Hotel Becomes Makeshift Home, and a Kind of Limbo

Rina Ackerman says she’s been too busy to cry. Six days after she, her husband and their 11 children were evacuated from the Gaza Strip and moved to a Jerusalem hotel, her hands are full every moment.

Her 12-year-old daughter has a sore throat. Her 4-year-old son, accustomed to climbing out of ground-floor windows at home, is now trying to do the same from their 16th-floor room. And Ackerman has damaged a dental crown by nervously gnashing her teeth.

Then, in a rare moment of quiet, the trim 42-year-old sits wearily on her bed and the blue eyes behind her silver-framed glasses fill with tears. Her family, like many others evicted in the last week from Gaza settlements, never believed the withdrawal would happen, despite many months of warnings. So they made no plans.

Beginning early this year, the government offered settlers the opportunity to sign up for free housing in apartments, houses or mobile homes in Israel. But the Ackermans agreed to none of these alternatives, and the government sent them here to the mid-size Shalom Jerusalem hotel, scattered among four rooms.

Hotel stays that were expected to last a maximum of 10 days are likely to be extended. A new home, though, is not the Ackermans’ only concern. Ackerman’s husband, Eliyahu, left behind his private practice as a psychologist in their settlement. The children aren’t registered for school, and the academic year is supposed to begin in a week.

The strain is showing. “I don’t feel like I’m in control,” said Ackerman, her hoarse voice softening to a whisper so the children won’t hear. “The lowest point of my day is at 5 a.m., when everyone is sleeping and I wake up for no reason. I ask myself, where will we be tomorrow? Or next week?”

The Ackermans have joined about 800 families, almost half the total evacuated from the 21 Gaza settlements, in finding temporary shelter at 25 hotels across Israel at government expense.

With the pullout taking just eight days instead of the anticipated three weeks, officials have had to scramble to double the number of hotel rooms reserved for evacuees. While some evacuees at hotels are waiting to be moved to already arranged temporary housing, many others, like the Ackermans, find themselves entirely at loose ends.

The government and settler leaders have been trading recriminations over the situation evacuated families find themselves in.

Settler leaders accuse the government of inept planning, but some senior officials say the fault lies with rabbis who told observant Jews like the Ackermans that any cooperation with the government would have demonstrated a lack of faith that a miracle would halt the pullout.

Government officials were also vexed when some settler leaders urged evacuees to leave hotels, guesthouses or other temporary accommodations and live in tent camps in the Negev desert. “No one has to live in a tent camp,” Prime Minister Ariel Sharon angrily told his Cabinet.

The Ackermans lived in Neve Dekalim, the largest Gaza settlement, for 16 years. She said many families from the community wanted to relocate as a group. Because of that, she rejected options such as a cabin-sized house in Nitzan, a town 12 miles north of Gaza in southern Israel. In any event, she says, at 270 square feet it was much too small for a family of 13.

Neve Dekalim’s leaders are in talks with the government on other options for the settlers.

Life at the hotel, while cramped and crowded, has had its small blessings.

Volunteers from a local religious organization have descended with donated goods, including toothpaste, hand cream, clothes and diapers. And signs in the lobby offer free medical services, laundry, babysitting, rides to do errands, and children’s activities.

But it’s no place for such a large family. Ackerman likens their four rooms to a refugee camp, strewn with clothes, soda bottles, disposable cups and stuffed animals. There’s a faint odor of spoiling junk food.

She has given up on elements of her usual routine with the children, who range in age from 18 months to young adults. At home, she always got the kids to bed early and up early; now she has milk and cornflakes on hand for when they sleep through the hotel’s breakfast buffet.

Most settler families are receiving between $150,000 and $400,000 in government compensation to help them re-establish themselves elsewhere. Government-dispatched social workers are trying to help families with decision-making.

Ackerman’s family expects little but upheaval, at least in the short term. Still, the Paris-born Ackerman, who speaks Hebrew with a slight French accent despite her 25 years in Israel, said she is optimistic.

“We believe God is taking care of us,” she said. “We believe that we have built a family and community that can’t be destroyed.”