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Bosnian Jews mourn Moris Albahari, one of Sarajevo’s last Ladino speakers
(JTA) — Moris Albahari, a Holocaust survivor, former partisan fighter and one of the last Ladino speakers in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s dwindling Jewish community, passed away at the age of 93 last month.
It is believed that he was one of four native Ladino speakers remaining in a country where the Judeo-Spanish language once flourished and was spoken by luminaries like Flory Jagoda, the grande dame of Ladino song, and Laura Bohoretta, the founder of a uniquely Sephardic feminist movement in Bosnia.
Bosnia’s small Jewish community — with barely 900 members throughout the country, 500 of whom live in Sarajevo — are mourning the loss of a living link to communal memory as well as a dear friend.
“From you, uncle Moco, I learned a lot about Judaism, about life, about nature and especially about people. About both the good and the evil,” Igor Kožemjakin, the cantor of the Sarajevo Jewish community, wrote in a memorial post on Facebook, referring to Moris as “Čika,” or uncle, a term of endearment in Bosnian.
“It is a terrible loss, especially for Sarajevo. Our community is very small, especially after the Holocaust,” Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino language and literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We’re not speaking just in terms of prominent members of the community, we’re speaking in terms of family members. Everyone is like a family member.”
When Albahari was growing up in the 1930s, the Jewish community of his native Sarajevo numbered over 12,000. Jews made up more than a fifth of the city and it was one of the most important centers of Jewish life in the western Balkans.
In his youth, the city was part of what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Formed out of the borderlands between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, it was a multiethnic state composed of Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, Slovenians, Macedonians, Hungarians, Albanians and more. Among them were many Jewish communities both Ashkenazi and Sephardic.
The unique mix of of Muslim, Jewish, Catholic and Orthodox Christian communities, with their mosques, synagogues and churches defining Sarajevo’s skyline, earned the city the nickname “Little Jerusalem.”
Speaking in a 2015 documentary made by American researchers, “Saved by Language,” Albahari explained that his family traced their roots back to Cordoba before the Spanish Inquisition, and through Venice, before settling in what would become Bosnia when it was part of the Ottoman Empire.
“We didn’t want to ‘just’ write an article about Moris or Sarajevo; we wanted [the audience] to see what we saw and hear what we heard,” Brian Kirschen, professor of Ladino at Binghamton University, who worked on the documentary with author Susanna Zaraysky, told JTA. “This resulted in a grassroots initiative to create the documentary.”
In the film, Albahari takes the researchers and their viewers on a tour through what was Jewish Sarajevo, giving glimpses of the thriving Ladino speaking community in which he was raised and explaining how ithe language would save him many times, when the Nazis and their Croat allies, the Ustaša, came to shatter it.
“In sharing your story of survival during the Holocaust, you opened doors that remained closed for decades,” Kirschen said in a memorial post on Facebook. “Some of your stories were even new to members of your family, but each survivor has their own timeline. While you experienced great pain during your life, from your story, we also learn about moments of kindness and heroism. Through your story, you also taught us about the power of language.”
Albahari wasn’t yet a teenager when, in 1941, Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy invaded Yugoslavia. The Nazis occupied the eastern portion of the country, including what is now Serbia, while they raised up a Croat fascist party, known as the Ustaša, to administer the newly formed “Independent State of Croatia” — often known by its Serbo-Croatian initials, NDH — in the western regions that included the modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Ustaša collaborated in the Nazis’ genocidal plans for Europe’s Jewish and Roma comunities, and they had genocidal designs of their own for the Orthodox Serb communities living in the NDH.
To that end they established the Jasenovac concentration camp, which would become known as the Auschwitz of the Balkans. By the war’s end it had become the third largest concentration camp in Europe, and behind its walls the overwhelming majority of Sarajevo’s Jews — at least 10,000 — were massacred. Including Serbs, Jews, Roma and political dissidents of Croat or Muslim Bosniak background, as many as 100,000 people were killed in Jasenovac.
