Rachel “Cheli” Baram will not — cannot — go back to Kibbutz Kfar Aza.

It is the place where she and her two young children, now 6 and 3, survived the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks. It is the place where her husband, Aviv, was killed as he and the other members of the community’s emergency response team tried to prevent the infiltration of hundreds of terrorists from the Gaza Strip. And it is a place she believes that even after 17 months of war against Hamas remains fundamentally unsafe.

“I won’t bring my children back to Kfar Aza because of the dangers inherent to it,” Baram told eJewishPhilanthropy, referring to the continued security threats posed by terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip. 

For Hadassah (not her real name), the decision to leave was forced by the adoption of her nephews, both of whose parents were murdered in the attack. “We are not ready to bring the kids back there. They have a serious problem with being there after what happened,” she told eJP, requesting anonymity to preserve the privacy of her family. 

“How can we go back? Has anything changed?” she said. “It was a very difficult decision. We were very involved in our kibbutz. It was not just a physical house, it was an emotional, social, cultural home for us.”

And they are not alone. An unknown number of survivors of the Oct. 7 massacres refuse to return to their homes due to what is known as place-based trauma, out of a desire to start their lives anew in communities not wracked by collective pain or to avoid having to again relocate after having been evacuated from their homes since the attacks — or some combination of the three. 

And yet despite the need of many Oct. 7 survivors, particularly those who experienced the worst horrors of the attacks, to relocate in the wake of the atrocities, there is currently no government program to facilitate such a move. Israeli authorities — as well as nonprofits — are primarily focused on rebuilding their communities and sending them home. There is a general understanding and expectation that such government assistance will eventually come,  and that those who owned their homes on the kibbutzim that were attacked will eventually be able to sell them once reconstruction is completed in the next year or two and new families look to move in. but for now, those seeking relocation lack the financial resources to purchase new homes elsewhere. 

Into that vacuum has stepped a new initiative, ReHome, which is offering bridging loans, financial advice and mortgage assistance, to “the hardest-hit victims” of the Oct. 7 attacks, the organization’s co-founder Dalia Black, told eJP. 

“Now who are the hardest-hit victims? Widows, returned hostages, bereaved parents and orphans of two parents. It goes without saying that no one expects that they will go back, including the government. So we have met with the [reconstruction-focused] Tekuma Authority, we have met with the government ministers… and they understand that there is a group of very hard-hit families that will never go back and that they need help. They do understand,” said Black, the founder and CEO of the impact investment firm Weave Impact.

While there is perhaps understanding that these families will not return, their desire to relocate is not regularly discussed in Israeli society — or in the Jewish world — where the focus is generally more on the more positive topics of reconstruction and those determined to rebuild their trauma-wracked communities. 

Black, whose firm had worked on social housing projects in the past, said she was approached by someone who knew a female hostage released in the November 2023 release deal. “I was asked to come and meet with her because she came out of Gaza to discover that her husband had been murdered along with other family members — and she was suffering from something called place-based trauma,” Black said. “She will never go back, not just not to live, she will never step back in the kibbutz and she says, ‘How can I step on my husband’s blood?’ She really sees it in those terms.”

For people who have suffered from place-based trauma and have post-traumatic stress disorder, returning to that location can trigger flashbacks and make it more difficult to treat the PTSD. As seen by the renewed rocket fire from Gaza on Thursday, the region is also still not a safe place. “In order to recover from post-traumatic stress disorder, we require a certain amount of safety and feeling of safety. And when the place in which the trauma happened is no longer a safe place and safety there cannot be guaranteed, it’s very hard to begin the difficult work of processing the trauma,” said Anna Harwood-Gross, the director of research at Metiv: The Israel Pyschotrauma Center and an Israeli expert in PTSD. (Full disclosure: She is also this reporter’s wife.)

For some people, returning to the scene of where a traumatic event took place — in a safe, thoughtful way — can lead to “post-traumatic growth,” allowing them to “generate a new story about the place and create a new narrative,” but for others, staying in that location “might not actually allow for trauma processing,” according to Harwood-Gross.

