is a deep wound that left difficult memories and a trauma that you will never forget. "Kiryat Shmona was no longer the same after that day," said Shimon Amar, who was a child at the time. "Until that day, there was an atmosphere of freedom and we lived in nature - we played on the mountain above the city. The next morning, people started replacing the simple wooden doors and installed iron doors, and on the mountain they paved a security road and built a fence. People lived in fear after that terrible day. Every knock on a door The house made us jump," Amr recalled.
50 years later, Kiryat Shmona records another difficult chapter in her life. The city is almost empty of residents due to the decision to evacuate the population following the Hezbollah shooting since last October. As in April 1974, also this morning the Janusz Korczak school was quiet and without students. But this time for a different reason - not freedom, but a forced evacuation that emptied the educational institution of its students six months ago.
Two women in the schoolyard. The two, city workers, finished cleaning the school's huge shelter. Now they are waiting in the yard to be picked up for the rest of the workday elsewhere in the city. Meanwhile Sarit Zohar uses the time to pick citrus fruits from trees that grow in the school yard. The winter blessed by the rains has been good for the trees and the heavy fruits are already falling on the ground and rotting. Zohar manages to save some lemons and oranges that haven't fallen yet and offers me commission fruit. She is not moved by the security tension and explains that she is staying in the city because there is work to do and shelters to clean. "It's very sad in the city. There are no people and everything is empty. Some days are scary and some days are not. I can evacuate the city, but I prefer to stay and work," she said. She arrived in Kiryat Shmona in 1984, ten years after the massacre that took place in the blocks opposite. She knows the story of the massacre well and points to a memorial to the murdered that was installed on one of the walls of the school.
Elhadad finished listening to the news broadcast on the radio and left the apartment towards the bus stop below the school. He is waiting for line 5 to go to the grocery store which continues to work as usual. He will buy milk and return to the apartment. He says that he relieves loneliness by playing and painting. "I paint other worlds," he said. After a few minutes the bus arrives and he gets on it. A single passenger on line 5 to the city center. Shimon Amar's falafel stall also operates in the city center. After several months in Tel Aviv he felt he was going crazy, returned north and reopened the stand which is the oldest restaurant in Kiryat Shmona. Residents who have not left or who, like Amr, have returned home, are taking over the place in a slow trickle. His falafel is for them an anchor of stability and a memory of the routine they miss so much. "From a social point of view, we have gone back forty years," said one of the attendees. "We finally raised our heads and were proud to be residents of Kiryat Shmona and here we are again becoming needy and seem helpless. This period is very bad for the city and it will take time to recover afterwards," he said.
In his office in the nearby city hall, the speaker Doron Shanper receives messages from the city's residents who now live throughout the country. "Look, now someone wrote to me that she doesn't know how the whole family will be able to celebrate Passover together. They are in a hotel and her father lives in another city and they don't allow him to be with them on the holiday. This is one story out of an endless number of cases," he said. He is also thinking about how the victims of the massacre on Yehuda Halevi Street will be commemorated this year. According to him, "Every year on Memorial Day, a city ceremony is held in the plot where the victims of the massacre are buried. The ceremony is led by Korchak school students who pass the memory down from generation to generation, and the families of the survivors and those who perished come to the ceremony. This year we will not hold the ceremony, and on this day I will go with other representatives, people from the municipal HML, light soul candles and place a bouquet of flowers in memory of the fallen so that these pure souls know that even when we evacuated the city, we did not forget them and we pay our respects to them even on difficult days."
Meanwhile, a municipal vehicle arrives at Korchak School to pick up Sarit Zohar and her friend for the rest of the work day. On the wall of the central building, above the citrus trees where we waited, there is an inscription in iron letters with the prophet Isaiah's prophecy: "And a wolf lived with a lamb and a tiger with a goat and a goat and a calf and a goat and took off together and a little boy drove them."