For more than eight months, Kibbutz HaGoshrim residents Urit and Zeev Gelber have had their life squeezed into a single room at a hotel overlooking the Kinneret.

Along with over 100 members of their kibbutz near the Lebanon border, the couple was relocated last October to the Ramot Resort Hotel in the southern Golan Heights, about an hour south of HaGoshrim, when Hezbollah began attacking northern Israel the day after Hamas’s October 7 massacre in the South. Every morning, the Gelbers eat breakfast in the hotel dining room with their fellow refugees, including evacuees from the northern Israeli city of Kiryat Shmona, and they see them again at dinner and sometimes lunch.

Retirees like the Gelbers often spend time with their fellow pensioners during the day, too. The group has organized a morning exercise class and extracurricular activities like papercutting. Speakers come to the hotel to give lectures and classes, and the seniors travel together on occasional day trips to area attractions. A hotel bomb shelter serves as a makeshift rec room. In the afternoons, many care for young grandchildren also living at the hotel.

Children roam the resort unhindered, leaving bicycles scattered about and spending lazy afternoons in the large outdoor pool with fantastic views of the lake. In the mornings, the younger kids occupy conference rooms that have been repurposed into a kindergarten and day care.

After dinner, the older folks often hold court in a corner of the lobby, sitting in a circle of chairs and munching on nuts and cookies, discussing the war and their kids, and speculating over when they’ll be able to return home. They call themselves “The Parliament,” and they represent the kibbutz in exile whenever issues arise with hotel management.

For 70-year-old Urit Gelber, a lifelong kibbutz resident, the communal element of life at the hotel during this wartime displacement recalls something from many decades ago— kibbutz life before privatization.

“The kibbutz community returned to itself,” Gelber said. “This life here reminds us of things from the past. We meet in the dining room for all three meals. We sit and laugh together. We make joint decisions and digest our problems together. We talk. Most important of all, we gossip. The camaraderie is therapeutic.”

It’s a peculiar side effect of the displacement of some 60,000 Israelis from northern Israel: some people, especially seniors, are benefiting, even thriving in ways they weren’t at home. They don’t have to cook for themselves. Communal activities keep them occupied during the day, and they’re not isolated.

In many ways, it’s like an assisted-living facility—and how the kibbutz used to be.

“We gather and people ask after one another, even people you didn’t necessarily meet before or talk to,” said Gad Hillel Rosenblum, 82. “You want to support others and be supported.”

Only a fraction of HaGoshrim’s 1,360 members live at the Ramot hotel. Approximately 10 percent are in their kibbutz homes, while others either reside at one of the four other hotels hosting large numbers of HaGoshrim evacuees, all near the Kinneret, or have moved into rental apartments. In fact, most of Israel’s internal refugees have taken up residence in rentals rather than crowd into the hotels.

That’s partly because of the uncertainty of when they’ll be able to go home, which many said is the most difficult element of their displacement. Hezbollah continues to attack northern Israel with rockets, drones and antitank missiles. Even if the barrages were to cease, residents are worried about the omnipresent threat of an October 7-style attack in the North.

The Ramot hotel, where there haven’t been any air raid sirens for the entire duration of this war, has its challenges, too—notably, crowding and lack of privacy.

“You see that families here have problems unrelated to the war; even if you don’t want others to see— people see and people hear,” Gelber said. “Everything is much more out in the open. People don’t have anywhere to go. You’re not getting along with your wife or husband, where will you run to?”

The setting at the resort is bucolic but isolated. The hotel is situated amid agricultural fields on the windy road to the tiny town of Ramot. The well-manicured 10-acre property has 129 rooms spread out among a series of interconnected buildings and a few freestanding wood cabins.

It’s a big change from the private homes the evacuees owned in HaGoshrim’s sprawling grounds about three miles from Kiryat Shmona, a large town with a population of 25,000.

Ironically, HaGoshrim has its own hotel, which is one of the kibbutz’s single-biggest sources of income; it has been shuttered since October 8.

One retiree who insisted on anonymity said she lived at the Ramot hotel for two months but moved back home despite the dangers because she couldn’t take it anymore. She didn’t want to revert to the communal kibbutz of old, or crowd together with her husband into a single room with a single bathroom.

A few key factors have enabled the current situation. The Israeli government is footing the bill for the evacuees, including accommodations and three meals per day. The refugees from northern Israel do not bear the same October 7 trauma as those from southern Israel, many of whom saw their homes destroyed and family members or friends murdered, kidnapped or assaulted during the Hamas attack.

And HaGoshrim residents relocated collectively, a decision that has kept those opting for hotels together in large groups at a few specific locations.

When privatization arrived at the kibbutz two generations ago, many of the unique elements of communal life began falling away. First, in the early 1980s, children stopped sleeping in group homes, where kids had been sent to live as soon as they were weaned. Then, in the mid-1990s, the dining hall reduced operations, eventually closing in 2000, the year the kibbutz was formally privatized.

Seventy-two-year-old Haya Lahav, who has lived on HaGoshrim since age 3, remembers the special sense of togetherness that faded once kibbutz members began eating their meals apart. At the hotel in Ramot, she said, that togetherness has re-emerged.

“We’ve returned to the communal dining room, to sitting together, to drinking coffee together—things we hadn’t done in years,” she said.

