A Story Shaped by Hand

We are Lee and Oded Amitai. We live in Netiv HaAsara – the last moshav before the Gaza border, where the land meets the sea and the fence runs close.

On October 6, 2023, we celebrated our son’s Bar Mitzvah surrounded by family and friends. The next morning, we hid in our safe room while our neighbors were murdered.

We survived. Many did not.

In the months that followed – displaced, grieving, searching for ground beneath our feet – we found our way back through wood.

Oded began gathering fallen trees from the land around us. Burned trees. Broken trees. Trees that had stood through everything this place has been through – and were still here. He shaped them slowly, by hand, listening to each piece, allowing it to find its form.

In our work with wood, we choose to keep it as it is. We do not fill holes or hide cracks. The marks the wood carries – time, wind, and the life it has lived – remain part of the piece.

We work with the wood according to what it asks to become. For us, this is not only an aesthetic choice – it is a way of looking at life: not to erase the cracks, but to keep creating from within them.

Like the wood, we have been shaped by life and continue to grow

Written in the handwriting of Yael Leibushor z”l – a memorial initiative Ot.Chaim

I began painting Circles of Life onto the wood – hand-drawn patterns of dots and lines, slow and deliberate, one dot at a time. A return to stillness. A return to breathing.

Together, we discovered something: The wood does not forget where it came from. And neither do we.

Every mezuzah, bowl and wall piece we create carries the memory of this land – its seasons, its wounds, its resilience. We do not impose form. We listen. We allow each piece to become what it needs to become.

We create for anyone whose heart is connected to the Holy Land and its story – for anyone who wants to hold something real. Something rooted. Something that grew from this land and was shaped by human hands that know both loss and gratitude.

We carry a simple wish: that every home connected to the Land of Israel – will hold a piece of the Gaza Envelope. A piece of the land. A piece of the story. A piece of the heart.

From our home – to yours.