“I Didn’t Just Not Kill Jews. I Am Raising Jews in My Home” , The Astonishing Story of Yaron Avraham

Yaron Avraham was born into a Muslim family in Lod, was sent as a child to mosques in Gaza and Hebron, witnessed unimaginable violence up close, lived as a homeless man on the streets of Eilat, enlisted in the IDF, and, after an almost unbelievable journey, found himself sitting in a study hall, converting to Judaism and raising Jewish children. In a wrenching conversation with Eli Guttahelf, he returns to the night his sister was murdered, to the years in the mosques in Gaza, and to the moment when one unknown Jew changed the course of his life. Watch (Kikar FM) the righteous convert Yaron Avraham in an interview with Eli Guttahelf 10 10 0:00 / 1:32:33

“I’m willing to go through everything again, just for one more morning like that at the Western Wall.”

“If the Holy One, blessed be He, grants me another morning like that, everything I told you, much more than what I went through in my life, I’m willing to go through it again. Just one more morning at the Western Wall.” The man saying this is Yaron Avraham. He was born in Lod, to a Muslim family with eighteen children, educated in the mosques of Gaza to hate the people of Israel, saw his sister murdered in the house when he was nine, slept in cemeteries, ate pizza from the trash, served in Givati, and converted.

Like a hotel: the luxurious restroom building was inaugurated in Meron. Will the Satmar Hasidim use it? Chaim Rozenbaum | 19:10 The story he told Eli Guttahelf on his podcast is one of the most astonishing things you will read this year.

House of eighteen: when hatred is breakfast Yaron Avraham was born on the 15th of Nisan. Yes, exactly on Passover. He is the twelfth child out of eighteen, and the luckiest one, in his words. “A complicated family,” he explains, “not in the sense of being poor, דווקא it was a very organized family. The difficulty is in the education there. Education to hatred, to antisemitism, hatred of the people of Israel. A family that was very connected to the leadership of the Islamic Movement.”

When he is asked to describe what it looked like in everyday life, he answers with a question: “What would Muslims do if there were no Jews in the world? Every bad thing that happens to you, you blame the Jew. Now think about this, there are less than one percent Jews compared with Muslims in the world, and there is no Muslim in the world who does not get up in the morning and deal with the people of Israel.”

He explains that what many see as a political conflict is, in his view, something else entirely: “The war is a religious war. And no one can deny that. The matter of conquering the world, turning it into sharia, a centralized rule that lives according to Islamic law, that is a religious mission. There is no politics here.” Then he adds, almost quietly: “I grew up into a family like that. These are the conversations you hear at home from a young age. If it’s jokes about the Holocaust, if it’s support for every attack that happens.”

But the young Yaron did not connect with it. “At the age of six or seven I already felt I didn’t belong, that it wasn’t for me, that story. I didn’t want to go pray. I wasn’t connected to my mother, my father, my brothers, the culture, nothing. Before I even knew one Jew, I felt like a stranger.” He smiles as he says that even then he refused to eat camel meat, rabbits, and other things forbidden by kashrut. “I didn’t know then that it wasn’t kosher. I just didn’t touch it. It seemed to me like something inedible.”

The night Sara was murdered When Yaron was nine, his seventeen-year-old sister, Sara, was murdered by her older brother on the basis of “family honor.” He describes the night in a quiet, measured voice, one that reveals more than it hides. “All the brothers were taken into one room, all the sisters into the room next door. We, the boys, were in the room paralyzed with fear. I personally took myself and sat in the corner. The crying, the screams, the shouting, just try to understand what a house looks like at moments like that.”

“She screamed for twelve, fifteen seconds. Then, complete silence. After five minutes, the older brother opens the door. I don’t know to this day why he opened it. And you see what you see, he has a machete in his hand, covered in blood.”

“What was going through your head at that moment?” Guttahelf asks.

“Nothing. The brain stops functioning. You are frozen with fear.”

The next morning, Yaron asked where Sara was. “We sent her to work,” his mother told him. “Go back to sleep.” He did not go back to sleep. He kept asking again and again. He annoyed the family too much. And three months later, he was sent to Gaza.

“Your parents just sent you to Gaza?” Guttahelf asks.

“Yes,” Yaron answers. “I believe the brothers understood one thing: if there is one person who can bring them down, it’s me, and I would have brought them all down.”

