Eli Levy expected Simchat Torah to be a day of prayer, celebration and candy for his children. Instead, he found himself facing hundreds of terrorists with only a handgun and 50 bullets.

By Hezy Laing

On the morning of Simchat Torah, Eli Levy, a Chabad emissary in the Gaza envelope, found himself facing hundreds of terrorists with only a handgun.

“I’m in a situation with a tallit, a helmet and a bulletproof vest,” he recalls.

Before going out to fight, he blessed his children and told them, “I want to give you a last priestly blessing.”

From there, he went into 17 hours of fighting.

Levy recounted the experience in an interview with Ido Tauber of Channel 14.

On the morning of Simchat Torah, at 6:29 a.m., a red alert sounded in the Levy family home, located only seven kilometers from the border fence.

Levy, a Chabad emissary in the communities surrounding the Gaza Strip, immediately ran with his children to the safe room.

“We have a gummy bear package,” he recalls.

“Usually, when there are missiles sirens, I take out gummies for the children, and we do some kind of dance.”

But this time, everything was different.

Shortly after leaving the safe room, Levy began hearing gunfire.

“I can actually hear gunshots. I hear ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta, I hear 0.5 shots, shots from helicopters. I know that there are no training sessions on Saturday.”

He looked up at the sky and saw it filled with smoke.

Then the community’s chief security officer approached him and said, “Eli, something big is happening.”

He went outside and got into a car, where he soon saw terrorists on the road.

“At first, I didn’t know they were terrorists,” he says.

He saw vans racing toward Moshav Yakhini and Sderot and quickly realized that something much larger was happening.

At the same time, civilians fleeing the Nova music festival began arriving in the area.

“Guys from Nova fled to us, to the residents,” he recalls.

His wife, Hodaya, a clinical social worker, was also there.

Levy says he immediately told her, “Hodaya, something big is happening.”

The family members and local defenders then began confronting the terrorists with whatever weapons they had available.

“We loaded up with everything we had at home, that’s how we met them,” he says.

Levy had only a pistol and approximately 50 bullets.

“We didn’t have rifles. We were only eight fighters.”

He describes the enormous force they were facing.

“There are 400 terrorists on the road. To put it bluntly, I think there were 250 dead on our road, too.”

At that point, Levy understood that he was entering an event whose outcome he could not predict.

“I understand that this is an event that I don’t know how it will end.”

He returned to the house and told his wife to flee.

Before leaving, he took three things with him: a tallit, a helmet and a bulletproof vest.

His daughter Chaya Sarah, who was nearby, grabbed his leg.

“Dad, aren’t you a hero anymore?” she asked.

Levy explains that she had seen her father under pressure, something she was not accustomed to seeing.

“She saw that Dad was under pressure. I’m used to seeing a father with strength, a father who fights.”

He answered her, “God is the hero.”

Before heading into battle, Levi also turned to a large portrait of the Lubavitcher Rebbe hanging in the house.

“I said to the Rebbe: ‘I have been your emissary here for nine years. I have one final request: if I survive, I want to come visit you one more time.'”

He later recounts how that request took on special significance for him: “And indeed, two months later, I traveled to Brooklyn, New York, with my son; we lay on the floor and wept, and I said: ‘You made a promise, and You kept it.'”

Then began the combat phase, which lasted—by his account—17 hours.

“So, for 17 hours, we were actually fighting, facing a situation where it wasn’t at all clear what was going to happen.”

Tauber, noting that Levi had emerged from the event physically unharmed, turned the conversation to his daughter, Chaya Sarah, who had experienced the events up close that morning.

At first, Chaya Sarah finds it difficult to speak about what she went through.

When Tauber asks if she remembers anything from that day, she replies: “We were at a friend’s house.”

She was sitting next to her father when a loud boom was heard.

“We all thought terrorists were infiltrating, and then I peeked out the window and saw clouds of smoke.”

She recounts running toward her father as further explosions rang out.

“All sorts of things were exploding there, and then we went into the safe room,” she recounts.

After a few minutes, she says, they left the safe room and tried to flee the area.

“We sort of ran through the fields near the house—we ran, moved along, and then sprinted to another safe room.”

She noted that several friends were with them as well.

When Tauber asks what she was thinking and feeling at the time, Chaya Sarah struggles to put those sensations into words.

“I felt something I had never felt before. Something strange.”