When the devastating surprise attack from the militant group Hamas started to unfold on Oct. 7, Chabad of Great Neck Rabbi Osher Kravitsky’s family was in Israel for an Israeli Defense Force ceremony for their son Menachem, who is his second son to serve in the IDF and enlisted as a lone soldier.

The ceremony was cut short as alerts blared and rockets began to be shot down over the Iron Dome.

Osher’s wife, Sara Kravitsky, director of the temple’s preschool, landed in New York last Thursday night after a week and a half of bomb-filled skies and helping to provide soldiers with home-cooked meals and supplies.

Menachem volunteered for the Israeli Defense Forces after his 18^th birthday and over the summer was accepted into the Golani unit that oversee the Gaza border. His older brother did two tours of duty years prior and Menachem wanted to follow suit.

Menachem was having his induction ceremony by the Western Wall with his family present when alerts began to sound and he was immediately deployed, Osher Kravitsky said.

“Within the hour a rocket went over and the Iron Dome intercepted and everyone there had to go into the tunnels,” said Sara Kravitsky. For hours they waited and during that time news started to emerge of “the kidnappings and the brutality; that’s when it got scary,” she said.

That’s also when both parents found out their son was pulled out of the base. Back in Great Neck Osher Kravitsky was praying his son would be be put in a safe unit, worried he was not yet a seasoned fighter like his older brother, who had served two tours with the IDF.  

Then news emerged of what happened to the initial unit Menachem was assigned to.

“After the holiday on Saturday night, I got the shock of my life,” the rabbi said. “It was bittersweet. The base that my son was supposed to be in, the unit that he was supposed to be in, they were all murdered.”

He went on to say, “the terrorists just walked in, and they weren’t prepared. This happened so abruptly, they shot everyone while they were in their bed, and he was supposed to be there. But as a miracle, he was not.”

All flights were canceled, and Osher Kravitsky was trying to find ways to get his wife and their 9- and 4-year-olds with her back safely, but she wanted to stay a little longer to help others and show her support. She started buying and collecting food and toiletries for the soldiers with other families there while her husband sent money for goods.

He raised about $15,000 for bedding, toiletries, religious items and cigarettes for soldiers. “Home became like a warehouse overnight,” the rabbi said, as religious studies students began helping collect provisions.

“While she was away, I couldn’t sleep,” Osher Kravitsky said, “but at the same time thousands of other people couldn’t sleep either so I was getting calls day and night…It was very difficult being away from them in such a pivotal time.”

“It hurts me to think that my son is going to have to shoot or be shot at,” he said of his son, “It really does. War is war. It leaves scars on both sides.”

At that time, the Lebanon border up north where Sara Kravitsky was staying became an active war zone, so she decided to leave Israel with her children, but leaving was no easy feat.

“We were trying to be very strategic,” Sara Kravitsky said, since videos were circulating of rockets exploding next to planes near Ben Gurion Airport. Together, they traveled three hours to the airport, taking a bulletproof bus at 5:45 a.m. to a high-security train.

“There’s soldiers everywhere, all armed soldiers everywhere, because they’re moving back and forth to bases and things,” Sara Kravitsky said, “so at that point, we knew we were very safe.”

The United States has been sending over charter planes, but no one knew till they got to the airport which country was receiving people from Israel that day. Sara Kravitsky and the two children were sent to Athens for a day, then Amsterdam and finally New York.

Sara Kravitsky said if she had not had her young children with her, she would have stayed, having felt a sense of serving a purpose there. At one point during her stay, she and some girls in the seminary school cooked meals for 150 soldiers and they drove together to a base with food and supplies like underwear, T-shirts and other necessities as bombs were flying overhead.

“The tanks were going off and you’d hear the tanks popping, like non stop, or the jets coming over,” Sara Kravitsky said she encountered while delivering meals. “So there was a lot of action,” but “there was no time to be scared…the unity of everyone coming together helps with the fear.”

Osher Kravitsky said in a message to his son now fighting in Israel “to remain confident and strong. You’re not protecting Israel. You’re protecting Judaism for over 3445 years. Past, present and future.”

He also said there has been a lot of misinformation around the Israel/Palestine conflict, some deliberate. While online he said he saw videos of terrorists going into Holocaust survivors’ houses and shooting them.

“And for what? Just because you’re born Jewish?” the rabbi said. “The irony is some of these people that were murdered were far-left wing people who were against the Jews, but they’re against the military and they were murdered as well.”

The rabbi dismissed the widely held view that the current conflict is based on ideology.

“People say it’s an ideological war. It’s not. It’s a cancer that’s destroying humanity. Anytime you find a system and a systematic approach based on hate and death, then it’s bound to destroy.”