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One Year / The Knitting Circle Organizer Using Yarn as a Tool of Resilience

At the height of Hila Harel’s knitting project, 70 women displaced to a hotel in the Dead Sea gathered to knit together, unraveling their trauma and reweaving connections

הילה הראל (צילום: יונתן בלום)
Hila Harel in her yarn storehouse. (Photo: Yonatan Blum)
By Yael Elnatan

The early morning sirens on October 7 didn’t awaken Hila Harel, 51, in her Jaffa home. Only at 10 a.m., when an agitated neighbor knocked on her door, did she realize something was wrong. But in the hours and days since that morning, an unquenchable sense of urgency washed over Harel.

She is familiar with a sense of urgency from her 17-year tenure as a graphic designer on the political satire television show Eretz Nehederet. During the show’s break over the high holidays, Harel had planned to spend time resting and settling into her new apartment. October 7 changed those plans.

In the days after October 7, Harel began collecting items for soldiers and evacuees. Soon, she was receiving long lists of needed items.

By October 8, Harel went out with a friend, Shifra Yaguda, to collect hygiene products for soldiers and evacuees. “I have a habit of reacting quickly,” he said. “It’s resilience combined with good functioning in stressful situations. I’m good at these things, and I’ve known myself this way even before the war.”

In the second week of the war, Harel and Yaguda decided to join another friend volunteering at the Dead Sea, where hotels were housing Israelis evacuated from the area around the Gaza strip. “There was no thought about what we would do. Does someone need help? Then we go. It doesn’t matter where. If they need the Dead Sea, then we will go to the Dead Sea,” she said.

“When we talked on the phone, Shifra was in the middle of knitting and suggested we take knitting needles with us,” Harel recounted. “After all, she and I knit. We didn’t know what we would do there, but we said, maybe it will interest someone.”

The friends arrived at the Dead Sea’s Royal Hotel, which was populated mostly by older adults and some people with disabilities from Sderot. “There was chaos there. Lots of mental health volunteers and a million other people,” she said. “We immediately realized they needed help with various things and didn’t know what they needed.”

They decided to set up their yarn in the hotel lobby and invite anyone interested to join them. “At first, we tried to walk around and ask women if they wanted to come knit with us. No one was really responsive: No thank you, no thank you. So we just sat down, opened a bag of wool, and arranged everything nicely,” Harel said. “Within maybe five minutes, someone came to us and asked, ‘What are you doing? Can I join?’ And that’s how it started: we sat down, opened the yarn, and women approached and joined.”

Knitting is an especially calming action, Harel explained. “Many of the knitters didn’t think to bring their knitting with them; they had fled their homes,” she said. “Many of them hadn’t knitted in a long time, but once it was there, they began to knit. Knitting is an action you quickly remember how to do, even if you haven’t done it in a while.”

A day or two later, Harel and Yaguda shared their story on Facebook and asked for donations and yarn. Two more friends decided to join, and this time they spread out across two separate hotels.

“We arranged the chairs nicely in a corner of the lobby,” Harel said. “We thought it should be in a place where people pass by. We wanted joining the circle to work that way, without needing to register or rely on hours. Each time we arrived for about six hours to allow people to come and go. This proved to be a good model. Pretty quickly, we realized there was potential. In the first month and a half, we went there twice a week and simultaneously began collecting wool and needles.”

People from all over Israel got involved in supporting the project. A yarn shop in Arad donated lots of needles. “Another post on Facebook got people involved, and an article that was published about the knitting led to creating connections and a significant boost in donations—wool, needles, and money, even from abroad,” Harel said.

They decided to open more and more circles in cities hosting evacuated Israelis. “And that’s how it just happened, day by day, week by week, more women and more circles were added—in the Dead Sea, in Jerusalem, in Tel Aviv,” Harel said. “A small circle in Beit Oren, one in Caesarea. At its peak, I think there were 25 knitting circles. And it was very, very exciting.”

The original circle, which was the largest, had 70 participants at its peak. “Not all sat in the circle; some just took yarn ‘home’ and knitted in their rooms,” Harel said. “What’s beautiful about knitting is that you can knit anywhere and at any time. Anyone who asked for yarn received it. We returned every time from the hotel in disbelief that all of this was happening and amazed at the impact knitting had. How excited the women were, how happy they were, and we were equally happy.”

Members of Harel’s original knitting circle at the Dead Sea’s Royal Hotel. (Photo: Pensioners Union)
Members of Harel’s original knitting circle at the Dead Sea’s Royal Hotel. (Photo: Pensioners Union)

It didn’t surprise Harel how healing knitting was for the evacuees. “Craft is one of the most healing things there is, truly,” she said. “It’s not that we invented something. Knitting is a therapeutic tool that has been used long before us. Just because we knit, we know the feeling closely. The depths and benefits of knitting are astounding. There are many things you know intuitively, but during this past year, a few articles happened to be published—in the New York Times and The Guardian, and later also in Israel—about knitting as a healing activity in various situations. Suddenly we received professional validation from studies, and it felt really good.”

The social connection of the circle had as much impact as the knitting itself, Harel said. “Coming every week creates an emotional bond,” she explained. “When many women sit together, something good almost always happens, even on an energetic level.”

The act of knitting lends itself to metaphors, and Harel said that Yaguda was especially sharp at noticing these. “She said from the start, we are unraveling connections and reweaving them.’ We were unraveling connections in the sense that many of the women who came to our circles were in very complex emotional and physical states, and knitting really calms and soothes. In the end, the knitters have a product in hand, something they can take pride in, give as a gift to family, grandchildren, and sometimes to each other. They can help one another. This builds a sense of capability.”

Volunteers sometimes struggled with the emotional elements of the work. “Some of our volunteers withdrew because it was hard for them to sit with older women and hear their difficult stories about what they went through, the fear and anger,” she said. “There was one very intense week, and I felt it was just too much for me, that I was kind of disappearing. A lot of donations came all at once, and some of the donations came from abroad, and we needed to coordinate, pick them up at various times, and there were tons of calls, messages, and emails.”

After ten months, when most of the evacuees from Sderot had returned home, the original knitting circle shut down.

“We said goodbye to the women of Sderot at the Royal Hotel by the Dead Sea, our first circle, which was throughout the period also the largest,” Harel wrote on Facebook. “I am so happy that in the shadow of this terrible time, we were also able to ease their burden and ours, to rejoice, create, and learn new things together. In the end, we cried tears of sadness and happiness and blessed each other for what lies ahead. Of course, we will meet again.”

The project itself is still operating, with circles in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Ra’anana, Ein Gedi, Beit Oren, and more. “They are flexible and change from week to week, depending on the crazy reality imposed on all of us,” Harel said. “Now we are trying to figure out what the best thing we can do to continue is. Like many initiatives that have been active since the start of the war, we are at some sort of turning point. Things are changing, and the future is uncertain. We are definitely continuing—we’re just thinking about what scope and in what exact way.”

“Volunteering is an amazing thing that goes both ways,” Harel said. “Anyone who volunteers will tell you this: you get back no less than what you do for someone else.”

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