Albahari was 11 years old when the Ustaša came to deport him and his large family to Jasenovac. A former teacher working as an Ustaša guard in the town of Drvar, where the train stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their destination, and he was able to help his son escape from the train.
The teacher helped guide the young Moris to an Italian soldier named Lino Marchione who was secretly helping Jews.
This was the first case when Albahari’s Ladino came in handy. Ladino is largely based on medieval Spanish, with a mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other languages mixed in. For speakers of Serbo-Croatian, a Slavic language, it’s entirely incomprehensible. But for a speaker of another Romance language such as Italian, it’s not such a stretch to understand, and Moris was able to converse with his Italian savior.
With his family gone, he was taken in by a Serb family, and changed his name to Milan Adamovic to hide his Jewish identity. Still, by 1942, it became clear that neither as Adamovic nor Albahari would he be safe in the town. So he fled to the mountains.
“If there was [a battle] I took clothes from a dead soldier to wear, I lived like a wolf in the mountains, you know. Visiting villages [asking for something] to give me for eating, it was a terrible time,” Albahari recalled in “Saved By Language.”
He would only feel safe in villages under the control of partisan forces. Yugoslavia was the only country in Europe to be liberated from Nazi rule by its own grassroots resistance.
During his time in the mountains, Albahari joined up with a partisan unit aligned with the movement of Josip Broz Tito, who would lead Communist Yugoslavia after the war. By the war’s end, Tito’s partisans numbered over 80,000 and included more than 6,000 Jews, many in prominent positions, such as Moša Pijade, who would go on to serve as vice president of the Yugoslav parliament after the war.
Moris was out on patrol as a partisan when he came upon a group of American and British paratroopers. They raised their weapons at him, thinking he was an enemy. Moris tried to communicate, but he spoke no English.
When he asked the soldiers if they spoke German or Italian, they shook their heads. When he asked about Spanish, one perked up: a Hispanic-American soldier by the name of David Garijo.
In Ladino, Alabahari was able to explain that he was not an enemy but could lead them to a nearby partisan camp where they would be safe.
“Ladino saved my life in the war,” Albahari recalled in the documentary.
At the partisan camp, Morris received even bigger news: The family that he had assumed had all perished after he left the train were in fact alive. The former school teacher and Ustaša guard who had warned his father had met them at the next train junction to help them escape. Furthermore, around half of the Jews in the train car were able to escape using the same hole Moris used during his initial escape.
Ultimately the family all survived the war, unlike so many other Jews of Sarajevo.
“Where is Samuel, where is Dudo, where is Gedala? They never came back,” Albahari lamented, listing missing neighbors while walking through Sarajevo’s old Jewish neighborhood in the documentary. “Maybe we are happy because we are alive after the Second World War, but also unlikely because every day we must cry for these dead people.”
When Moris returned to Sarajevo, it was an entirely different place from the bustling Jewish community he had once known.
Gone was the sound of Ladino in the streets and alleyways of Bascarsija, the market district where so many of Sarajevo’s Jews had once lived. Gone were the synagogues — only one of the many synagogues that had existed before WWII still functions. Gone was the robust Jewish life that was once a central part of Sarajevo.
Moris was still only 14 by the war’s end, so he returned to school and ultimately graduated at the top of his class. He became a pilot and later director of the Sarajevo Airport.
In this new world, Ladino was spoken, if at all, only in the home.
“Always, when I hear Spanish, I hear my father and mother, and all the synagogues, prayers in Ladino and rabbis who spoke Ladino. But that is in the past,” Albahari says in “Saved by Language.”
Eliezer Papo, who is a generation younger than Albahari, recalled that in his youth Ladino had long been reduced to a language of secrets.
“Mostly, Ladino was used when the elders didn’t want youngsters to understand,” Papo said.
Only later, in the 1980s, did community members realize what was being lost and begin to gather to maintain their language, recount what Jewish Sarajevo had been like and share their wartime stories of survival.