Sara’s murder was never solved. To this day, she is defined as “missing.”

Five and a half years in Gaza: loving death When he describes the mosque in Gaza, Yaron uses the word carefully. “It’s not a terror cell. It’s Islamic education. They hunt people, strengthen them religiously. The moment you connect a Muslim to Islam, automatically he goes in those directions.”

The daily routine: “You don’t have a life there, you have no choice, you have nothing. You study about eighteen hours a day. You stay until 11 at night. Quran studies, Islamic studies, religious law.” And then there is the discipline coordinator. “He walks around all day with a stick a meter and a half long. There are offenses for which students end their lives, in front of everyone. So that they may see.”

From the age of twelve or thirteen, the real training begins. “Not military training. Much crueler. They teach you to be the angel of death. You will choose the people, the place, look them in the eye, and murder them.”

“What does training like that look like?” Guttahelf asks.

“They deal with death. Terrorists killed by the IDF would arrive, and you have to walk past them. Children from ages seven to fourteen, fifteen, and the number of bodies depends on how successful the IDF operation was that day.”

He pauses. “We got to the point where when we saw the bodies, all we cared about was whether it was a terrorist’s family that was handing out baklava or not.”

“They love death,” he explains. “In Islam, what will define your life in the next world is the moment you return your soul. And the way you return it, that is how your next world will be.”

Then he adds a sentence that lands like a punch: “Many years ago, when I lived in Tel Aviv, I had friends who would go breathe the air at the beach. I went to a cemetery. The silence there, there I made the most important decisions of my life.”

The mosque’s graduation ceremony included lying in a real open grave while everyone recited verses from the Quran above. “So that you feel the moment your soul rises to heaven.”

A note inside the shoe Yaron did not have a single friend in the mosque. “From the first day I saw them as enemies. I didn’t connect with anyone.” But once, after a day of study, he put on his shoe and felt something hard inside. A note.

“If everything is okay, do you need help?”

“That gave me a bit of optimism.” They began corresponding, note for note, putting them in and taking them out of the shoe. Two or three days of hope. “Then I made a mistake and asked him how I could escape from there. I never heard from him again.”

First escape, and sixty lashes After five and a half years, Yaron beat the discipline coordinator. “I told him, this morning I’m getting out. Do whatever you want.” The punishment, sixty lashes on the soles of his feet. “Very painful. Not recommended. You wake up, faint, cry, scream, feel like you are dying. It took me four or five days until I could stand on my feet again.”

“And weren’t you afraid of them?” Guttahelf asks.

“No, I didn’t care. After you see death, after you lie in a grave, what can threaten you? Death looked like something comfortable, peaceful.”

They sent him to Hebron. Another year and a half. Then one evening, Yaron took off running.

A walking corpse and pizza from the trash At sixteen, without money, without clothes, without a name, Yaron arrives in Lod. He sleeps in the cemetery for ten days. “What is a cemetery? Come on, among us, the people there are quiet. They don’t talk, they don’t go out to have fun. Everything is fine.”

One evening, on the verge of starvation after not eating for two days, he sees a pizzeria, but the seller is a Jew wearing a skullcap. “We were taught they are the most dangerous, the craziest. But what do I care. At least he has food.” He approaches, explains that he has no money, gets food and water. He decides to “stick to the man.” He tells him about himself, about Sara’s murder, about the cemetery.

“The man puts me in his car, drives me to the central bus station in Tel Aviv, gives me money, puts me on a bus. He told me, ‘Get to Eilat. There it will be safe for you.’ I saw the pain in his eyes at that moment.” It was an ultra-Orthodox Jew, with a skullcap on his head. One of the people he had been taught to fear. “That encounter was the definitive proof for me that there is something else.”

In Eilat, six months on the street. Benches, stairwells, whatever food could be found. And once, half a tray of pizza someone had thrown in the trash. “To this day, after eating at every pizza chain in the country, I have not found pizza that comes close to that pizza I ate that night.”

The bus full of soldiers on the way to Eilat Yaron boards a bus full of soldiers. “Soldiers. Come on, like, I’m on a bus of bloodthirsty vampires, I’m just hoping it ends peacefully, for me it’s like you getting on a bus full of terrorists.” To his relief, the soldiers were tired. No one looked his way.