“If someone hasn’t been able to process their trauma, returning to a place of continued sirens and continued reminders and continuous threats to their safety — and they’re suffering greatly from PTSD — then returning to that place isn’t going to provide them with the experience to develop,” she said.

As with the other residents of three of the hardest-hit kibbutzim — Kfar Aza, Beeri and Nir Oz — the woman whom Black met (who did not give her permission for her identity to be shared) is being provided with rental assistance from the government until her community is rebuilt, but once that happens, she didn’t know where she would go next.

“She’s living in rented accommodation, and she said, ‘Basically I’m homeless. There is no government solution for someone who cannot return today, none,” Black said. “I understood straight away that these families need a bridge loan because their capital is tied up in their homes, which cannot be removed right now.”

Baram from Kfar Aza said that her financial situation is entirely unclear and will likely remain so for the near future. “Everything is in a fog,” she said. “It will take some two years [to rebuild], and then once the kibbutz is back up, then I’ll be able to start the process of selling. But in order to sell my house, I need to find a buyer and they have to be approved by the kibbutz — it takes a long time. It will take even longer because there’s not a physical kibbutz right now.”

For residents of Beeri, the process is even more complicated as it is a full cooperative kibbutz, meaning residents do not own their homes, the kibbutz does. 

Seeing a need, Black reached out to Daniel Goldman, a philanthropist and co-founder of the financial advising firm Goldrock Capital, who quickly came on board, providing the start-up funding for ReHome and who now serves as its interim chairman.

Black and her team performed a feasibility study to understand what would be needed to offer this kind of support to Oct. 7 survivors, and they quickly realized that there was no existing model for them to adopt, no “down payment assistance finance funds” as exist in the United States and the United Kingdom, for instance, she said.

“We brought in a top real estate lawyer. a top credit license lawyer, a top real estate business here in Israel, we brought in a mortgage advisor business, we brought them in and we built the model together — everyone worked pro bono. That’s before we called up the banks, and the banks also stepped up and said, ‘OK, this is what the Bank of Israel allows, we can give as cheap a mortgage as we possibly can as quickly as possible,’” Black said. 

“We didn’t choose for it to be innovative, but it didn’t exist so we’ve had to get legal approvals and regulatory approvals because now we have partnered with a credit provider,” she said.

“We put together a wraparound social service to remove anything painful in the process of buying a house. So each participant gets a case manager who is a financial advisor,” Black said, noting that ReHome has partnered with the social lender Ogen, which has experience working with soldiers who have PTSD to buy a home. 

“They get a mortgage advisor and they get a legal advisor. And we hand-hold them from the beginning to the moment they move into their new house — and that’s all covered by philanthropy… This is almost 5% economics and 95% psychology, in the sense that the purpose of the program is to assist in the rehabilitation, and the decisions we make about how we deliver — whether it’s the finance or the services — has got to be driven by that criteria, making sure that actually it works, that it’s good for the family,” she said.

Part of that is also assessing the family’s income — from work and from the government benefits given to victims of terror — and ensuring that they can repay the loans that they would receive.

Black and Goldman said that for ReHome, a top priority was earning and maintaining the trust of their clients, whose experiences in the Oct. 7 attacks — the infiltration, the slow military response, the haphazard evacuations — have shattered their faith in institutions. 

“The very fact that we have families who are putting their trust in this thing that didn’t even exist a number of months ago and trusting us when we give them advice about financial planning or mortgage or whatever… It’s an amazing feeling for us, but that’s besides the point. Actually it’s about helping our families to feel that there is at least somebody that they can trust. I’m sure there are other people, but here’s an anchor around which they can [cling],” Goldman told eJP. 

“I still wonder if it’s a dream,” Cheli Baram said of the ReHome program. 

“A friend heard about this program. I said, ‘How do I know that they’re not scammers?’ It sounded too good to be true,” Baram said. “From checking our financial planning to mortgage advisors and helping with the loan, getting us a mortgage with conditions that just don’t exist anywhere else… I saw how serious they are.”