“He never took his story to the places of revenge, but he took it and his life experience to a place of ‘Never again,’ not just ‘Never again for Jews’, but never again for anybody,” said Papo.
Like many Sarajevans, World War II would not be the last major conflict Albahari would see. Less than 40 years later, war would once again come to Sarajevo with the break-up of Yugoslavia.
From 1992-1995 the city remained under constant siege by Bosnian Serb forces looking to break away from what would become Bosnia and Herzegovina. Moris joined with other Jews of Sarajevo in working to provide aid to their fellow Sarajevans during the harsh period.
Sarajevo’s synagogue was turned into a shelter and a soup kitchen. The community ran a network of underground pharmacies and a message service allowing Sarajevans to get word to family and friends outside of the city during what became the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare.
“Moris was an inspirational persona to many members of Jewish community and La Benevolencija,” Vlado Anderle, the current president of that local Jewish humanitarian organization told JTA. “He was a man with such inviting spirit and energy.”
When the dust settled on the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the new Bosnian state rose from its ashes, Moris found himself once again in a new role.
During the communist era in Yugoslavia, religious activity was discouraged. Sarajevo’s Jews emphasized the ethnic character of Jewish culture rather than the religious one. In the new Bosnia and Herzegovina, that was no longer true. So the community worked to reconnect with their religious identity as well.
“Everybody looked up to the people who had Jewish upbringing before the Second World War,” Papo recalled. “This doesn’t mean that they were rabbis. Just that they knew it better than anyone else.”
Moris, whose formal Jewish education ended in his preteen years, was appointed president of the community’s religious committee.
As such it often fell on him to represent Judaism to the Bosnian society at large, often in a very creative way, according to Papo, who in addition to being a scholar of Ladino is ordained as a rabbi and serves the Sarajevo community as a rabbi-at-large from Israel.
In one case, while being interviewed on a major Bosnian television station, Moris was asked why Jews cover their head with a kippah or other hat during prayer. Moris’ response, or rather creative interpretation, as Papo called it, was made up on the spot.
Moris’ interpretation began with the ancient temple in Jerusalem where Jews once had to fully immerse in a ritual bath before entering.
“Since the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed it was reduced to washing the uncovered parts of the body only, before entering a synagogue, similarly to Muslims: the feet, the head, the hands…” Papo recalled him saying. But in Europe, as Moris’ answer went, they began to cover more and more of their body. “In Europe they started wearing shoes, so the feet were not uncovered anymore, and then they started wearing a hat, not to have to wash their head… you know it’s Europe, one could catch a cold if going out with wet hair…”
“A few months later, I came to Sarajevo, and found that everyone has heard this explanation and is talking about it, not just people in the community, but in the street,” Papo said. “And you know, I let it pass, I couldn’t correct them, it was just so beautiful. That was his genius.”
“Identity is all about telling stories. And Moris was one of the great storytellers of the community,” Papo added. And through his stories he expressed an identity which was “made of the same contradictions that Sephardic Judaism is made of, that Sarajevo is made of, that Bosnia and Herzegovina is made and that Yugoslavia was and is made of and that the Balkans are made of.”
Albahari is survived by his wife and a son.
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Newly aired recordings of paramedic Amit Mann’s final hours renew push to let families access Oct. 7 records
(JTA) — Three years after paramedic Amit Mann, 22, was killed by Hamas while treating the wounded in Kibbutz Be’eri on Oct. 7, newly aired recordings of her final calls revealed fresh and harrowing details about her last hours.
The recordings, aired by Channel 12 on Tuesday, prompted her sister, Haviva Mann Izikson, to renew an appeal for a centralized system to ensure other families are not left searching for similar records years later.
The calls capture Amit repeatedly calling emergency services as Hamas terrorists overran Be’eri, seeking assistance while continuing to treat wounded residents.
The previously unknown calls came to light by chance, when, earlier this year, Mann Izikson contacted the Magen David Adom emergency service seeking the precise times of calls Amit had made on Oct. 7 as she updated a presentation she planned to give about her sister. MDA provided information on seven calls. Until then, the family had known of only four.
