By Andrew Adler
Community Editor
Israeli Defense Forces paratrooper Matan Elul speaking at a June, 2025 Lunch & Learn session for staff members of the Jewish Federation of Louisville and the Trager Family JCC
It was to be paratrooper Matan Elul’s last Shabbat of compulsory IDF service: October 7, 2023.
We all know what unfolded on that terrible day.
Elul had spent a year training to secure a slot in the elite 35th Brigade, earning the unit’s coveted red beret with its distinctive winged-snake insignia. He became a navigator, while also tasked with evacuating wounded soldiers in combat zones.
With his three-year commitment approaching, Elul was considering his post-IDF options. “I wanted to travel and then try to apply to university,” he recalled during a late April “Lunch & Learn” session for Jewish Federation of Louisville and Trager Family JCC staff. “So that was my idea after the Army.”
Elul and several friends were poised to celebrate their IDF finales by vacationing in Amsterdam. On Friday night – October 6 – they engaged in revels that extended until 5 a.m. the next morning.
Less than two hours later, following a barrage of more than 5,000 rockets fired from Gaza, Hamas terrorists were overrunning the Nova Music Festival. The attacks quickly spread to nearby kibbutzim, with civilians and a small number of security forces battled against Hamas’ far superior numbers.
A coordinated response by the IDF was conspicuously absent. But word of the murderous incursions soon began reaching individual contingents, including Elul’s.
Coincidentally, his unit had scheduled a training exercise for the next day, October 8. “Unit training is like mini war,” he told his “Lunch & Learn” listeners. “We prepare as much as we can, because if there is a war, we’ll be ready. So October 7 caught us in the best position we could be in.
There was one huge logistical problem, however: Elul’s unit was based in northern Israel, reasoning that an attack by Hezbollah out of Lebanon was the likeliest threat. Nobody was expecting a significant threat from Hamas in the south, least of all a coordinated mass attack by thousands of well-armed terrorists pouring across the border between Gaza and Israel.
“Our Jeeps to evacuate people were stuck in the north, because that’s where the training was,” he said.
When initial reports of Hamas activity began filtering down to his unit, Elul and his fellow soldiers figured it was yet another isolated, relatively modest incident – one that would be neutralized by Israeli security personnel stationed nearby. “After one hour we didn’t know anything,” he said.
But then helicopters began arriving, and it quickly became apparent that something big and deadly was unfolding along the Gaza border.
“Our commander was saying, ‘Okay, we have 500 soldiers, 500 warriors. Four hundred will go with the helicopters. The other 100 will go with the buses, because we have a unique mission: We evacuate.’”
A squadron of UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters rose from the ground and headed south. The principal destination was Kibbutz Be’eri, with its approximately 1,200 residents, that was under mass attack by hundreds of Hamas terrorists from the al-Qassam Brigades.
The helicopters landed amid a chaotic scene – “smoke and misunderstanding,” as Elul put it. Homes were on fire, streets – echoing with gunfire — were strewn with the dead and dying. By the end of the day 132 Israelis, including 101 civilians, had perished. Dozens more were taken hostage.
But before reaching Be’eri, Elul’s unit had to secure an approach road and its main junction. Then, around 2 p.m., his contingent of about 300 soldiers entered the kibbutz proper.
With the unit’s Jeeps still stuck in the north, Elul and his companions were doing whatever they can “to evacuate as many as we can.” Fierce fighting was all around them – “a very hard, hard battle,” he acknowledged.
The Jeeps finally arrived at noon the next day, October 8, accelerating the pace of the evacuations. “The feeling that we were doing something historic made us not think about ourselves,” Elul said. “We felt like, ‘If we can survive here, we can survive anywhere.’”