My Grandmother, A Zionist Who Died as She Lived

It has now been three months since my grandmother and last remaining grandparent, Shifra Kadish, was laid to rest at Ashdot Yaakov, her kibbutz overlooking the border between Israel and Jordan. My grandmother, after years of chronic pain, multiple falls and bone breaks, major hearing issues, decreasing sight capabilities, and, most importantly, the loss of her independence, decided to end her own life with dignity. After several months of waiting for the gears to turn—dealing with bureaucracy, proving her mental capacity—she finally flew with my mother and her two sisters to Switzerland and, a day later, put herself to sleep. Her final month, after she received the confirmation that she would be able to go through with the process and was given her date, was the happiest I had seen her in years. At no point was there even a hint of regret or questioning. My grandmother died as she lived: with conviction.

Shifra Kadish in her bedroom with a painting of her three daughters behind her. 

It was a meaningful and inspiring experience for my family, especially for my mother and her sisters. It was a bonding experience, both sweet and sad, like all loss, and we feel lucky and grateful to have had her in our lives. I had my grandmother for 28 years; the world had her for 93. These are Israel’s first months in its entire history without her as a citizen. Her story is deeply intertwined with the land and country, and it is linked, for me, with a time defined by tremendous and devastating loss and grief.

One does not need to be invested for very long in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to become intimately acquainted with loss. It is a common refrain among Israelis that everyone has lost someone they know, and certainly, after October 7, there is no more than one degree of separation between every Israeli and a hostage, a fallen soldier or a relative of one or the other crying at their funeral. This reality is far starker for Palestinians, many of whom have lost entire branches of their families in the last few months, and almost all of whom have witnessed someone they know beaten, jailed, tortured, or killed by the IDF or settlers. Death, grief, anger and the actions spurred by these realities and emotions have a stranglehold over the Holy Land.

For Israelis, and to a lesser extent Palestinians, there are, of course, still moments of relative calm, of family time, barbecues and celebrations. As the one-year mark of October 7 has come and gone, it is hard to look back through my life and remember a time that felt even comparably bleak.

I was born in 1996, just months after the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin by Yigal Amir, at a time when the Oslo Accords and the peace process dominated the discussion in and around Israel and Palestine. In the years since, the unraveling of Oslo with nothing in its stead, the Second Intifada, the multiple wars in Gaza, the daily violence of the West Bank and the entire last year have colored and informed my peers’ lives and my own. The dominant color: red. The hatred, the blood spilled, the anger felt, the revenge taken, the ongoing cycle punctuated by funerals and mass graves, and as time has passed, with more social media and smartphones, up-close and intimate views of the horror and violence and the gamut of reactions to it.

I am frequently asked by those close to me if I am hopeful, or to try and point out something to be excited about. Just over a year ago, I was leaving an Israel where thousands were wearing shirts, buttons and stickers that loudly said, “No Democracy With Occupation,” and it was no longer uncommon to see a Palestinian flag or imagery at the massive protests that took place every Saturday. The Israel I left just a few weeks ago, on the day Hersh and the other hostages were confirmed dead, was sad in equal measure to the degree of hope just a year earlier. If one insists on finding a reason for optimism, then perhaps the whiplash of change I experienced in one direction can happen equally fast in the other direction. History reminds us that it was only four years after the Yom Kippur War, arguably Israel’s most traumatic war until this one, that a treaty was reached between Israel and Egypt in which they exchanged land for peace. We can hope and work toward leaders who will draw courage and wisdom from the grief and trauma and take similarly brave steps. I do my best to remember that what I have seen in this life is not all that can be, and the times I spent speaking with my grandmother, as well as those who knew her better at the shiva, helped make that point very clear.

Shifra Kaddish at the Kibbutz Ashdod Yaakov swimming pool. 

My grandmother was a child of the early kibbutz movement. Its population was made up of idealist, socialist Ashkenazi European Jews dedicated to the Zionist dream of a Jewish homeland, many of whom had arrived at the turn of the century. She grew up in a children’s house, where she slept with the other children of the kibbutz, seeing her parents infrequently, often just for an hour a day. At 17, she danced with her peers after the UN vote, and after the State was declared and war broke out, she was in charge of leading the children away during the evacuation of the kibbutz to avoid the shelling from the combined Arab forces. Despite her wishes otherwise, the kibbutz’s needs came first, and she was sent to the military rather than to nursing school. Determined to follow her dream, she

Shifra Kaddish in paratrooper training, preparing for her first jump. 

found a way to the IDF’s nursing school. She volunteered and was one of the first women to become a paratrooper. As a medical corps officer, she trained to parachute behind enemy lines and provide medical care in the hills of Jerusalem, specifically at the Hadassah Hospital of Ein Karem. Her younger brother, Chen, was killed in combat on the first day of the Six-Day War. At 30, she became the head nurse of Soroka Hospital in Beersheva and spent the last 25 years of her career as the head nurse of a surgery ward at Shiba Hospital in Tel Hashomer, Israel’s largest hospital. Long past the mandatory retirement age, she would still be working multiple shifts a week and, perhaps more than anything else, found tremendous meaning in her work and in teaching the younger nurses.

