‘Every day, I move from grief to the life I’m trying to build. It’s emotional torture’

If Chen Goldstein-Almog and her family were abandoned once on October 7, she says what is happening now feels like abandonment all over again. For the past two and a half years, Goldstein-Almog and her three surviving children, Agam, Gal and Tal, have lived in temporary housing at Kibbutz Shefayim, north of Tel Aviv. They arrived there after returning from 51 days in Hamas captivity and have slowly begun rebuilding a life shattered in Kibbutz Kfar Aza.

Recently, the family was informed that the temporary homes in Shefayim are due to be dismantled in July 2027. They have been told they can eventually return to a rebuilt Kfar Aza, with Kibbutz Ruhama serving as an interim option if necessary. But Goldstein-Almog says she neither wants nor feels able to return to the place where Hamas terrorists murdered her husband, Nadav Goldstein, 48, and their eldest daughter, Yam Goldstein-Almog, 20, on October 7, 2023.

Kfar Aza is where Yam once walked the paths laughing with friends and where Nadav ran through the surrounding fields. It is also where the family they had built together was destroyed. After captivity, bereavement and repeated moves, Goldstein-Almog says she and her children have finally begun to regain a measure of stability in Shefayim. Now she finds herself fighting simply to remain there. “When we came back, we were moved around Israel almost the way we had been moved around Gaza,” she says.

“We returned in November 2023 and spent two and a half months in a hotel in Tel Aviv, then two and a half months at the hotel in Shefayim, and from there we moved into the temporary housing. This is where we started rebuilding our lives. “The children found their place socially. It took time, but now they feel they can leave the house, ride their bikes around the kibbutz and feel safe. They receive treatment and support through their schools here.

We had finally begun to find our footing. You can’t just say, ‘OK, time to move again.’ In July 2027, these temporary homes are going to be removed, and nobody ever asked me where I want to live or where I think my family can recover. Nobody seems to understand how important stability is for my children.” Shefayim itself cannot simply allocate the family a plot of land, she says. There are already kibbutz families waiting for available building lots, while opposition lawmaker Chili Tropper tried to help her but was unable to find a solution.

“They keep sending me from one government office to another,” Goldstein-Almog says. “Do I have contacts in the government? Has anyone from the government come here to see us? We’re being passed from one authority to another, and no one wants to take responsibility.” “The state said it would make land available for evacuees, but not in Shefayim because the land here is so expensive. I simply don’t feel that what happens to us matters to anyone.

Does anyone understand what it was like to celebrate Rosh Hashanah this year, sitting around the table without Nadav and Yam? At the very least, give me some certainty for the next six years, until Tal, my youngest, who is almost 12, finishes school. Instead of being able to focus on our recovery and rebuilding our lives, this is what I have to spend my energy on.” ‘I’m not going back to Kfar Aza’ Kfar Aza is now undergoing extensive reconstruction.

Homes destroyed or burned on October 7 are being demolished and rebuilt, and many members of the community are preparing to return. Goldstein-Almog made her decision long ago. After October 7, much of the Kfar Aza community was initially evacuated to Shefayim before moving into temporary housing at Kibbutz Ruhama. “When that move happened, I decided there was no point in going to Ruhama because I already knew I wasn’t going back to Kfar Aza,” she says.

Other families have also chosen not to return. Some have rented or bought homes elsewhere and gradually separated from the community. Nadav’s parents and sister plan to go back Goldstein-Almog’s parents do not. For her, that would once have been almost unimaginable. “We were the family that always stayed put,” she says. “Even during periods of fighting, we never left the Gaza border area. I always felt that even when there was danger, home was my anchor.

That was where I could breathe. I held on to that for 20 years. But I can’t anymore.” The family had built its dream home in Kfar Aza only four years before October 7. For now, Goldstein-Almog plans to rent it out once the repairs are complete. The same interior designer who helped them create the house originally is overseeing the renovation. “This time I told her to take care of everything,” Goldstein-Almog says. “I just can’t be involved.”

She has visited Kfar Aza many times since returning from Gaza, and every visit hurts. “Right now, Kfar Aza is one huge construction site. It’s going to be beautiful,” she says. “The question is whether it’s going to be safe. My captors told me, ‘We’ll come again.’ I told them, ‘Next time, just knock on the door and we’ll open it. You don’t need to blow it up.’ “I’ve been back to the kibbutz many times, and every time it hurts. It doesn’t feel like home anymore.

It represents a life that will never come back and everything that was done to us. And there is still one question nobody has answered: How did the terrorists get all the way to us without being stopped? This is not an easy decision for me. Nadav was born and raised there. But now I have to do what is right for my family.” Her children want to stay in Shefayim as well. Gal, now 14, says that if remaining there is impossible, he would rather return to Kfar Aza.

