The Nova Festival Victims Memorial site near Kibbutz Re’im, June 2024. Photo courtesy of Natan Galula.
By NATAN GALULA
JNS
Lt. (res.) Yehonatan Skariszewski, 30, knew he could not return to his nine-to-five office job after his experiences on Oct. 7 and its aftermath. Terrorists murdered his father, Rody, early on the day of the invasion after his father ran into a Hamas roadblock in the “Gaza Envelope,” the area of Israel adjacent to the Strip.
Skariszewski drove straight south from Tel Aviv, encountering the havoc wreaked by Hamas-led terrorists in the region, looking to save lives. In the weeks that ensued, he entered the Palestinian enclave as part of the Israel Defense Forces ground incursion, tasked with evacuating wounded troops.
“After doing something of such significance, how can you return to the fluorescent-lit office and scold your sales representatives for not meeting their targets? I couldn’t,” Skariszewski told JNS via Zoom on Tuesday.
Hands-On Labor
An army buddy, Yitzak Sarusi, contacted him several months ago and asked if he would be interested in forming a nonprofit association that trains combat soldiers in specialized hands-on labor such as construction, welding and carpentry.
“Many soldiers who return from the battlefields in Gaza find it difficult to switch back to their regular lives. They need psychological help, they don’t sleep at night, but they are not the type to receive treatment on the sofa. Our association helps put these soldiers back on track through skilled physical work. Working with the hands can be very soothing to the soul,” Skariszewski said.
Sarusi is an independent contractor who deals in construction and welding. Four of his workers were murdered at the Supernova music festival, the open-air music festival that was held in the western Negev on the weekend of Oct. 7. Sarusi’s little brother, a manager in his company, was wounded fighting in Beit Hanoun, in the northeastern Gaza Strip.
Lt. Yehonatan Skariszewski (rear, second from left) and his IDF reserve unit inside the Gaza Strip.
Shortage of Laborers
“I started everything from square one,” Sarusi related when we met at the Supernova festival memorial site near Kibbutz Re’im in late June. “I take youngsters before their military service, lone soldiers [those without close relatives in Israel who can help them], reserve soldiers who are a bit lost, including two soldiers who were wounded, and I train them at my expense.”
Skariszewski stressed that it is in the interest of the state to train Jews in manual labor. “There is a shortage of at least 100,000 laborers right now,” he noted, referring to Israel’s barring for security purposes the entry of Palestinian workers from the Gaza Strip, Judea and Samaria since Oct. 7.
Their association, “For the Home, For Tomorrow,” trains 30 workers and is involved in the effort to rebuild the communities of the Gaza Envelope, devastated by the Oct. 7 attack.
“We just started fund-raising. Most of the association’s expenses are coming out of our own pockets,” Skariszewski said.
Pogrom Seemed Surreal
Raised in Moshav Ohad, near the city of Ofakim and the Gaza Strip, Skariszewski had relocated to Tel Aviv and worked in a sales company. On Oct. 7, he woke up in that metropolis to the blare of air-raid sirens. The first to call him that morning was his mother, from her home in Ohad, saying she did not know where his dad was.
Next, he received calls from his sergeants, Andrei Gerasimuk and Yakir Nizozi, who alerted him that something was happening in the south.
“Two minutes later I get another call from Daniel Sharabi, a friend of mine. I hear terrible shouting in the background. ‘I’m at [the Supernova festival] near your home town,’ he told me, ‘and terrorists are murdering us.’ I thought he was on drugs.
“He started a video call and sent me his location. Twenty minutes later Andrei and Nizozi arrived at my home and we raced down south,” Skariszewski recalled.
Focus On The Living
“Meanwhile, I was on the line with Sharabi, instructing him on how to treat the wounded, how to prepare a defensive line, how to use the spare ammo that they had. He and a few others found an abandoned [IDF] tank and remained near it. I kept telling him that a chopper was on its way, to prevent him from breaking down mentally,” Skariszewski said.
