(Avi Dishi/Flash90)
ROSH HASHANAH EDITION 5780 SECTION A PAGE 12
On the morning of May 23, 2019, residents of Mevo Modi’im in Israel smelled smoke and knew that a fire had been spotted in the area.
Around 2 p.m., they received a WhatsApp alert, informing the 220-some residents that the fire was drawing nearer and that they should prepare to evacuate.
“At 2:30,” recalls one of those residents, Rachel Trugman, “it was like, ‘you have to get out now.’”
Adds her husband, Rabbi Avraham Trugman: “Someone came banging on the door, saying everyone has to leave the moshav. We had about five minutes to evacuate.”
The residents only had time to hastily grab a few precious personal items before they were evacuated to a nearby shopping mall. One individual had the presence of mind to run into the community’s synagogue, located in its central common area, or beit knesset, and retrieve the Torah from its ark.
Still, the majority weren’t seriously worried — at first. Several fire crews had already arrived, ready to face the flames and save the structures.
“Everyone else had the same impression: Yeah, this is a serious fire, but there’s all these fire trucks here and everything,” says Rabbi Trugman. “We’ll be back in an hour or two. Everyone went to the local mall. An hour later, we got word that the whole moshav had burned down.”
That initial report about the “whole” moshav was an exaggeration, but not by much. Although the beit knesset was largely spared, some 80% of the moshav’s other buildings, including most of its homes, was reduced to cinders. Much of the surrounding forest and parts of adjoining communities were also lost to the blaze.
Not a single life was lost, however.
“People were in total shock,” Rabbi Trugman says, but he acknowledges that they weren’t totally surprised.
Mevo Modi’im is located in approximately the geographical center of Israel proper, about halfway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. It lies squarely in the middle of Ben Shemen, Israel’s second biggest forest.
The previous winter Israel had seen its most prolific rainfall in nearly three decades, fostering unusually dense growth of weeds and underbrush. By late spring, the vegetation was bone dry; for several days before the fire, an extreme heat wave had driven temperatures well above 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
Everyone knew the place was a tinderbox.
The Trugmans took a break from the arduous and frustrating process of helping rebuild their community by recently paying a pre-High Holiday visit to Denver, a city in which they are not strangers. From 1988 to 1995, they founded and directed the National Council of Synagogue Youth here.
Back in their former hometown, they held a series of talks and lectures, most of them geared to attract financial support to help the residents of Mevo Modi’im.
In an interview with the Intermountain Jewish News, the couple related their long history with Mevo Modi’im and the late Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, the legendary chasidic folk musician and composer who was the spiritual leader—and inspiration — for the community, often referred to as “the Carlebach moshav.”
The Trugmans were among the founders of the community in 1976, among a few dozen other disciples of Carlebach. In fact, Rachel has been a follower since the 1960s, when Carlebach founded the House of Love and Prayer in San Francisco.
Rabbi Trugman joined the Carlebach movement not long thereafter and for several years ran Mevo Modi’im’s educational programs, which at one time attracted some 5,000 visitors a year to the moshav.
Since returning to the community in 1995 after their Denver stay, the Trugmans have based their Ohr Chadash educational program in Mevo Modi’im, teaching classes on a wide variety of Judaic subjects, producing video and audio educational programs and musical recordings and publishing Rabbi Trugman’s 17 (so far) books on such subjects as Gematria, Kabbalah and reincarnation.
While many Ohr Chadash activities are conducted online, it has also sponsored many gatherings at the moshav itself, with visitors often staying at the Trugmans’ home. “We stopped counting at 10,000 people staying with us for Shabbat,” the rabbi says.
The Trugmans’ perspectives on Judaism are fully in line with the orientation of many of the moshav’s residents, including Carlebach himself, which is to say highly creative, open-minded and mystical.
While the moshav’s economic mainstays have been organic agriculture, health food production and education, its 60 or so families constitute what Rabbi Trugman calls “an incredible collection of creative people,” including artists, musicians, writers, ceramicists, silversmiths, poets and healers.
Most of its residents are American Jewish olim and its religious orientation is best described as non-traditional chasidic, the Trugmans say. Members of various chasidic groups reside there, as do individuals not affiliated with any religious movement, per se. Many are students of Kabbalah.
Despite Mevo Modi’im’s relative small size, the rabbi says, “Its reputation is world-wide,” due not only to its association with Carlebach but the many large gatherings it has hosted for thousands of visitors.
“I don’t believe I’m exaggerating that if you take all of the educational programs, shabbatons, holidays and festivals, about a half a million people have come through the moshav,” Rabbi Trugman says.
“So when this happened,” he continues, referring to this year’s fire, “there was an incredible outpouring of concern and support, including financial support. Everyone in the Jewish world knew about it within hours.”
On May 23, the residents of Mevo Modi’im celebrated Lag b’Omer, a Jewish festival often marked by the burning of bonfires. Obeying government orders, the moshav marked the holiday with a single candle, safely contained inside a structure.
The precaution was in vain. By the afternoon of that day, the moshav was essentially in ruins, its population transformed into what Rabbi Trugman calls “refugees.”
The residents were provided temporary shelter in a hotel in the nearby religious community of Kibbutz Chofetz Chaim. The most immediate needs — water, food, clothing, supplies for babies and the elderly — came in the form of emergency aid from the Jewish Agency and other emergency charities.
The Trugmans were part of this chaotic exodus. Like their neighbors, they worried about what would greet them upon their return to the moshav.
“For 48 hours, I thought my house had been destroyed also,” says the rabbi, describing the “beautiful” home he and his wife have lived in for decades, with an inspiring panoramic view toward the west, surrounded by lush gardens and landscaping that he and his wife have nurtured for years.
“We thought that the house, and everything with it, was gone. And then we got word — and someone took some pictures — that our house had survived.”