Mann Izikson said hearing them revealed both that what Amit endured was “even worse than we had thought” and the extent to which Amit continued caring for others even as the situation around her deteriorated.
“It showed me even more both the hell that she went through and, on the other hand, who she was. What she was dealing with, what she went through there, which was even worse than we had thought, and how despite all of that she keeps treating the wounded in every way she can,” Mann Izikson told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency Wednesday as she prepared to return to Be’eri for a memorial event at the dental clinic where Amit was killed.
The recordings trace Amit’s increasingly desperate attempts to summon help as terrorists closed in around the dental clinic. Hours later, she sent her sisters a chilling last message: “They’re here, in the clinic. I don’t think I’ll make it out of here. I love you.”
In one call, Amit is heard struggling to convey the scale of what was happening to a police dispatcher.
“I don’t understand what’s going on,” she told the dispatcher, describing wounded and dead people around her and continued gunfire. She asked whether the army or police had reached the kibbutz. When the dispatcher told her help was coming and urged her to stay inside, Amit began to cry. “Just tell me you’re here.”
Hours later, at 10:41 a.m., after seven calls to Magen David Adom, Israel’s national emergency medical service, Amit made her final recorded call to police. “Listen, terrorists have infiltrated Be’eri! We urgently need an ambulance or police here. Come urgently to the dental clinic.”
Hearing the latest recordings was heartbreaking, Mann Izikson said. She was struck by Amit’s ability to pull herself together after desperate calls for help and return to caring for the wounded, comforting them, asking about their families, bringing them water and improvising with what little there was. Amit placed helmets beneath their heads and covered those who were cold from blood loss.
“She keeps them alive until her final moments, and she stays true to herself until her last breaths,” Mann Izikson said. “It just amazed us.”
Mann Izikson is urging the state to establish a central body that would collect all existing documentation from Oct. 7, including recordings held by emergency services and police as well as security-camera footage and other material, catalogue it by victim, and contact each family. Such a body, she said, should tell relatives: “We have documentation of your loved one. Would you like to receive it?”
“If the family wants it, then all of it should be provided to them proactively,” she added.
She pointed to the family of Gil Buyum, 55, a member of Be’eri’s security squad whom Amit treated after he was shot. In one call, Amit reported him wounded; in a later call, she reported that he had died.
The two recordings allowed Buyum’s widow, Ayelet, to narrow down the time of her husband’s death, Mann Izikson said. Buyum’s 22-year-old son, Inbar “Buri” Buyum, was also killed while trying to defend the kibbutz that morning.
“Only because of Amit’s recordings was she able to identify the 20-minute window in which he died,” Mann Izikson said. “That’s just one example of how someone can get some kind of closure from something like this.”
She said families should be able to decide for themselves whether they want such material. “It belongs to the families. It is the families’ material, and the families should decide what, if anything, to do with it.”
A law passed in July established an Oct. 7 Memory Authority slated to include an archive and centralize documentation of the attack. The law is due to take effect in January, but it is unclear whether the authority will match material to individual victims and notify their families.
JTA was unable to reach the Prime Minister’s Office and the Israel State Archives, the government body responsible for preserving state records, in time for publication.
Merav Israeli-Amarant, CEO and co-founder of the Civil Commission on Oct. 7 Crimes by Hamas, which released a major report in May documenting sexual violence during the attack and its aftermath, said Mann Izikson’s proposal was “profoundly important.”
“Families should not have to discover, years later and by chance, that recordings, footage, or other documentation connected to their loved ones exist,” Israeli-Amarant told JTA. She said there should be a mechanism that “approaches families with sensitivity,” while giving them the choice of whether to “receive it, view it, preserve it, or not engage with it at all.”
But Israeli-Amarant also said there was “unique importance” in preserving such material through civilian institutions, noting that many Oct. 7 families feel abandoned by the state and that some prefer documentation to be handled independently and “outside political considerations.”
