Everything sparkled at the Leonardo Plaza Hotel in the northern city of Haifa on Wednesday evening as a group of elderly men and women donned traditional North African kaftans, or their “Sabbath best,” to sing, clap, and shimmy at a Mimouna celebration.

There were brightly colored cakes and queues for mufleta — the iconic pancake associated with the Maghrebian Jewish festival marked nationwide at the end of Passover.

A crooner dressed in a black jacket threaded with gold sang at an eardrum-busting volume against the backdrop of a golden throne.

But the festivities were laced with anxiety. These were not the large, multigenerational families traditionally present for Mimouna, but elderly people aged 75 and over from bomb-scarred communities near the Lebanon border who cannot get to a protected space within the 15 seconds needed during a rocket attack.

They were evacuated from mid-March onwards by a charity, the Tzalir Fund  (link in Hebrew) and its “Banu” platform of volunteers. The NGO reached people interested in evacuation via the northern authorities and an advertising campaign.

The fund, established by Zilit and Meir Jakobsohn after October 7, 2023, has guaranteed the evacuees’ stay until April 15. It hopes the state will step in thereafter.

Some 1,200 people from cities like Kiryat Shmona, Shlomi, and Nahariya, and other smaller communities, mostly moshavim, are being put up in five hotels, three in Haifa — itself a frequent target of rocket attacks — and two in Tiberias. All have large protected spaces.

The evacuated participants’ fear is well-founded: On March 18, an elderly couple, identified as Yaron and Ilana Moshe, were killed in Ramat Gan while attempting to reach their shelter. Police said they were headed to the bomb shelter, but the missile hit before they could get there.

“We haven’t come to replace the government,” Zilit Jakobsohn was careful to point out, describing the fund as a body that reacts quickly to emergencies while the state prepares. “There’s a whole belt of Israel where our grandmothers and grandfathers live with only 15 seconds to........

© The Times of Israel