The rabbi sighs and frowns as he lists the moshav’s losses:
Some 40 of the community’s 50 houses were consumed by the fire, he says.
“The beit knesset was spared. The synagogue was saved. All the greenery on both sides of the beit knesset was untouched, but half of the houses right across the street from the beit knesset were burned.”
The house in which Rabbi Carlebach resided was also destroyed, but somehow the rabbi’s personal library — which was stored in cardboard boxes — did not burn.
“On the part of the moshav where we live, 80% of the homes were totally destroyed,” Rabbi Trugman says.
But the flames didn’t touch the Trugman residence, and only burned the bottom part of their beloved garden.
The Trugmans are asked if they have any personal explanations for their rare good fortune.
“G-d’s grace,’ the rabbi says quietly. “I’m not going to offer any other explanation. People can come to their own conclusions. For us, it was like a personal miracle, but it’s very hard to talk about that when so many of our great friends and neighbors lost everything. So why us? Only G-d knows these things.”
Rachel frames it in a more down-to-earth context: “The way I like to put it is, I almost flunked algebra in high school and G-d’s arithmetic is like calculus to me. I just don’t get it.”
Four months after the fire, its aftermath continues, making life difficult for the moshav’s residents. None of them have been able to return to live there because water and electricity have been only partially restored.
Many residents are still staying at Chofetz Chaim, while others have found other temporary residences, including the Trugmans, who are staying at a friend’s apartment in Jerusalem.
A government plan is in place in which residents have been given the choice of receiving housing subsidies or living in prefabricated temporary housing on the moshav itself while they work to rebuild their homes. These domiciles, the rabbi says, are similar to housing provided to hurricane victims in the US.
The rebuilding process will be arduous, the Trugmans say, since most Mevo Modi’im residents didn’t have any insurance to cover the loss of their homes. Other than an as-yet undetermined amount of government aid, these residents will essentially be on their own.
“Most people,” Rachel says, “are living hand to mouth.”
A committee of residents is doing its best to organize and coordinate the recovery effort. The Trugmans’ daughter, Chani Pearlstein, who works for the New York-based American Associates of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, has played a leading role in obtaining emergency and long-term financial support for the effort.
More than half a million dollars have been raised from private donors, a benefit concert featuring Israeli musical stars, the Jewish Agency and the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, whose new president, Yael Eckstein, is a former student of Rabbi Trugman’s.
The bureaucratic obstacles are no less formidable than the economic, say the Trugmans, who use phrases like “Kafkaesque” and “Catch 22” to describe the prolonged and complex process.
“We’re in the second wave now where we’ve had to hire a lot of lawyers,” the rabbi says. “There are all kinds of legalities and politics involved here. So we’ve had to hire lawyers, publicists and marketing people because we need to stay in the limelight so the government doesn’t forget us.”
In addition to determining which agencies are responsible for which parts of the recovery, the government has been unable to rule definitively on what caused the fire, which has huge implications for the residents.
Early in a three-month police investigation, it was determined that the fire had four points of origin, strongly suggesting arson, quite possibly terrorist arson, Rabbi Trugman says. But the investigation ended with an “inconclusive” position on the cause.
If the fire can be legally attributed to ordinary human or natural causes, the government is largely off the hook in terms of providing financial support for rebuilding. If, however, the cause is determined to be terrorism, the government must provide the lion’s share of that funding.
Residents of the community recently held a demonstration outside the prime minister’s office, protesting the inconclusive ruling. Several hundred people were in attendance.
“The battle,” says Rabbi Trugman, “is not over.”
Transcending whatever frustration and anger the Trugmans might feel is their sheer gratitude for the support they have already received.
“We have received a huge hug from people in Israel and throughout the world,” Rachel says. “We feel very comforted in that.
“Within 24 hours of the fire there were thousands and thousands of boxes of clothing, cribs, strollers, shoes, toys, everything imaginable, sent to one central place. There were hundreds of volunteers sorting through things and putting them into boxes so that people could have just basic things. There was so much love, so much support.”
Her husband continues: “It still is difficult. It’s not clear yet how it’s going to affect the community. Many of our people are in their mid-70s, inching up there, who say it’s too big of a task to try to rebuild a home, especially if they don’t have any money.
“But that’s the exception. There is an incredible determination on virtually everyone’s part, an incredible coalescing of the individuals going through this.”
Among the residents of Mevo Modi’im, he adds, there has been no crisis of faith in the fire’s wake.
Rachel agrees.
“We’re a spirit-based community, so we didn’t take it as hard as someone whose whole life is in the material world. We didn’t lose a life, which is a miracle in itself. There were elders on walkers who had to get out of there in half an hour, there were babies. So we didn’t lose a life; we lost a lifestyle.”
What lies ahead for the moshav remains uncertain.
While the rabbi wants the community’s core mission to remain, he knows that something as traumatic as this year’s fire will inevitably change things.
“We all realize that whatever was, we’re not going to be able to recapture. Something different is going to happen now. That’s where there is a certain amount of optimism because we have to make it better.
“We were not a perfect community — there is no such thing as a perfect community — and there has been a lot of soul-searching as to why this happened and what can we do differently. No one knows what the future needs.”
Rabbi Trugman finds it both exciting and daunting to be facing such an uncertain future.
“We have an opportunity to reinvent our life,” he says, “but it’s very challenging.”
At least, the rabbi says, it’s happening at the right time of year — just before the High Holidays, a season for introspection.
“This is big time introspection,” he says with a smile.
Asked for a final comment, Rachel says quietly: “I’ll just quote Dorothy. There’s no place like home.’”
Chris Leppek may be reached at IJNEWS@aol.com.
Copyright © 2019 by the Intermountain Jewish News
