Other than the Celebrate Israel Walk & Festival each year, there is perhaps no other JEWISHcolorado event that brings Colorado closer to Israel than Yom HaZikaron, the Day of Remembrance for fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism.
This year, JEWISHcolorado marks Yom HaZikaron on April 29 at the Wolf Theater in Staenberg-Loup Jewish Community Center. To reinforce the connection between communities in Colorado and Israel, JEWISHcolorado has invited Ron Segal, who lives in our partner region of Ramat HaNegev, to speak at Yom HaZikaron. Segal brings the story of a unique double loss as a result of the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7th.
Ron Segal grew up in Moshav Netiv Ha’esra, very close to the border with the Gaza Strip, a little over a mile from Gaza City. When rocket attacks increased in the early 2020s, Segal and his siblings tried to talk their parents into adding a safe room to their home in Netiv HaAsara. But their parents did not want one, even though their moshav was the closest community to the Gaza Strip in Israel.
Ron Segal and his mother, Havik
His mother Havik would say that she was “more afraid of an attack coming from tunnels underground than from rockets overhead.”
But mainly, the Segals resisted building a safe room because they did not live in fear. After their long history in the moshav, they thought the chances that something would happen to them were low.
They were one of the original families that, in 1982, had moved the Israeli settlement of Netiv HaAsara from the Sinai Peninsula to the Gaza Envelope after the Camp David Accords. Segal was two years old at the time. He relishes telling the story of the home his parents built when they moved. In a hurry to establish the community, they hired an Israeli company that dealt in Swedish wood houses. The builders came from Sweden and within a matter of months, they had created what Segal describes as “a large wood house set in a white dune.”
The “Swedish” house
Segal, who is the youngest of five children, remembers his early years as idyllic, a time when there was not even a high fence separating Israel from the Gaza Strip.
“We would go shopping in Gaza, or to the market or the mechanic, or to restaurants,” he recalls. “We would stay there, and people would stay with us. There was peace with no peace agreement.”
Segal left home to attend an environmental high school in Midreshet Ben-Gurion. He served 3 years in the IDF, traveled for several years, and 13 years ago settled in a small community in Ramat HaNegev, where he is a neighbor of JEWISHcolorado’s former Shaliach Itai Divinsky.
By April of 2020, Segal’s father had died, and his 78-year-old mother Havik was living alone in the big Swedish house. In June 2023, months before October 7, her children asked her to consider moving to be closer to them for her own safety.
“She agreed to do it, which really surprised us,” Segal says. “It was a big change at that age, but she gave us the green light to find a place for her to live.”
The family was still looking for a new home for Havik on October 7th. They called her that morning and told her to run to the community safe room in the moshav until they could come to get her.
Yiftach Gorni
At 9:15 a.m. on October 7th, Segal got a call from a good friend and colleague, Yiftach Gorni. Gorni was in the reserves, and he was heading toward Gaza to try to defend the Gaza Envelope. Less than three hours later, Segal’s phone rang again, and he saw it was an Orthodox friend calling on Shabbat, so he knew the call was important.
“He told me that Yiftach had been killed in a battle with terrorists in the Gaza Envelope near Kerem Shalom,” Segal says. “That was my first meeting with death on this long day.”
Segal jumped into a car, and by 1:00, he had raced to Moshav Be’er Milka where he works as CEO of the agricultural community. His phone rang again. This time, it was his sister calling with the news that his mother had been killed. Three Hamas terrorists used paragliders to enter and attack the community of Netiv HaAsara. They killed 17 people. Havik Segal had been shot nine times.
As Segal drove back from Moshav Be’er Milka to his home, with news of two very personal deaths in just a matter of hours weighing on his mind, he ran out of diesel fuel and found himself stranded in the desert in a “state of shock.”
“I felt like I was on a psychological bridge between my old life and my new life,” he says. “In my old life, I believed that people who lead a normal lifestyle—with a good job, family, children—would have no reason to kill and destroy. In my new life, I encountered pure evil. I couldn’t imagine the hatred that these terrorists have to kill babies and people and just destroy everything.”
At Yom HaZikaron, you can hear how Ron Segal has come to terms with life after October 7th. Even after devastating loss, he believes there can be victory over darkness by lighting a light. At Yom HaZikaron, he will speak about hope and his new mission to “add light wherever I can, following in the path of my beloved parents.”