Aid cannot recreate belonging': How Sde Nitzan is healing after October 7

Her 22-year-old grandson sits with Henry, a 93-year-old founding member of the moshav, as he often does on weekends.

These simple encounters are part of how a community rebuilds.

Nearly everyone evacuated. Only a handful of older residents remained because, Klein Sofer says, they could not bear to leave their homes. She spent seven months in Eilat.

Klein Sofer moved to Sde Nitzan from Australia in 1977 with two young children. They are now adults, raising their own families on the moshav, and her seven grandchildren live there too.

Back then, she recalls, Sde Nitzan was almost entirely English-speaking. Over the years it grew and changed, but community life remained largely something residents created for themselves.

Unlike a kibbutz, each family lives independently, but holidays, children’s activities, and much of the social life were built around volunteer committees.

“In Tel Aviv, if you want coffee, a movie or a show, you step outside and find it,” Klein Sofer said. “Here, you have to build that life with your own hands.”

For decades, that was what Sde Nitzan did.

Then came October 7.

Even during the evacuation, residents tried to hang on to their community spirit. In Eilat, they organized picnics and day trips to maintain some sense of normalcy.

Eventually, they returned to the moshav.

But it quickly became clear that coming home had not brought the old Sde Nitzan back.

“The silence was heavy,” recalls Klein Sofer. People were home, but many stayed behind closed doors.

He found a community pulling in two directions.

Among its leadership and social activists, there was a strong desire to revive the moshav, bring people back into public spaces, and restore some of what had been lost. At the same time, many residents found it difficult simply to go out and meet people.

“The trauma doesn’t disappear simply because of the physical move,” Shahar said. “Reality isn’t an on-off switch where the moment you cross the gates of the community, everything that happened is erased and life automatically returns to normal.”

Months of displacement had disrupted relationships and routines that once came naturally.

An internal survey of roughly 100 households found strong demand for a place where residents could gather. But since Sde Nitzan sat just outside the official rehabilitation boundary, it did not receive the same state recovery grants as communities within it.

It needed to create its own solution.

With support from NATAN and Operation Blessing, an international humanitarian organization, residents began turning a decommissioned weapons-storage facility into a community gathering place.

An art room was created, along with an outdoor deck and a café-bar. Plumbing was redone and furniture was donated. Most importantly, residents aged 18 to 82 did most of the work themselves.

“People who return to something that has been shattered are looking for meaning,” Shahar explained. “Social action gives them exactly that meaning. That is rehabilitative in the deepest sense.”

The building is now known as the Sde Nitzan Community Healing Hub, although much of what happens there is strikingly ordinary.

People meet for a drink. Children play. Families spend Friday afternoons together.

The hub, says Klein Sofer, has revitalized the rhythm of the moshav.

It has also changed her own social life.

Before the war, she and her husband would invite their close friends to their home. At the hub, they find themselves sitting with people they have known for years but never really got to know. They have a drink and start talking.

For Shahar, those encounters are exactly the point in the recovery process.

“The community itself is the most significant healing space, sometimes much more than dozens of psychologists,” he said.

That does not diminish the need for professional treatment, he stressed. Individual therapy remains essential for those who need it. But most of life takes place outside the therapist’s office.

When a community has networks of support and places where people can meet, he said, people are less isolated and have others to rely on.

Children are part of that picture too. Klein Sofer’s grandchildren take part in psychosocial activities offered through NATAN at the hub. “They genuinely look forward to it,” she said.

Operation Blessing became involved in the project through NATAN and remained after the immediate emergency.

For Gigi Endaya, executive director of Operation Blessing Foundation Philippines, that was precisely the point.

“Returning home is the start of recovery, not the end,” she said. “Even when families go back, the trauma and anxiety remain.”

“The social fabric of Sde Nitzan, and of other communities, was frayed,” Endaya said. “People needed to feel connected to each other again.”

When NATAN proposed the hub, Operation Blessing agreed to support it.

“Aid can replace what was lost, but it cannot recreate belonging,” Endaya said. “A shared physical space gives people somewhere to gather without needing a reason, to talk, to heal, and to rebuild trust with their neighbors.”

The challenge, Endaya said, is maintaining that kind of support as the years pass.

“Emergencies draw donations and attention quickly, but trauma and displacement unfold over years,” she said. “Long-term recovery work is less visible and harder to fund.”

Some things in Sde Nitzan have clearly improved since October 7, but Shahar cautions against trying to measure recovery against a timetable.

What a visitor cannot necessarily see, he said, is the uncertainty that remains. The sense of security that existed before October 7 has been badly shaken. For some, the fear that something could happen again has never disappeared.

And no two communities will recover in exactly the same way.

Each community has its own “DNA,” Shahar explained, and outside organizations cannot arrive with a program that worked in one place and assume it can simply be replicated in another.

Before there was funding, a small group of Sde Nitzan residents had already decided that something needed to be done. Outside organizations could provide money, professional guidance, and support, but they could not manufacture that desire.

The process, Shahar said, must be built with the community rather than for it.

The old weapons-storage facility itself reflects that change. Once associated with the physical defense of the moshav, it is now a place where children make art, soldiers returning from service meet friends, older residents sit with young people, and families spend Friday afternoons together.

For Klein Sofer, there is still another measure of recovery.

She hopes that the hub will encourage more families to return to Sde Nitzan in the coming year.

Endaya puts the distinction more simply.

“Returning home is physical, while recovering is emotional and social,” she said. “Sde Nitzan shows that rebuilding a community means rebuilding relationships, not just homes.”■