One day not long ago, a woman from Ashkelon called me, asking for tefillin for her husband. She told me the following amazing story:
She and her husband, both 30-year-old new immigrants from Russia, never had much connection with Judaism. Last summer, 2023, they planned to move to their new home in Kibbutz Nir Oz, about two miles east of the Gaza border. However, following the birth of their youngest child, they decided to postpone the move to the holiday period, and in fact took advantage of those vacation days to gradually move their belongings to Nir Oz. On Friday, the eve of the Sabbath and Simchat Torah, they were busy in their new home, making final arrangements and planning to remain there for the holiday – but then the woman said to her husband that because it was late and the house wasn’t yet ready, she would rather spend the night in Ashkelon and not in Nir Oz. So they all packed up and returned to Ashkelon – waking up in the morning to the sounds of rocket sirens. When they heard how many of their soon-to-be neighbors (110…) had been kidnapped and/or murdered from the exact place they had just been in some hours earlier, they grasped the enormity of the miracle they had just undergone.

She continued to recount that Divine Providence still did not leave them over the coming days, for when her husband was drafted to battle in Gaza, he was saved a number of times during clashes with Hamas terrorists. All these events, she said, caused them to come to the realization that G-d was truly watching over them – and this led them to decide to connect more to their roots and Jewish identity. She began to light Sabbath candles, and he started wearing tefillin each day. At first he borrowed a pair from a fellow soldier, but now, she said, he needs his own… And so we provided him with a set of high-standard kosher tefillin, which he now wears every day.