Israeli Town Vows to Rebuild After Fire
“The truth is that the Israeli way is not to do anything until a rope is around your neck,” says Ran Ronen, a respected member of Beit Oren, a town ravaged by the Mount Carmel fires last year.
Ronen is leading FrumForum on a tour of the damaged community, which was evacuated by the Israeli government in December as wildfires threatened the inhabitants of the small town that housed around 500 people.
Forty-four people died as a result of the fire, all of them killed in a single incident. A prison near the Beit Oren kibbutz was threatened by the fires, and so a bus filled with policemen was sent to assist with evacuation efforts. While enroute, the path was blocked by a tree and the bus was caught in the advancing flames – leading to the deaths of most on board.
The fire, which burned across 12,000 acres of land, caught both the kibbutz and Israeli government by surprise. With a population of around 7 million people, Israel had not yet found it economical to purchase planes for the purpose of fighting fires, which meant it took two days for the international community to respond. The government also failed to anticipate the fire by neglecting to clear brush in the area around their houses – something opposed by park rangers in the nearby national park.
“Yes, the Israeli way, we don’t plan too far into the future, we don’t act until something bad happens,” Ronen says. This might even be overstating it: after the forest fires, the Israeli government allotted not a dollar more for firefighting brigades.
The damage caused by the fire was savage, leveling an entire forest to the ground. Ronen tells FrumForum that in the picture below, trees used to stand up to thirty feet high.
Of the community’s 120 homes, half were damaged in the fire, with 35 houses a total loss.
Fifteen families still are homeless, and a hundred residents of the kibbutz have now left permanently, bringing the population of the small town to about 400 people. Orna Dagon, whose house was severely damaged in the fire, tells FrumForum she had only a few minutes to react to the evacuation order. The three things she grabbed from her house before she fled? A photo album, one terabyte of data, and her daughter’s mandolin.
Beit Oren is no stranger to rebuilding. In 1987, the financial collapse of the communal kibbutz that had been established there in the 1930s led to the departure of half of its residents. Since then, the privatization of the community has helped the community rebuild – a spirit which they need to embrace now more than ever.
“We came from the ashes,” says Ronen. “We will come from the ashes once again, like a phoenix.”
Tim Mak is in Israel as a Media Fellow with the new media organization Act for Israel.
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