When Oren Rubinstein awoke in his Pacifica home on Oct. 7, he discovered he’d slept through increasingly desperate messages from his cousins in Kibbutz Be’eri. Another cousin in Israel was forwarding him updates, screenshots of WhatsApp messages on the family’s group chat.

“Mom was kidnapped. I’m alone at home hiding under the bed in the safe room,” Rubinstein’s second cousin Noga Weiss, who is 18, wrote to the family in Hebrew. “They burned the house down.”

Weiss remained in her mamad (safe room) as long as she could. With the house on fire, it became difficult for her to breathe. She fled outdoors through a window and hid in nearby bushes to try to evade the Hamas terrorists who had infiltrated the kibbutz, according to Rubinstein.

“She was texting us from the bushes, and then she says, ‘They’re coming.’ And that was it.”

Noga shared her live location via WhatsApp. Rubinstein saw the screenshots of when her phone entered Gaza.

Be’eri, located about 2 miles from the Gaza border, was one of the sites that took the brunt of the terrorist attack that began at sunrise on Oct. 7. More than 120 Be’eri residents were massacred, including four members of Rubinstein’s extended family: husband and wife Amir and Mati Weiss, who were both 69, Gil Buyum, who was 55 and part of the kibbutz security team, and his 22-year-old son, Inbar Buyum.

Gil’s sister, Shiri Weiss, who is 53, and her daughter Noga are two of at least 32 Be’eri residents kidnapped by Hamas or still considered missing. Shiri’s 56-year-old husband, Ilan Weiss, is listed as missing because his body has not been recovered and his whereabouts remain unknown. He was last seen helping the kibbutz emergency squad on Oct. 7, according to the Times of Israel.

“They killed the dog, Ketem. I was hoping they would find Ilan and that his dog was alive,” Rubinstein told J. earlier this month, sitting on the couch in his Pacifica living room with his dog, Frankie, curled up next to him.

Since Oct. 7, Rubinstein has attended community vigils in San Francisco, San Jose and Palo Alto and has spoken at multiple rallies calling for the release of the estimated 240 hostages.

“It’s almost like a nightmare, like it can’t be real,” Rubinstein said at a “Bring Them Home” rally in Palo Alto on Nov. 4. “We have to remember, and we have to support.”

Rubinstein, who has two daughters, Scarlett, 14, and Anabel, 10, has printed posters of Noga that he’s also shared at rallies and posted on social media, hoping strangers who may otherwise feel detached from the situation will connect to the face of an innocent young woman.

He recently hung posters of all the known hostages on a building in San Francisco’s Little Saigon area in the Tenderloin, with the owner’s permission, and plans to hang more translated posters in the Mission District and Chinatown. He has begun reaching out to contacts in the Jewish community to seek donations for rebuilding Be’eri, and for providing bikes and sporting goods to the children of Be’eri. He has also booked a flight to Israel for later this month to grieve with and support family members and other survivors, including Noga’s sisters, Meytal, 23, and Maayan, 26.

Both sisters, who lived in separate homes in Be’eri, hid in their safe rooms for nearly 12 hours, terrified. They kept in touch with the rest of the family on the group chat until Israeli soldiers were able to rescue them, according to Rubinstein, who shared the WhatsApp messages with J.

The sisters have been staying at a hotel near the Dead Sea with other survivors from their kibbutz since Oct. 7, Rubinstein said. They cannot go back home.

On Nov. 7, Maayan visited Washington, D.C., with a group of Be’eri survivors, speaking on Capitol Hill about Noga, Shiri and Ilan. According to a video shared on Instagram, Maayan spoke with members of Congress, including Rep. Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, and asked them to advocate for the release of all the hostages.

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A post shared by Meytal Weiss (@meytal_weiss)

“Both their parents are gone, their little sister is gone, both their uncles are gone, and one of their cousins, and who knows how many of their friends and people they grew up with and neighbors,” Rubinstein said. “It’s insane. It’s like they’re survivors from Auschwitz, where the whole family is killed, and they’re the ones that survive.”

Rubinstein, a New York native whose own father was a Polish Holocaust survivor and whose mother was born in Haifa in 1942, does not make that comparison lightly. After witnessing the global antisemitism and support for Hamas on display since Oct. 7, Rubinstein fears that history may be repeating itself.

“It seems like it wasn’t just an incident of terror,” he said. “It’s like the Nazis are rising again.”

Rubinstein feels as if the Oct. 7 terrorist attack that killed an estimated 1,200 people in Israel is already old news to many Americans. Their focus is now on the escalating war with Hamas in Gaza with the rising Palestinian death toll and not on the dead or missing from Israel, he said.

Rubinstein had last visited Be’eri in 2020. Now, the idyllic memories of the visit with birds chirping and flowers blooming haunt Rubinstein every day. He is fixated on the photos of Be’eri he took on his phone, comparing them with what the kibbutz looks like now in images sent to him by family members who were allowed to return briefly to Be’eri to see what was left of their loved ones’ homes.

“It’s not a burned-out house. It’s an exploded house,” he said, showing J. photos of his cousin’s home with rooms so blackened from explosives it’s impossible to identify what he’s seeing.

He also shared a photo that Noga had sent on WhatsApp from inside her safe room, showing where Hamas bullets had pierced a wall.

“My daughter talks about Noga a lot,” Rubinstein said of Anabel, who attends Brandeis School in San Francisco. He said Anabel remains hopeful that Noga will be reunited with her sisters.

Meanwhile, Rubinstein worries about what brutal treatment Noga may be enduring in captivity.

“I’m trying not to visualize what went through her mind when she saw [Hamas approaching],” Rubinstein said, growing emotional and briefly covering his face with his hands.

To show solidarity with his family in Israel, Rubinstein has draped a large Israeli flag above his garage doors, facing the street. He placed another on the back of his two-story house, visible to cars driving by.

He ordered a pack of 300 smaller Israeli flags and attached them to telephone poles along the route to school so Anabel can see something positive amid all the trauma his family is experiencing.

“I want her to see as we’re going down the hill and going to school,” Rubinstein said. Hanging the flags and putting up the hostage posters are his way of being supportive and useful in a situation he knows he’s unable to control.

He said he feels isolated and hasn’t met any others in the Bay Area who lost family members at Kibbutz Be’eri. He’s looking forward to arriving in Israel.

“I’m here,” Rubinstein said, thinking of the thousands of miles separating him from his Israeli relatives. “I can’t even give anybody a hug.”