Perach Pilo, 76, is the daughter of Holocaust survivors from Hungary who made their way to Israel after the war.

When she was 13, Perach’s parents moved to Kibbutz Be’eri, where she continued to live after she was married and had her own family – until the October 7 assault.

Perach didn’t receive a Jewish education. However, in more recent years, her daughter became frum through Chabad and her grandson now serves as a Chabad shliach in Berlin.

At 6:30 a.m. on October 7, Perach, who lives alone, ran into her safe room when the sirens began sounding, a common scenario in her Gaza border kibbutz. She then began hearing the sounds of dozens of rockets and saw messages on her kibbutz chat about terrorists on the kibbutz. She then heard yells in Arabic and gunshots.

Perach, alone in her safe room, was terrified. But then she thought about the lesson she had learned from her Chabad grandchildren about the power of positive thinking. She wrote on a piece of paper. “I’m protected. Thank you to Hakadosh Baruch Hu and the melachim who are protecting me. Thank you to the Lubavitcher Rebbe. Thank you to everyone davening for me. I am safe.”

She repeated this mantra over and over thousands of times over the next 48 hours as 12 violent and armed terrorists holed themselves up in her home and repeatedly tried to break into the safe room. She sat alone in the dark and after her phone battery died, she had no contact with the outside world. When she began worrying about her son Oren, who had promised to come save her but never showed up, she fortified herself by repeating the mantra again and again.

In a recent interview with Arutz Sheva, she elaborated on her amazing story. “Ten years before October 7, I had a dream about terrorists who came into my bedroom in a tunnel from Gaza. I was very frightened and  I hired a locksmith to install a lock on my safe room and it saved my life.”

“Terrorists came into my home in the afternoon of October 7 and didn’t leave. Twelve terrorists holed up in my home.”

The terrorists repeatedly tried to open the door of the safe room, even throwing explosives at it, but were unsuccessful. They also tried to get in through the window of the safe room but failed.

As Perach was huddled in her dark safe room with the terrorists outside her door, a fierce battle was taking place between the terrorists and IDF soldiers on the kibbutz.

The soldiers were aware of the terrorists in Perach’s home and tried to negotiate with them to surrender but the terrorists refused. Finally, on Sunday evening [October 8], thinking that the residents of the home were long dead, the IDF decided to kill the terrorists by destroying the home with a military bulldozer. Unbelievably, the IDF bulldozed the house, killed the terrorists, and retreated while Perach was still holed up in the safe room! The bulldozer did create a crack in the door of her safe room, filling the room with dust.

When Perach woke up on Monday morning and heard the sound of silence on the kibbutz, she decided to open the window but tripped and fell and lost consciousness for over a hour. When she woke up, she decided to jump out the window, thinking she would land on the grass. But she instead landed on concrete debris from her destroyed house and injured herself. But she managed to get up and limping around the deathly silent kibbutz, she found a golf cart with the keys inside. She drove to the front gate of the kibbutz, where she saw IDF soldiers, who ran to help her and treated her injuries.

Perach attributes her survival to the positive thinking she learned from her Chabad grandchildren and the mantra she repeated thousands of times in the safe room.

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)