In Eilat he met Uzi Sade, who saw his distress. “A good person.” Uzi took him home, fed him, gave him clothes, and later brought him to his brother in the Knesset. About a month later, Yaron found himself with a guardian, living in a youth shelter for at-risk youth in Tel Aviv.

“At seventeen and a few months. That’s when I told myself, I have no money, I need to pay back debts. People did so much good for me.” The decision, to enlist in the IDF.

Givati: “Now I can finally kill Arabs” When he comes to enlist, he asks for the Border Police. “They asked me why. I said, because you can beat up Arabs freely.” They said no.

In Givati, during a lesson on suspected hostile activity, he starts laughing. “The commander asks why. I told him, Commander, I’ve been there. That’s not how it works.” The commander takes him aside for a talk.

“He asked a few questions. At some point he turned to me and said, ‘I am sorry for what happened to you, but you are a soldier in the Israel Defense Forces. We work exactly the opposite way. We are willing to give our lives so that someone else can live. You have two options, leave in peace, and I will help you get discharged. Or stay, and I’ll take you as a personal project.’”

“Then he said to me, ‘I look you in the eyes and I do not see a murderer. And I’ll tell you something else that probably no one ever told you in your life, you also deserve to live.’”

Yaron said he would stay.

“Then we left the room and he called out, ‘Come, give me a hug.’”

“A hug?”

“Yes. And I didn’t know what that was. The first time in my life someone hugged me. I broke down on his shoulders, two or three minutes. That was the moment I understood where I had arrived.”

“I came out of there and said, one day I’ll be part of this” After he was discharged, Yaron returned to Tel Aviv. For three years he did not go out even once. “I sat at home and studied between fourteen and sixteen hours a day.” In Tel Aviv, in a completely left-wing environment, he saw something that surprised him.

“I saw the Jewish spark. In mutual responsibility, in the help they give one another, in something that doesn’t exist anywhere else.”

And during the Second Lebanon War, he jumped into a car with friends, went up north, went from house to house, helped the elderly. “I said, only a Jew can do something like that. And no one there was even wearing a skullcap.”

Then, one Friday evening, instead of going down to a party, he stood at the window and watched his friend Yaron and his family go to synagogue. “They had a special smile, a smile that no matter what, only Jews have on Shabbat. Of calm, serenity, joy. I was truly envious. I said, why them and not me?” He went to his friend and said, “That’s it. I decided. I’m converting.”

“One of the easiest decisions I ever made,” he says. “That’s the moment I told myself, I’m going to give up everything I built.”

One year and four months at Meir Institute The conversion process at Meir Institute. He studies Torah eighteen hours a day, by choice. “Suddenly I understand where this people got its strength.”

At the rabbinical court, he was questioned for forty-five minutes, twice as long as everyone else. “I turned to the head of the panel and said, Rabbi, if you do not want to accept me, say so. He said to me, of course we accept you. It’s very intriguing.”

“Stand up,” the rabbi told him. “Recite Shema Yisrael.”

“You feel the Holy One, blessed be He, present in the room,” he says. “He is simply moved together with you.”

The next morning, 5:30, at the Western Wall The day after the conversion, before dawn, Yaron walked to the Western Wall. He arrived at 5:30. Sat on a simple plastic chair. “For the first time I could say, ‘Blessed are You who has not made me a gentile.’ For the first time to put on tefillin. For the first time to be called up to the Torah.”

And then he says the sentence that opened this article, and now takes on its full weight: “If the Holy One, blessed be He, grants me another morning like that, everything I told you, much more than what I went through, I am willing to go through it again. I would now, of my own free will, go back to Gaza, move to Hebron, live on the streets, eat from the trash, just to merit another morning like that. Because there is no other morning like that.”

Today Yaron lives in Kiryat Moshe in Jerusalem. Recently he held a brit milah for his firstborn son. He stood there with his wife, both in tears. “I looked at my son with a skullcap, with sidelocks, with tzitzit. I thought that I had once needed to destroy, kill, and murder children like that. And suddenly I am raising a child like that in my house. That is the greatest victory, not only did I not take Jewish lives, I am adding to the people of Israel. I am beginning a new dynasty within the people of Israel.”

He also noted that he has a daughter who studies in a state religious school. “Every morning we say Modeh Ani.”

Then Guttahelf sums it up in a sentence that sounds like the real headline of the whole story: “You won.”

And Yaron smiles. Not the smile of someone who defeated others. The smile of someone who defeated the fate assigned to him.