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PortugueseDespite the close proximity to the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, 10 young families have made Kibbutz Nirim their permanent home.
Almost a year to the day since the end of the 2014 summer war with Hamas, 10 new families made a permanent move to Kibbutz Nirim, located in the Eshkol Region of the western Negev near the Gaza border.
“On the very last day of that horrible war,” longtime Nirim resident Adele Raemer wrote last month in a Times of Israel blog, “the rockets fired from Gaza exploded in the kibbutz where our people were trying to restore electricity that had been knocked out by one of the morning barrages. Two neighbors of mine were killed and a third lost both of his legs and almost died.”
Yet these 10 families, as Raemer told United with Israel, “have invested economically to become members and to make the kibbutz their permanent home. They are all young families.”
Established in 1946 by members of Shomer Hatzair (Young Guardians), a pioneering Zionist socialist movement founded in eastern Europe, the kibbutz became privatized about six years ago in order to remain relevant in the 21st century and to attract a new generation. “We were concerned it would become an old-age home,” Raemer said. “All of a sudden, you see bicycles, kids playing – a rejuvenation of the community.”
Most of the Nirim founders were sabras – native-born Israelis.
Last Friday, the kibbutz hosted a party welcoming the new members. One person made a video in which he interviewed each family, including some of the children, Raemer said. Asked what Kibbutz Nirim means to them, they all responded, “Nirim is our home.”
Raemer was moved to tears because, she explained, they answered not with a staged reply, but from the heart.
“I started crying, it was so emotional to think these young families have enough trust in this community to be willing to invest their future in a kibbutz that’s under two kilometers from the Gaza border and a five-minute jog to the opening of one of the tunnels that was discovered last year,” she said, referring to the terror tunnels built by Hamas in order to seize border communities and to murder and abduct Israelis.
Raemer, in fact, was born and raised in New York. She made Aliyah (immigration to Israel) in December 1973 and moved to Nirim in 1975, where she finished her army service with the Nachal Infantry Brigade.
By: Atara Beck
Senior Writer, United with Israel
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