She added that while she and her children are receiving support from different organizations and government agencies, when it comes to housing, “no one else is doing this.”

Baram said she is in the final stages of getting a loan to purchase a new home in the area where she and her children had been sent after Kibbutz Kfar Aza was evacuated. 

“We are not doing another big move. I was widowed. My children lost their father,” she said. “My kids were ripped out of everything that they knew once. I am very firm in my decision [to not go back to the kibbutz].”

“[After we were evacuated], I signed my kids up in local preschool — not the preschool for evacuees. I’ve made connections with other parents there. I have new friends, friends who are helping with picking up the kids and taking them to activities, friends who brought us food and furniture and flowers for Shabbat, who make us feel a part of the community. Our painful story is not the center of our relationship — and that’s priceless,” she said.

Hadassah and her family — her husband, two young children and her nephews — are looking to move to the kibbutz where she grew up, offering her nephews a fresh start, “where not everyone knows what happened to them down to the smallest detail,” she said.

They are deep in the process of receiving a loan and mortgage through ReHome as they start to build the new home, Hadassah said. 

“We received financial advice, then went through their approval committee. Our contractor is starting. We’re just waiting to sign the agreement,” she said.

Since launching a few months ago, ReHome has so far raised $7 million — slightly more than half of the $12.7 million that it estimates it will need to assist 50 families through the process. That $7 million includes both charitable gifts and impact investments that ReHome will repay as the recipients begin repaying their loans. 

In addition to providing the initial funding, the Goldman family has joined the project as an anchor funder. They are joined by the Day After Fund, the Seed the Dream Foundation, Marla and Gideon Stein, Edward Stern and Stephanie Rein, the Beck Family Charitable Foundation and “a couple of anonymous families,” Black said.

Goldman traveled to the United States this week, potentially looking to bring on more partners.

For ReHome, the decision by Oct. 7 survivors to relocate is entirely personal. The organization does not encourage it or market to survivors. “We don’t do public outreach because we want to ensure that the families that come to ReHome truly cannot go back [to their homes],” Black said. Goldman added: “We’re not advertising cheap loans.”

For  clients — who can reconsider and back out at any point in the process — the decision to leave their communities is a difficult one, but one that Baram and Hadassah said people on their kibbutzim accepted, or at least understood.

“Everyone is accepting and understands,” Baram said. “They want us to come back, but they accept it.”

In her community of Kibbutz Kfar Aza, people are still deciding whether to go back or not, but Cheli said she doesn’t know of others who are currently working with ReHome.

Hadassah said that with the added complexity of adopting children who have lost both parents, everyone in their community expressed understanding. 

“They understood and accepted. Even if they don’t really accept it, they make us feel that we are still part of the community and that they understand where this decision came from,” she said. “This wasn’t our first choice. It required courage. Most of the kibbutz is staying together… A lot of people were disappointed that we were leaving, but others came and said, ‘I wish I had the courage’ or ‘I wish I had a place to go.’”

Both of them acknowledged that there were downsides to leaving their communities — which will collectively focus on mental health care and support — but said that they felt it was necessary for the long-term health of them and their children. Both of them said that their families were receiving psychological treatment.

“As of now, it feels like the right decision,” Hadassah said, noting that on her new kibbutz the family isn’t permanently “sunk into” the suffering of Oct. 7.

“It’s not the topic of every discussion,” she said. “[With their old kibbutz],” everything is sensitive. Everything is a trigger. On the one hand, it protects you. But on the other hand, it doesn’t let you get out of it.”

Baram, who is a clinical psychologist, said that she felt her new community, which she described as strong and supportive, provided her with the foundation she needed to focus on her children, “unlike in a community where everyone is in the same situation as me. We have strong people to rely on.”

Goldman stressed that these families relocating does not represent a defeat, it demonstrates their resilience. 

“The families are choosing to remain on kibbutzim, and I think there’s a lot to be said about that. 

They’re choosing to remain in Israel,” he said. “So at the end of the day, we are helping these families start their rehabilitation.”