Written by Chaim Schreiber
Translated by Rivkah Ben-Yisrael
Edited by Juliana Brown
Amichai rushed to the cowshed. The foreign workers from Nepal and Thailand who had come to work on the kibbutz were waiting there for him. He had to crawl part of the way there. This was not how he had imagined this morning playing out.
“It may have been a festival, but it was still my turn to work a shift in the cowshed,” says Amichai Shacham from Kibbutz Alumim. The night before, the kibbutz members had celebrated the festival together in the synagogue, dancing with the Torah scrolls, their spirits soaring with joy. The next day, even before the first rays of the sun appeared in the east, Amichai got up and got ready to leave the house. “I drank a cup of coffee and ate a piece of chocolate cake. On my way to the front door, I heard a siren. ‘Quickly, everyone, to the safe room!’ I urged my children. Suddenly, I heard another noise that is not typical for our area. Small arms fire.”
Amichai hurries to get to the workers in the cowshed. He hears that there are wounded people there and brings bandages to treat them. His hands, those of a medic, are skilled at this task. In the meantime, he sends a message to the community emergency team, whose role is to protect the community until security forces arrive. “Friends, head to the armory quickly and equip yourselves with weapons.”
Another friend joins him and helps him treat the wounded when suddenly a loud explosion is heard. “A missile fell on the kibbutz,” he writes to his friends, but he knows it wasn’t the sound of a missile he heard. Before a missile explodes, it whistles, but there was no whistle in this case.
Amichai looks westward and sees terrorists breaking through the kibbutz fence. That’s where the loud noise came from. He follows them as they approach the closest house to the fence—his house.
His wife and children are locked in the safe room. He must protect them! In a moment’s decision, he shoots in the direction of the terrorists to divert their attention and drive the fire in his direction. His plan succeeds, and the terrorists panic and run toward the barn. Amichai is hit by a grenade that is thrown his way in response.
The community emergency team members are busy fighting when Amichai comes to receive treatment from Michaela Koretsky, a midwife living on the kibbutz. Thanks to the stubbornness of those fighting, the terrorists abandoned their plan to harm the kibbutz members but killed some of the foreign workers who lived near the cowshed.
Although Amichai could not continue fighting, it was thanks to his clear thinking and quick reaction that Kibbutz Alumim was saved.
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