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On Oct. 7, I was on a flight from my home in Tel Aviv to a conference in Las Vegas to launch a women’s heart health pledge as part of my work leading Hello Heart, an Israeli-American digital health company. I was feeling excited for the week ahead when I got a text from my colleague: “Maayan, look at the news. Israel is under attack.”
At first, I brushed off those words. Israelis are a tough people. We’ve been through many missile attacks, and we’re not easily shaken. The first time I entered a bomb shelter, I was just 6 years old.
But as my phone filled with notifications, I knew something was very wrong. I felt sick when I read the headlines, and even worse when I saw the violent footage Hamas shared on social media. Videos and reports of women and children being brutally killed in front of their families. A music festival, full of young and happy people, that became a massacre. It was psychological warfare like nothing I have ever seen or thought I would ever live to see.
The horrific and cruel terrorist attacks by Hamas on Israel earlier this month, the worst assault on Jews since the Holocaust, have shattered my own heart. Even though I wasn’t in Israel when the attacks began, as a Jewish person and an Israeli-American, I knew I had no choice: I had to return home as quickly as I could.
I couldn’t stop thinking about my 5-year-old son. I felt so helpless on that 15-hour flight, knowing my family, friends and 80 employees back in Tel Aviv were in danger.
I immediately checked in with my loved ones and team. I was terrified to learn that three Hello Heart employees were in the strike zone, including Rotem, one of our HR team members I work with closely.
Rotem is five months pregnant. Before I left for Las Vegas, she shared her excitement with me about the upcoming birth of her baby.
But on Oct. 7, Rotem hid in a bomb shelter with her two small children for hours while Hamas militants slaughtered her neighbors and torched their homes outside. She could hear their screams and cries for help amid rapid gunfire. She was terrified of being found, of being forced to witness her children murdered in front of her, so she kept them quiet with coloring books and stickers. Sensing her panic, her young son put a sticker of a rocket on his arm and said, “Don’t worry, Mommy. The rocket will protect us.”
Rotem and her kids were some of the lucky few who survived. Many others were not so fortunate and endured fates far worse than death.
As I landed in Vegas, dazzling lights, slot machines and happy people greeted me – the complete opposite of what I knew my team and loved ones were enduring back home.
I couldn’t leave my hotel room. I refreshed the news nonstop. And I booked the first available flight back to Tel Aviv, which was scheduled for the next day. While counting down the minutes to my departure, I tried to project business as usual, but on the inside, I was scared. People asked me if I wanted to fly my family to safety in the U.S., but I knew I had to be in Israel during this horrific moment – for my family, for my team. I had to fly home and help however I could.
I took that flight the next day, and after landing in Tel Aviv, I picked up my son, hugged him way too tightly, and we went straight from the airport to the Hello Heart Tel Aviv office. In the days since the attacks, I have made a point to come into the office every single day – no matter how exhausted or anxious I’ve felt – but it’s been far from easy.
Tel Aviv is attacked multiple times a day with rockets. When the rocket alarm sounds, you have 90 seconds to run into a bomb shelter before the rockets hit your area. The 10-minute drive between my house and our office, once the best part of my day spent listening to upbeat music on the radio, has become the most stressful part. I’ve started driving in silence with the windows open so as to hear the alarms, hoping I’d have the chance to get to shelter in time before the rockets strike.
Every time I enter our office parking garage, I feel relief because I know I have a shelter nearby. Recently, on my way back home, I heard the alarms. I immediately stopped the car in the middle of the road, got out in the dark, laid on the ground with my hands protecting my head and prayed the rocket wouldn’t hit near me this time. I heard the “BOOM” a few minutes later, which was thankfully not over my head.
Several Hamas terrorists from the Oct. 7 massacre are said to still be roaming the country, so I’ve started carrying pepper spray and a kitchen knife in my laptop bag. I’m not even sure what I would do with them if I was faced with an armed terrorist, but I’ve been scared and need to carry some sort of protection.
To cope with these shared fears, at Hello Heart we consulted a trauma expert, who explained that the most important thing we could do for the team is to mobilize them into taking action – to give us all a way to help and to have some semblance of control in a situation beyond our comprehension.
So that’s what we did. We established a volunteer-run aid center where employees package up 50 boxes a day of essentials like clothing, toiletries, baby food and toys for the thousands of terror attack survivors, displaced families and army reservists — many of the very same individuals who were our software engineers and project managers up until a couple of weeks ago. Volunteers text our reservist team members and their loved ones around the clock, asking what they need, where they are, and personally delivering the boxes of essentials to them within hours of receiving their requests.
Coming together to volunteer has given our team a shared sense of purpose and meaning as we cope with the devastation we feel. We have a diverse group of employees who are Israeli, Palestinian, Lebanese, American, Jewish and Muslim. Some have family in Gaza and the West Bank, and they are traumatized and worried for their safety right now.
So much is still uncertain and scary, but I quickly realized that during times like these, leaders don’t just set goals and inspire people to innovate; our role is much bigger than that. We must lead with empathy, guide our people through incredibly emotional and difficult situations, and support them in moments of crisis. It’s challenging. We’re all exhausted and scared. I don’t always have the right words to say. But I know I have to be there for my team and show up, not only as a leader, but as a human being.
In war, everyone loses. I’ve lost friends in war, so I know that firsthand. My heart breaks for every single person affected by the violence in our region. This attack was different, not just because of the scale of the physical violence, but because of the flood of reports and videos of murdered children, grandmothers kidnapped and beaten, and young girls raped and paraded in the streets.
These are not anonymous people in some faraway land; these are people we personally know. It’s important to me that every person on my team, no matter their background or personal beliefs, knows that I am profoundly impacted by human suffering. Like them, I’m horrified by the graphic images I’ve seen, which continue to haunt me day and night.
Leadership goes beyond just encouraging donations, offering resources for your own team and broader community and projecting confidence. The most vital action we can take as leaders is to raise our voices and share our honest and vulnerable feelings of shock and fear.
I hope that this violence doesn’t continue forever. But silence in this moment is deafening. I hope my fellow business leaders join me in standing up against terror and advocating for peace.
Our actions, our collective voice, can make a difference. To my fellow leaders: Do not turn away from this crisis; your people need you now more than ever.
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