‘You can still smell death': Aventura rabbi visits hard-hit kibbutz one month after Hamas attacks

For Israelis who depend on their intelligence network, surveillance technology, and superior military, the events of Oct. 7 are simply incomprehensible, even one month later.

Hamas violated a cease-fire and sent about 2,000 terrorists surging across the border from Gaza into Israel. They murdered, pillaged, and kidnapped their way through 22 communities along with a crowded dance festival that was happening in the desert. Before the army could respond, Israel said Hamas slaughtered about 1,400 people, mostly unarmed civilians, in the most barbaric ways, including burning people alive.

Guido Cohen — a rabbi from the Aventura Turnberry Jewish Center — is in Israel right now, joining a group of rabbis who traveled there to show support and to bear witness. They met with families of the 240 hostages Hamas is holding in Gaza, including the mother of a young woman whose abduction was captured in a viral video.

“This mother saw that on TV, how her daughter was taken by the terrorists of Hamas, into the Gaza Strip, we talked to her, it’s powerful because I could relate, she’s the mother of a teenager just like me,” Cohen said. “Very, very painful, impossible not to relate to her pain, not to cry, not to feel how devastated they are and we are.”

In Washington on Tuesday, another mother of a hostage told her story to members of Congress, describing how her son, Guy Lieber, called her from the Supernova Dance Festival, saying he had been shot in the arm.

“He was trying to say his last words, he actually said, I want to say my last words, we’re not going to survive it, nobody survived it, everybody is killed,” Doris Lieber said.

Rabbi Cohen’s group went to one of the hardest-hit communities, the kibbutz Kfar Aza, where house after house was ransacked, some set on fire, some hit with grenades and RPG shells. The death toll here was 58 people, including some children and babies, and some of the residents were kidnapped. The group was escorted by a police spokesman who was one of the first to arrive at the scene. He told the group he is constantly being asked by the foreign news media to prove that atrocities actually occurred.

“People question me and asked, are you sure the women were raped? Well, when I walked into these houses, and a woman was naked, and her hands and legs were tied with zip ties, and there’s blood everywhere and you can’t make out her face, even, does it really matter if she was raped or not?” the officer said.

I asked Rabbi Cohen in a Zoom interview what it was like to see the scene of carnage.

“So Ari, that was this morning, and let me tell you something: I been to Auschwitz six times and I never saw something more devastating than visiting Auschwitz until this morning, that’s how bad it was,” Cohen replied. “And it’s not only what I saw, and I’m sorry to be so explicit, it’s what I smelled, you can still smell death in Kfar Aza.”

Cohen said the victims at Kfar Aza were mostly peace activists who supported a Palestinian state. After what he’s seen, Cohen thinks the war is not between Israel and the Palestinians, but rather between humanity and terrorist monsters.

“I’m a religious person, I couldn’t stop but thinking of the line in Psalm 23 which speaks of the valley of the shadow of death, that’s the place where I went today, I don’t think I ever understood that line until I visited Kfar Aza,” Cohen said.

He went on to say after a month in captivity, the world should be demanding that Hamas release the hostages instead of calling for a cease-fire.

Like most Jewish Americans, Cohen is profoundly disturbed by the frightening surge in antisemitism, but he’s also heartened that the first text messages he received after the Hamas attacks were from a Catholic priest and an African American pastor offering their support.