Shifra Kadish meets with Prime Minister David Ben Gurion. 

She was a lifetime Labor or left-of-Labor voter, and near the end of her life she was especially animated in opposition to Benjamin Netanyahu. She had no particular interest in Jerusalem and maintained a particular dislike for the ultra-Orthodox and the religious coercion she felt in the state. I do not think my grandmother ever spent more than a few hours (and if so, most likely driving) in the West Bank or Gaza, and she did not have any Palestinian friends. She believed in a two-state solution, far more for the sake of the Israelis (as she saw it) than for the Palestinians, from whom she simply wanted to split.

My grandmother was a Zionist through and through, with a deep connection to the land she was born and raised on. She was concerned about the water level of the Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee) until her final days and had only one request for her funeral: that we play “Ein Li Eretz Acheret” (“I Have No Other Land”). My grandmother reflects a generation of Israelis raised on a dream of a place that, if it ever existed, is without a doubt hard to find today.

I don’t think I’m particularly qualified to speak on the ethics of dying with dignity (sometimes known as assisted suicide). As I experience this loss, I cannot help but consider how blessed I am, as an American mostly watching this conflict unfold across the ocean through my phone, that my grandmother was able to choose to end her own life. The horrors we are living through have made it even more of a blessing. I have read countless stories, some Israeli, many more Palestinian, of children and young adults my age who never got to have a final conversation with their grandparents. There are Palestinians and Israelis living abroad who were not lucky enough to know exactly when they would be sitting shiva and attending a funeral, who could not plan with their work to attend without issues, as I was able to do. There were the Israeli grandparents killed on October 7, or who were taken and killed as hostages—many peace activists themselves—who certainly still had plans for their lives. They still had energy to give toward their dreams, their families and the hobbies that kept them active. They did not wake up anticipating it being their final day.

I recently interviewed a Palestinian man who, last October, woke up to news that a whole branch of his family that he had grown up visiting in Gaza was simply gone. Flattened. No hope of recovery existed. The decisions Palestinian elders have been making are not when, where or whether to die. They are whether to die in the same room as your family or to hope splitting into different parts of the house will protect some of you.

Every death matters equally, just as every life does. But what we can do to recognize, acknowledge and celebrate those lives lost has not been equal in any way. I was not worried that the cemetery where my grandmother was buried would be bombed while I was there. There was cold water and snacks aplenty at the funeral. We ate at a restaurant afterward. My travel to Israel was not as simple as usual, due to flights being canceled after Hezbollah rockets were launched from the North, but I needed no visa to attend the funeral. My grandmother’s life was special and fascinating, but that did not make her more deserving of a proper burial or remembrance than anyone else. What she received, and how her family was able to experience it, should be the norm, not the exception.

In a more existential sense, one additional weight lifted from this situation for my grandmother and our family was the weight of consequences. My grandmother had no fear, unlike many elderly Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, that her death would make it that much easier for settlers to take over their land. She knew the bank that would hold the money paying for this process was not going to disappear overnight. My grandmother knew she could go, and that the state she helped create would still exist, her family would be unburdened, and her history and dreams, even flawed, would live on.

I have no concept of what attempting to go to Switzerland through the same process and for the same purpose would look like for a Palestinian. A dark and cynical part of me thinks it would be one of the few permits the Israeli government would deign to give, and one of the fastest processed ones as well. In fact, however, this is a question my grandmother never had to entertain—because the Israeli state treated her like a first-class citizen, unlike so many Palestinians.

Shifra Kadish was not warm. She was not full of compliments or praise for the people she loved. She was hardworking, and steadfast, and driven by ideology and purpose. She was an active participant in some of the most historically impactful moments of the last 100 years, events that have shaped my life. She left a thorough imprint upon her daughters and on her fellow nurses. It was a blessing to hear her stories when she decided to share, to see her laugh when one of my cousins inspired her to do so, to see her at peace with her life finally coming to an end on her terms. In her honor, I will do my best to hold onto whatever hope I have that we can find that same peace while still here and allow for all the families destroyed by this conflict to lay their elders to rest, knowing, just as I did, that they were ready to go.

Top image: Mattan Berner-Kadish with his grandmother Shifra Kadish at one of his first birthday parties (Photos Credit: Mattan Berner-Kadish).