Lahav’s husband stayed behind in the kibbutz, first to serve as a reservist in the kibbutz security squad and later to stay close to his job driving a truck for a nearby fish farm. He visits the hotel on weekends, and Lahav is surrounded by friends the rest of the time. When the communality gets to be too much, she retreats to her hotel room. “I do crafts, I watch TV,” Lahav said. “Everyone busies themselves with something.”

Such close-quarter living is particularly challenging for families, where parents and kids may be four to a room. Children assigned to new or temporary schools may attend only intermittently due to refugee fatigue, and adults must manage jobs alongside all the other challenges of displacement.

At the Ramot hotel, the number of evacuees fell from a high of 190 to 127 by mid-spring, leaving most of the resort’s rooms open to paying guests.

Haim Yitzhak is among the younger HaGoshrim exiles who have stayed, along with his wife and three children, ages 5, 7 and 12. He said there are advantages to the hotel.

“If I were in an apartment, who would my kids play with?” Yitzhak said. “They’d be stuck inside. They wouldn’t have friends.”

Relatively speaking, Yitzhak said, he’s fortunate. He has a roof over his head, he’s not going hungry and he can do his high-tech job remotely from his hotel room—albeit with frequent interruptions from his kids. While uncertainty about the future is frustrating, he said, many families in Israel are much worse off, starting with those whose loved ones are stuck in Gaza. His wife, Dana Yitzhak, is having a harder time.

“I’m going crazy, but I stay because the kids have acclimated to their frameworks here,” she said, later adding: “I’ve gotten to know the kibbutz community better here. Now I know who’s who. The kibbutz takes care of us.”

Ursula Taquni is one of the seniors helping to care for her grandchildren in the afternoons. Her daughter is a police officer and her son-in-law works in construction. A native of Switzerland who moved to HaGoshrim 35 years ago, Taquni sometimes struggles with finding alone time.

“It’s a little hard, with just a room in the hotel,” Taquni said. “Sometimes in the afternoons, I go to my room to watch a movie in German that I like. Or I go for a walk on the hotel grounds.”

Stacey Avni is among the small number of evacuees at the hotel from another kibbutz. Maayan Baruch is located across the road from HaGoshrim and only about 400 yards from the Lebanon border.

“I’ve found a really wonderful community here,” the 68-year-old said of the Ramot Resort Hotel. “We joke about how I’m a moment away from becoming a member of Kibbutz HaGoshrim. It’s fun.”

In her next breath, Avni corrected herself. We’re not suffering, she said, but her hotel room is as cluttered as a storage shed. She doesn’t like living on the government’s dime with no income from the three-room bed and breakfast she ran back home, and her grandchildren are far away.

“It’s not fun,” Avni said. “We’re always talking about when we’re going to go home.”

A few of the hotel residents venture back home occasionally to fetch clothes, check on their houses or even visit for the weekend. But between Hezbollah’s attacks, a dearth of safe rooms and the shuttering of essential area services such as schools, returning permanently doesn’t seem feasible right now.

Yaela Gluzeshten said she feels safer at the hotel than she would at her kibbutz home, which is not outfitted with a reinforced safe room. She has been displaced for so long that she had trouble the other day remembering what the coffee table in her living room looks like. Before the war, she would host her three children and their kids every Friday night for Shabbat dinner, but she said she doesn’t miss all the cooking.

“The food here is simply delicious,” exclaimed her husband, Giora, at dinner, “and the hotel’s treatment of us is even better.”

Hotel manager Rinat Olami Shriki said she tries to balance the evacuees’ needs with those of vacationing guests paying full price. However, things don’t always go smoothly.

“We’ve never dealt with people living here on a long-term basis; it’s a big challenge for management and staff,” she said. “People live here, and it turns into their home, but it’s not really their house. We’re a hotel and we’re supposed to keep operating as a hotel.”

The reality of kids’ bikes and scooters strewn about is typical for a kibbutz but irritating to hotel management. Strollers are parked in hallways, washing machines have been placed in available nooks and crannies, and some evacuees complain about dining needs. They also grumble that when family or friends visit, they must pay for meals, and their guests can’t spend the night.

For the most part, conflict between evacuees and the hotel is managed by The Parliament, with whom Shriki is in constant conversation. They negotiate over everything from meal menus to the use of common rooms.

Overall, Shriki said, she’s sympathetic to the evacuees’ situation and views the hotel’s role hosting them as a national duty. The hotel is compensated by the government at a rate of about $135 per day per adult evacuee and half that amount per child.

“We’re like family now, really,” said Salem Gamal, the hotel’s Israeli Arab dining manager. “The kids call me by name. We live together with these people day and night, 24 hours a day.”

Daniel Tshuva is among the few older evacuees who came to the hotel from Kiryat Shmona rather than a kibbutz. At first there was a divide between city dwellers such as himself and kibbutzniks, he said, but after more than half a year together, they feel like family.

“If they’re depressed, I help them. If I’m depressed, they help me,” Tshuva said.

The hotel has fostered its own kind of kibbutz, he said: kibbutz galuyot, using the  Hebrew term for the ingathering of the exiles.

“We’re all Am Yisrael,” he said. “This is our kibbutz galuyot.” 

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Uriel Heilman is a journalist in Israel. He works for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and has written about Israel’s current war for the Los Angeles Times, Salon and USA Today.