Both he and Tal still keep in touch with friends from their old home. At the family’s most recent memorial gathering during Sukkot, Gal walked around Kfar Aza with friends, watched the reconstruction work and collected spent shell casings, including some from the family home. He did not enter the cemetery. Tal chose instead to attend a camp run by an organization supporting bereaved widows and orphans. “They’ll have plenty of years ahead of them to deal with the cemetery,” their mother says.

Although she knew she would not return to live in Kfar Aza, Goldstein-Almog agreed to have Nadav and Yam reburied there. “I knew I wanted to respect Nadav’s parents,” she says. “They visit their graves every week.” A home that was a dream Goldstein-Almog, 52, is now publishing a memoir, Suddenly So Alone, through Yedioth Books. The last photograph Yam took before she was shot appears on the back cover: the family’s front door, blown off its hinges, leaning to one side as the green landscape of Kfar Aza is visible beyond it.

Paradise turned into horror. But Goldstein-Almog was determined that the book would not reduce her family to what happened to them on October 7. She devotes much of it to the happy, noisy life they shared before the massacre. She and Agam, who now serves in the IDF, have spoken publicly about the murder of Nadav and Yam, the family’s abduction and their captivity in Gaza, but Goldstein-Almog also wants people to know who Nadav and Yam were before they became victims.

“They are not only what was done to them,” she says. Chen and Nadav were childhood sweethearts. She was born and raised in Kibbutz Gevim but first met Nadav in first grade at the regional Sha’ar HaNegev school. They became a couple at 15, after Chen took the initiative. “We were friends, and I said to Nadav, ‘People keep asking whether we’re together. What should I tell them?’” she recalls. They would sometimes break up over the summer after serious teenage conversations about where the relationship was going, only to get back together.

“It was a love that just kept growing.” Goldstein-Almog served in the IDF as a physical fitness instructor, while Nadav became a fitness instructor with the elite Sayeret Matkal unit. After she completed her degree in social work, they settled in Kfar Aza. Nadav studied economics and eventually became vice president for business development and innovation at Kafrit, the kibbutz-based company that manufactures raw materials for the plastics industry.

After Tal, their youngest child, was born, Chen left social work to focus on raising the family. “We had the kind of home you dream about,” she says. “Every child we had brought Nadav and me even closer. I was his person. The way he looked at me, the way he still courted me after all those years. I loved him deeply. I admired him. He was smart and completely self-taught. He was always ordering books and teaching himself something new, but he was incredibly modest.

He used to say, ‘There’s so much I don’t know.’” Their extended families were woven into everyday life. After Chen moved to Kfar Aza, her parents followed. Her children grew up alongside the four children of Nadav’s sister almost like siblings, with both sets of grandparents nearby. “We had this whole extended family around us,” she says. “You felt the strength of it. It was wonderful. Everyone survived, by the way. Except us.” Residents of the communities near Gaza used to describe life there as “95% paradise and 5% hell.”

The Goldstein-Almogs understood exactly what that meant. During the 2014 Gaza war, Nadav insisted that they stay. “He said you don’t abandon your home,” Goldstein-Almog recalls. She was pregnant with Tal at the time. The kibbutz nurse, who would herself be murdered on October 7, asked how she could remain there while pregnant, and Chen’s parents also tried to persuade her to leave. “Whenever there was an escalation, I hated the fact that we lived so close to Gaza,” she says.

“But just thinking about moving away made me feel sick. Other families from the kibbutz spent weeks at a boarding school in Afula, sleeping on metal beds. At home, I felt healthiest. I felt most normal.” When rocket sirens sounded, residents of Kfar Aza had only about 15 seconds to reach a reinforced safe room. The boys became accustomed to spending hours there, and Nadav even ordered them a basketball hoop that could be attached to a cabinet so they could play inside.

Still, years of rocket fire gradually eroded the family’s sense of security. “We were always wondering how they would surprise us next time,” she says. “But terrorists coming into the kibbutz? That was never even a scenario in our heads. Not even one terrorist. We worried about rockets.” From the large kitchen window, Goldstein-Almog could see a beautiful avenue of trees and, beyond it, Gaza. “That view used to make my heart expand,” she says.

The trees had partly been planted to block the view from the other side. “Now we know they were watching us with binoculars and gathering intelligence.” Yam, her mother says, was full of life, almost effervescent. “She had this incredible energy,” Goldstein-Almog says. “She was warm, affectionate, always hugging and kissing everyone.” Yam served as a squad commander at the IDF’s Bahad 7 communications training base and had been identified as a candidate for officer training, but chose not to pursue it.

Her boyfriend had already finished his military service, and she was counting down the days until her own discharge. She planned to work in the kibbutz kindergarten and then travel with him. Three months before October 7, the family had faced what seemed at the time like the worst thing that could happen to them. Nadav, a dedicated endurance athlete, was critically injured when a truck struck him while he was cycling near the Beit HaGadi junction on July 21.

He spent nine days in intensive care, underwent surgery to stabilize his spine and suffered fractures to his pelvis and