Victory means sovereignty, Part 1: Yehudit Katsover, the Hebron sit-in, and beyond

Yehudit Katsover has been fighting for the establishment of sovereignty over the whole of the Land of Israel. This is where her story began.

Yehudit Katsover told me the remarkable story of the re-establishment of the Jewish town of Hebron in 1979.

She related that it was decided that, in the middle of the night, 13 women and their children would enter Beit Hadassa, the abandoned hospital in Hebron, and just stay there. Prime Minister Menachem Begin was known to be a gentleman who would not harm women and children, would not expel them. They were right.

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Let me introduce you to Yehudit Katsover and Nadia Matar and Women in Green and the Sovereignty Movement. We begin with Katsover. In Part 2, I will tell Nadia Matar’s story. And Part 3 will complete the journey from the establishment of the Sovereignty Movement to the present day. A final chapter will outline what extending Israel’s sovereignty to Judea and Samaria will mean for Jewish and Arab residents of the region.

Katsover’s story opens in Romania. What follows is her journey leading up to the Beit Hadassa sit-in and then her meeting with Matar and the beginning of their work together. We talked by Zoom and I have edited the interview for length and flow.

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“A Light like no other”

I was born in Romania, 78 years ago, to a family of ultra-Orthodox Zionists. My parents were part of the Agudat Israel Workers' Movement, deeply committed to the Land of Israel. The carpets in our home were rolled up, literally, in anticipation of aliyah [moving to Israel]. We were always waiting for the call to come home.

That call came in 1960. I was twelve. Stepping off the ship in Haifa the day before Passover, I remember being hit by a light unlike anything I had ever seen. The light of Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel]. I’ve traveled the world since, but no other place has that glow. Something about it is holy. The hills shimmer. The air sings.

The port authorities tried to send us to Dimona, but a man from Bnei Brak — a religious activist — pulled us aside and said, “You’re religious people. Go to Bnei Brak. Your children will stay religious there.” He was right. We lived with my aunt in a cramped apartment at first, and later moved into a two-bedroom place. My parents worked hard — long hours, little money — but they were grateful. We had arrived home.

I trained as a teacher, and when asked where I wanted to be placed, I answered, “Dimona.” This was 1966 — before the Six-Day War. Back then, Dimona was another world, a development town, dusty and overlooked. But to me it was an adventure. I joined a religious girls' seminary as dorm mother and a teacher. That’s where I met my husband, a local sabra [native-born Israeli]. He’d grown up herding sheep, the child of Holocaust survivors from Poland and Germany. We married just before the 1967 war.

I’ll never forget those days of war — the tension, the fear. We huddled in the shelters in Dimona, not knowing what was coming. And then — victory! The whole country seemed to erupt in joy. Suddenly, Jerusalem was ours again. Hebron was ours once more. It felt like the gates of history had swung open. The impossible had become real.

After the war, my brother-in-law took us to Hebron for a wedding. It was the first Jewish wedding held there since the 1929 massacre in which 69 Jews were murdered and the survivors fled for their lives. As we walked the streets, he said, “We’re going to build a city here.” My husband, Zvi, just laughed. But two years later, we moved to a new neighbourhood of Kiryat Arba, adjacent to Hebron. We were among the first families and I was pregnant with our second child. Zvi Katsover later became mayor of Kiryat Arba.

Those early years were hard — water shortages, poor infrastructure, no real roads. We felt like pioneers. But everything felt possible. We were building something eternal.

That’s when I met Rabbi Moshe Levinger. He changed my life. He had the fire of the prophets in him — fearless, stubborn, filled with love for the Jewish people. He asked me to be the cultural coordinator for Kiryat Arba. That role led me deeper into the ideological work toward the resettling of Hebron. We organized events, programs, classes — but more than that, we built spirit.

Then came Beit Hadassah.

In 1979, I joined twelve other women — mothers, teachers, homemakers — and we entered the old Hadassah Hospital in Hebron with our children. The hospital had served both Jews and Arabs before the 1929 massacre. It has been abandoned ever since. We wanted to return, to reestablish a Jewish presence in the heart of Hebron, where Abraham bought the land on which he buried his wife, Sarah.

We climbed in through a window at night, using a ladder. We brought mattresses, canned food, diapers, everything we’d need. Miraculously, not a single child cried. The soldiers stationed upstairs didn’t realize we were there until the next morning. I remember them opening the door and blinking in disbelief: babies crawling, children playing, pots simmering on little gas burners.

The regional IDF commander, Fuad Ben-Eliezer, issued a simple order: “Whoever is inside stays. Whoever leaves, doesn’t come back.” That was our home for the next year.

It was rough — rats, mold, no electricity or running water. We’d carry jerrycans of water up three flights of stairs. We’d bathe our kids in plastic tubs and reuse the water for mopping. We set up a makeshift school in the corner of a hallway. There was illness — hepatitis, lice — but we held together.

That first Shabbat was unforgettable. The men from Kiryat Arba came to stand outside the building. The army wouldn’t let them enter, so they sang Shalom Aleichem from the other side of the fence. Their voices floated up to us. It felt like the gates of heaven opened.

We stayed for a full year, under impossible conditions, until tragedy struck. In 1980, six yeshiva students were murdered while returning home from prayers at the Cave of the Patriarchs. That horror finally moved the government. Prime Minister Begin legalized our presence, and Beit Hadassah became a recognized Jewish site once more. We later expanded into the Avraham Avinu neighborhood, and other parts of ancient Hebron. It was a slow, uphill struggle — but we never retreated.

In 1984, I began working for the Department of Education as a regional supervisor. I held that job for over twenty years — from the First Intifada through the Oslo years and the Disengagement. I saw the system from the inside, what it was doing to our youth. I saw the split between the Torah world and the nationalist world, between religion and state. It pained me deeply.

Katsover meets Nadia Matar

The expulsion from Gush Katif in 2005 was the breaking point. I saw teenage girls being dragged from synagogues. I saw government trucks hauling away mezuzahs. That same year, I met Women in Green’s Nadia Matar. She was already a force — fierce, smart, brave. We stood on a hill near Alon Shvut, overlooking a spot where Arabs were rapidly building on land, overtaking it. And we said, “Never again.”

From that moment, we began working together. Not in protest — in construction. We studied maps, learned land laws. We learned to distinguish state land from private land, survey land from trust land. We never built on private Arab land. We never wanted to.

Instead, we worked with what was ours — land owned by the state, and the region was overwhelmingly state land; there was very little privately owned land.

Together with many volunteers, we established farming outposts, gardens. We built on the hills, not to provoke, but to preserve. We planted roots where others saw only politics. People mocked us at first. “It’s just a few women with flags.” But we grew. We succeeded.

The key was persistence. That, and love.

The State of Israel still doesn’t fully understand the war being waged on its soil — not with guns, but with deeds and maps and foreign funding. But we do. We’ve seen it up close. We’ve stopped it — again and again.

I sometimes speak to young women now. They ask, “How did you do it? What gave you the strength?” I tell them: faith. Not just in God — though that always — but in our purpose. In our right to be here. In our people’s unbreakable connection to this land.

We aren’t trespassers. We aren’t colonizers. We’re the children of Abraham, coming home. And we are not leaving.

At this point, Women in Green was not yet the Sovereignty Movement. Parts 2 and 3 will fill in the gaps.

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