They reached Kibbutz Re’im, adjacent to the music festival, around 11 a.m. and Skariszewski observed large numbers of terrorists. That is when he knew his father was not alive. Somehow, he managed to shake that thought off. “I had to focus on those who were still alive,” he said.Two guns
“The three of us had only two guns,” he continued. “Luckily, an IDF unit had just arrived and together we took out a heavily armed terrorist squad. We took their Kalashnikov rifles and split from the military unit, which continued into Re’im. We tried to enter the festival grounds, but couldn’t. There were too many terrorists. I told Andrei we have to break in with his vehicle. Bullets whizzed around us but somehow we managed to reach the tank. We found about 30 to 40 frightened civilians.”
Helping The Wounded
Skariszewski’s first mission was to evacuate the wounded.
“Andrei had some Ikea shelves in his car, which we turned into a stretcher. Four times Andrei evacuated injured people unscathed. I told him he needs to repent and become religious. He said, ‘No problem, but I’m not Jewish.’ More and more festival-goers came to our location until we amassed more than 100 attendees. We became the ‘safe compound’ in the Nova festival, with my Kalashnikovs.”
The hardest part, he continued, was to decide whom to save.
“If I left the compound in an attempt to save stranded individuals, I would risk the lives of a hundred people. There were also grown men having panic attacks. I had to raise my voice and command the situation even though I was just a civilian like them,” he said.
Finding Dad
Eventually, military personnel and civilians in vehicles arrived and everyone was evacuated. When the sun began setting, Skariszewski gathered Gerasimuk and Nizozi and drove south to his family on Route 232, which runs along the Israeli communities near the Gaza border.
“The entire area was a war zone,” Skariszewski recalled. “Smoke billowed on the road and we could barely see a few feet ahead. Fields were burned—a tank was parked on the road, burned, a man was carrying bodies and covering them, seemingly senseless, from the side of the road—it was unreal. A 10-minute drive took us 30 minutes.
“I got home [to the moshav] and found my mother and sister hiding in a closet. My father was not there. We traced his car with a GPS tracking app and drove to a junction near Ohad. Andrei, Nizozi and I started combing the area and then I saw the car; it was hanging on top of a ditch. I found him inside, lifeless. What do I do—leave him there? Who do I call? There are a thousand bodies outside. I closed his eyelids and returned to my mother and sister to break the news.”
Relativity
I met Skariszewski and Sarusi at the Nova Festival Victims Memorial, situated in the Re’im parking lot near the kibbutz where the music festival took place. The site displays photos of the 364 attendees murdered and 40 more hostages on posts. Trees newly planted by the victims’ families could be seen about 100 feet away. The scope of the massacre was quietly concretized under the hot sun of June.
“My loss is small,” Skariszewski said. “My father was 57 years old, but he had children, he lived life. A family friend who paid his respects at my father’s funeral buried two of his sons and a soon-to-be daughter-in-law. Who am I to complain? The cemetery near Ohad used to bury one grandmother every once and a while. Now? We had to bury our father in 15 minutes because there were so many burials.”
Skariszewski spoke fluently and courageously, but his eyes revealed a man who did not sleep well.
Entering The Strip
Entering the Gaza Strip was not easy, he related, as he had a broken family to take care of, but he felt that he needed to.
“A reserve mobility unit was missing a commander and for me it was the perfect fit. Their mission was to evacuate wounded soldiers, so while our actions were dangerous, we were not the first line into combat,” Skariszewski said.
“The unit’s morale was pretty low. I brought my soldiers from the reserves with me [veterans of the Givati Infantry Brigade who volunteered] and we raised the spirits of everyone. We were in [Gaza] for over two months with our Hummers. Other than four soldiers who died on the spot, everyone we evacuated survived.”
Skariszewski described the Gaza Strip as a dystopian terrorist society.
“We saw ammunition everywhere: rifles, bullets, explosive belts, Iran-made grenades, everything. There were pits of tunnels in kindergartens; we found Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ in Arabic in every other house; every home had a flag of either Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad or Fatah; we saw photos of [Yasser] Arafat and [Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed] Yassin on their walls. Even in education they propagandized. Their math books read things like, ‘If you kill 4 Jews plus 3 Jews, how many Jews have you killed?’ For children—it’s insane.”
Now Skariszewski lives with his mother in Ohad and is trying to get used to civilian life. He returned to working at his former sales company, but in a “calmer” role, he noted. In his spare time, he is helping Sarusi grow their For the Home, For Tomorrow association and delivers lectures about his experiences to anyone who is interested.
“This is my form of therapy. I can’t talk about this [with a therapist], but to ret
