JERUSALEM – To night, as millions of Jews celebrate Passover, the shadow of a modern Jewish exodus falls across Israel – the evacuation this summer of settlers from the Gaza Strip.
“We wrote our own Haggadah,” Yael Neuman of the Gush Katif settlement block, said last week of the religious text about the biblical flight of Jews from Egypt.
But in her version, the blows suffered under Pharaoh are replaced by the settler’s woes – including Qassam rockets, Palestinian shells, reports from the Israeli media about the pullout and statements by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Sharon, once the settlers’ hero, is under pressure to carry out the evacuation smoothly and to leave settler homes intact for the Palestinians.
He says Palestinian officials don’t want to discuss the future of the homes and if there is no agreement, they will be left to the chaos of mob rule.
“A guy from Gaza will take a window, and a guy from Rafah will take a door,” he said.
But Neuman, a 42-year-old teacher and mother of six children, says her home “should be destroyed.”
“There are some who say we should leave it as it is. Soon they will ask that we leave coffee and sandwiches for the Palestinians when we leave,” she said.
“It will be a great victory for the Palestinians,” she told The Post. “I fear seeing my home with a PLO flag.”
The settlers, many of them deeply religious, say they can only rely on the Almighty to stave off this exodus. But they’re organizing supporters anyway.
Neuman said some 600 buses of guests and sympathizers – about 30,000 people – will be visiting her settlement block during the Passover week.
Evacuation won’t be a new experience for her.
Yael Neuman and her husband Yossi were living in the Sinai desert town of Yamit in 1982 when it was evacuated and turned over to the Egyptians, as part of the agreement establishing relations between Jerusalem and Cairo.
Other settlers say they’ll never leave Gush Katif.
One of them, who keeps a low profile, is Karen Eldar, who lives with her husband Uri and their three daughters, aged 2 to 8, in a trailer, in a small community of 20 families.
Only after the synagogue that Uri Eldar runs was rebuilt did journalists find out that Karen was the daughter of Yitzhak Teshuva, one of the richest men in Israel, and the owner of, among other things, the Plaza Hotel in New York.
For the Eldars, staying in Gaza is a matter of ideology.
“We looked for a place to raise our children and for its quality of life,” Uri Eldar said. “That’s the place.”
A call to their home brought a child’s greeting: “Happy Pesach. And with faith we will win.”