Naama Benmocha ’23

Posted on November 24, 2023

When everything started, I was in Morocco with my family on a trip that had been planned long ago. We had big plans to travel. We were supposed to finish the trip in Marrakesh, visiting my great-grandmother’s grave there, as well as the Jewish neighborhood where my grandparents grew up.

On the morning when everything started, we got up to see the sunrise in the Sahara Desert, but we awoke to chats and notifications from family and friends at home. I had difficulty understanding and believing [what was going on] because of the contrast and the distance—on the one hand, I was opposite a breathtaking view, while at the same time my country was undergoing one of the most destabilizing and difficult events of our history. We quickly decided to leave Morocco for Barcelona and from there we were able to get on an earlier flight home.

As soon as we got home, we began to truly feel the war. Family members went to do their reserve duty and other family and friends evacuated from their homes in the Gaza Envelope regions, from Sderot, and from the North.

I remember our first day home as day when the house was full. Friends who wanted to be together during this time, family members who didn’t have a shelter in their home or who wanted to go somewhere quiet for a moment, away from the places filled with sirens – everyone came to us.

Since the start of the war, I’ve participated in all kinds of volunteering. I teach children who need extra help during this period, I participate in agricultural activity in my region, and I’ve done other small volunteer activities for the past month and a half. In my region we’ve already returned to a kind of routine, but a fabricated routine, not a real one. We go back to school, but not for the whole week. I start to work, but every day begins with instructions about how to conduct ourselves during dangerous situations. I can call it a routine, but it’s not a real routine.