Maya Gan-Zvi, manager of the National Library of Israel’s Bearing Witness: October 7 Archive, which has collected hundreds of thousands of files from the attack, cautioned that proactively approaching families, as Mann Izikson proposes, also raised ethical questions because families differ widely in how, and whether, they want to encounter such material.
“Some want to receive everything, and some do not want to know, or not yet,” Gan-Zvi told JTA, adding that even members of the same family may disagree. Contacting a family without first knowing its wishes could “reopen wounds,” she said, particularly in cases involving graphic material or footage filmed by the terrorists themselves.
Gan-Zvi said she favored a system in which bereaved families themselves would take the initiative, registering that they wanted to be contacted, specifying the types of material they wanted and receiving a description of what had been found before deciding whether to obtain it.
According to Israeli-Amarant, any system would face “significant” practical and legal hurdles because Oct. 7 material is scattered among government bodies, emergency services, police, the military, media outlets and private individuals, raising questions of ownership, privacy, consent and the rights of victims’ families.
Some recordings or footage may also be evidence in ongoing investigations or criminal proceedings against Hamas terrorists, she said, making chain of custody, publication restrictions and the integrity of those proceedings additional considerations.
Mann Izikson said providing documentation would help answer fundamental questions that remained unresolved.
“Three years later, we still don’t know the full truth and don’t understand how this happened,” she said. “Every piece of material like this can shed another bit of light and help us understand a little bit more.”
She has listened to the newly aired recordings repeatedly, echoing a pattern she described to JTA on the first anniversary of the attack, when she said she reread Amit’s messages from Oct. 7 every day, in part to piece together what happened during her sister’s final hours and try to come to terms with it.
It took two and a half days for Amit’s body to be identified. Mann Izikson told JTA at the time that when her sister was lowered into the grave, “I felt like they were burying half of my own child. I wanted to go in instead of her.”
Even amid the war, the hostage crisis and the wider grief in Israel on the first anniversary of Oct. 7, Mann Izikson said Amit’s loss eclipsed everything else. “There is all the rest — and the rest is painful and scary,” she said. “And then there is Amit and nothing else at all.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Bereaved mother: ‘Every day is Oct. 7. Still.’
(JTA) — TEL AVIV – Some 50,000 Israelis filled Tel Aviv’s Yarkon Park on Wednesday night to mark three years since the Oct. 7 attacks, at a bereaved families’ memorial ceremony that for the first time took place with no hostages remaining in Gaza.
The ceremony, organized for the third year by the Kumu movement, an initiative set up by families affected by Oct. 7, came more than eight months after the body of Ran Gvili, the last hostage held in Gaza, was recovered and returned to Israel. The last 20 living hostages had returned in October 2025. A year ago, 48 yellow chairs hung above the same stage to represent those still in Gaza.
This year, with the hostage campaign that dominated Israeli public life for more than two years no longer hanging over the anniversary, the emphasis shifted toward remembrance and another unresolved demand of many bereaved families: an investigation into the failures that allowed the attack to happen.
Former hostage Eli Sharabi, who was held in Gaza for 491 days, hosted the ceremony alongside actress Shani Cohen. Sharabi was abducted from Kibbutz Be’eri on Oct. 7; his wife Lianne and daughters Noiya and Yahel were killed in the attack, and his brother Yossi was killed in captivity.
“Remember what happened. Investigate how it happened. Don’t cut corners. Don’t let time blur the truth, don’t rewrite history, and don’t let history repeat itself,” Sharabi said from the stage.
Omri Shifroni, a founder of the Kumu movement whose relatives Liel and Yanai Hetzroni and Avia and Ayala Hetzroni were murdered in Kibbutz Be’eri, also demanded a full investigation.
“That morning, the systems collapsed and the state failed to function,” he said. “But mutual responsibility alone is not enough. To rebuild trust, we also need the truth. We must know what happened. Without investigating the truth, we cannot fix things, and we cannot make sure it never happens again.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has resisted establishing a state commission of inquiry into the failures surrounding Oct. 7 and instead backed legislation for a politically appointed probe.
Wednesday’s ceremony was launched ahead of the first anniversary of the attack as an alternative to the official state event after many bereaved and hostage families said they would shun it.
Netanyahu instead attended the official state commemoration at Mount Herzl on Monday, the Hebrew-calendar date designated by the government for marking the attack.
For Eliot Young, whose brother Nathanel, a British-Israeli soldier, was killed fighting Hamas on Oct. 7, the ceremony has become an annual form of support. He was there with his wife, Rena, and their infant son, who was named after Nathanel.
“These days are very hard, but the fact that these people are here is a huge source of strength for me,” he told The Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Some of them lost lots of family members, but they’re still here, smiling, having a conversation. It’s an inspiration for anyone who has been through loss.”
Young recalled Nathanel talking about joining the Israeli military from the age of 10, even though he was living in the UK at the time, and said that by 15, Nathanel was going to the gym with the goal of getting into the best unit he could.
“He taught us, and continues to teach us, about persevering with your dreams,” Young said.
Nathanel, a soldier in the Golani Brigade’s 13th Battalion, was killed fighting at the Yiftach military base near Zikim in the Gaza envelope in southern Israel, where he and other soldiers held off Hamas attackers, saving soldiers at the base and preventing an infiltration into the nearby kibbutz.
His sister, Gaby Young Shalev, said that three years on, Nathanel’s memory has become woven into the family’s daily life.
“There’s not one day that goes by where someone in my family isn’t doing something in memory of Nathanel,” she told JTA.
Among the projects is a professional music and DJ studio for at-risk youth at a WIZO school in Jerusalem — Nathanel himself was a DJ — funded with tens of thousands of shekels raised by Young Shalev in his memory. A wine and a cold brew have also been made in Nathanel’s memory.
“We’re trying to live our lives the way that Nathanel would want us to. He definitely wouldn’t want us to sit around moping,” Young Shalev said.
Other memorials were held throughout the day across Israel, including in communities attacked on Oct. 7. At the Nova festival site near Re’im, survivors and bereaved families gathered for a memorial at 6:29 p.m., deliberately matching 6:29 a.m., the time the Oct. 7 attack began and the music stopped.
Eyal Golan, whose sister Shirel survived the Nova massacre and later died by suicide, returned to the Re’im area for the first time in five years. He said he had not been back since developing PTSD during reserve duty in the 2021 Gaza conflict, and had not even driven through the area since.
During the ceremony, Golan chose to remain beside a memorial placard bearing Shirel’s photograph. “I wanted to babysit my little sister,” he said.
He spent much of the day speaking about Shirel and handing out sensory balls designed to help ground people during anxiety and PTSD episodes, part of a project he founded in her memory. It was a marked change from a year earlier, when Golan told JTA he could not bring himself to attend a memorial and had spent the anniversary struggling with a feeling of “emptiness” and his own PTSD.
“For the first time in years, I felt like I had completed a missing piece of the puzzle of my life,” he said after Wednesday’s ceremony. “I felt much more whole.”
Their mother, Yaffa Golan, said being among others “in pain, tearing up, crying” reflected how raw the loss remains.
“You know, for us, every day is October 7. Still now,” she said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Bereaved mother: ‘Every day is Oct. 7. Still.’ appeared first on The Forward.
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The definitive Oct. 7 book was written — and sketched — before the attack
As Salomé Parent-Rachdi and Zac Deloupy worked on the drawings for a book about Israeli-Palestinian romance, they had no way of knowing the world they were depicting was on the brink of collapse.
The day they finished their pencil sketches, we learn in the book’s introduction, was Oct. 6, 2023. The next day, Hamas invaded Israel, killing about 1,200 and taking another 251 hostage. By the time the book was published in April 2024, Israel was locked in a multi-front war that still hasn’t quite settled.
That context — a looming attack, a forever war that has not yet begun — colors every panel of Love and Desire in the Promised Land: The Private Lives of Israelis and Palestinians, a French graphic nonfiction book whose English translation was released this summer. Reading the book feels like opening a time capsule that had been buried in the distant past: Even as it reminds you how bad the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was before Oct. 7, it leaves you wishing desperately you could restore things to how they were.
The book follows Parent-Rachdi, a French journalist, as she travels across Israel and the Palestinian territories to interview 16 subjects about their love lives. She talks to a mix of singles and couples, straight and gay, in Israel, West Bank and Gaza. (That’s one giveaway this book couldn’t have been made today: No journalist has been permitted to enter Gaza unaccompanied since Oct. 7.)
A few tell of dating across Palestinian-Israeli lines. Lana, an Arab Israeli, finds herself in a situationship with a right-wing Israeli — and ends up marrying him. Samira, an Arab Israeli woman, tells us about her Israeli ex, whose enlistment during the 2014 Gaza war — when they are living together — brings the unspoken tension in their relationship out into the open. And we learn the complex family dynamics of a celebrity Muslim-Jewish couple: Fauda star Tsahi Halevi and his Arab-Israeli wife, TV anchor Lucy Aharish.
The less politically fraught experiences are relayed with the same empathy. Avi, an ex-Hasid, reveals that, despite unbearable teenage horniness, he initially didn’t know how to find porn on the internet due to his insular upbringing. (He searches for “woman in pajamas” instead.) Rami, Parent-Rachdi’s fixer and taxi driver in Gaza, says, as a single man in his thirties, he told people he had erectile dysfunction so they wouldn’t grow suspicious.
In between these revelations are glimpses of life as it was in Israel and the Palestinian territories before Oct. 7. We ride shotgun as Parent-Rachdi navigates checkpoints on her way out of the West Bank and deals with Israeli and Palestinian officials on the way into Gaza. Rami — who did finally marry — says he made sure his son was born in Jordan so that he wouldn’t be trapped in Gaza as an adult. Parent-Rachdi has brought his stepson a remote-control car — the kind of toy Rami can’t buy in Gaza due to the Israeli blockade.
The love stories describe conflict, of course, and they do not uniformly lead to happy endings. (Or for that matter, breakups.) What they consistently show instead is people — as far as we can tell, basically good people — reaching out to each other in a pressure cooker of cultural, religious, sexual and political attitudes.
The stories also betray civilians’ genuine skepticism of their own communities with a frankness that seems unimaginable today. The clearest example of this comes in Gaza, where Mohammed, a closeted Palestinian looking for hookups, tells Parent-Rachdi about Hamas honor killings of gay men and his own brush with death. “They’re more likely to kill you if you’re a bottom,” he says matter-of-factly. Catfished by a Hamas intelligence officer, Mohammed escapes arrest by swearing he’s a virgin and flees to the U.S. a few days later.
Would Mohammed make the same disclosures today, when “What about Hamas?” has become a refrain for anyone defending Israel’s response to Oct. 7? The Gaza he left behind no longer exists. The book’s afterword, written in Feb. 2024, reveals that Rami’s wife’s cosmetics store — lovingly illustrated by Deloupy earlier in the book — was leveled in Israeli airstrikes; the family was now living in a refugee camp in Rafah. “We have gone from a life with all the modern comforts to a reality where we move with a cart, where we buy wood to split and burn in order to cook and take a shower,” he says.
As for Mohammed, his house was destroyed, as were many friendships with Jews and Israelis: “I write to them,” he says in the afterword. “They don’t respond, but they read my message.” As for Hamas, he says, “today, seeing the suffering, somehow I feel like I better understand their resistance.” When the authors checked in with the subjects, several did not respond. By then, some 30,000 Palestinians were dead.
As it reminds us what we’ve lost, Love and Desire in the Promised Land also points the only way toward a shared future: people on all sides defying the forces pulling them apart. It shows us it can be done. Even in the afterword, one of the interviewees, a Modern Orthodox Jew named Jean-Marc, is optimistic: “I am still convinced, even more so now, that we have to work with the Palestinians,” he says. “Our safety depends on it.”
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