‘One of those moments in Jewish history’: 10 days as a wartime volunteer in Israel
Scenes from a volunteer trip to Israel. From left to right: Alison Leigh Cowan brings fresh-grilled burgers to Annette Pimentel who is serving them at an army base in Modi’in; Tehillah Blech Harris helps paint a mural for a bunker used by children at Migdal Ohr; and Cowan with two recent hires from Uganda picking oranges at B’nei Dror. Photo by Penina Blazer; Ilana Sherizen; Stephen Bodurtha
B’NEI DROR, ISRAEL — A friend showed me how to twist the oranges lightly, rather than yank them, so they dropped into my hand without marring the crown. Twist and drop, she said, then repeat.
Seemed simple, but then I was admonished for leaving stems on the fruit that might jab other oranges in the crates. The whole experience gave me new appreciation for the expression “low-lying fruit”: the best shot a short person like me had to support Israel’s war effort seemed to be rooting around underneath the brush to grab the fruit practically kissing the ground.
And don’t be too quick to roll up your sleeves and pitch in — definitely wear long sleeves, and even gloves, to pick oranges. The thorns will get you.
It’s practically a cliché by now: American Jew goes to pick produce on an Israeli farm in the aftermath of Oct. 7, stepping in for Palestinian laborers and migrant Thai workers. Birthright Israel has brought 1,050 volunteers for two weeks of fieldwork or packing produce as part of its Onward program, and expects 2,500 more by the end of March. Ramah Israel is sending five delegations this month and next, ready to repair homes and playgrounds, with more names on its waitlists. Harvard Jewish Alumni and the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance also ran missions that just returned.
Tourism halted after Oct. 7, but Israel’s ministry of tourism says about 60,000 people from the U.S. visited in late 2023. That was far below the 252,000 arrivals from the same period a year earlier, but one difference is that many of the recent arrivals are coming to lend a hand.
“In December, we saw a significant increase in the number of tourists coming to Israel, especially from the U.S.,’’ said Eyal Carlin, Israel Ministry of Tourism’s Commissioner of Tourism to North America. “It is our estimate that almost all arrived for reasons of solidarity and to volunteer.’’
I chose to go with a group of three dozen volunteers from the Jewish Center synagogue in Manhattan, and then improvised a few days on my own. I went both because I felt I needed to do something more than write a check, and because I wanted to hear directly from Israelis in their own words about how their world has changed.
“This is one of those moments in Jewish history when everyone is called upon to serve,’’ said Rabbi Yosie Levine of the Jewish Center, who led our trip.
Farms and orchards throughout Israel have been welcoming volunteers to make up for the foreign migrant workers who fled after the Hamas attack and the Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza who have been barred from working inside Israel ever since. Tal Forte, the B’nei Dror farmer who trains newcomers like me, said the rotating cast of rookies work at about one-eighth of the speed of the 40 highly experienced Palestinians from Tulkarm who used to harvest the moshav’s crops.
B’nei Dror, a small community in central Israel that predates the State of Israel, has hired some new workers from Uganda, who told me they are excited to be getting computer training along with their wages. But the orchard is still reliant on walk-ins. When the coffee truck rolled up mid-shift, the volunteers from Israel made a point of not calling the strong brew “Turkish” coffee – in protest of Turkey’s support of Hamas.
With no clock to punch and angry scrapes to tend, most of the volunteers called it a day after a few hours, leaving Forte to train the fresh reinforcements taking our places. He invited me to take home a bag of oranges as a thank-you but I was reluctant to dip into the precious store, knowing it was needed for local tables. We compromised, and I picked one perfect orange from the pile, whose sweetness I can still taste.
Feeding troops, at rest stops and in the Golan Heights
Some of the volun-tourists now pouring into Israel spend the whole time picking produce. But I did something different each day of my trip.
Up in the Golan Heights, I helped a wedding planner named Noa Levy who oversees the preparation of 1,500 Shabbat dinners each week for soldiers hunkered down near Lebanon. A grandmother named Sarah collected eggs for these meals by darting in and out of hen houses in an evacuated town that has seen rocket fire. My friend brought soup. I helped with the math, making sure the recipients got enough of everything.
Another group I observed, more than helped, is called Tzomet Gilat. It runs a bustling rest stop near the Gaza border to provide tired troops a brief respite from the war with freshly grilled burgers, haircuts and help with laundry. There were lines for the massage tables, and a library of books donated by Yafa Adar, the 85-year-old grandmother taken on a golf cart into Gaza on Oct. 7 who was among the more than 100 hostages released in November.
The Jewish Center’s bus deposited us at the rest stop with a charge to go forth and be useful, but just about every soup ladle and spatula I tried to commandeer was taken. The best I could do was check in on the troops.
One soldier I met, originally from Iran and dusty from his time in Gaza, was eager to know how American Jews were holding up in the face of rising antisemitism. In Israel, people feel they are in this fight together, so the idea of being a Jew with neighbors who have turned on you frightens them.
The soldier also said he wished that President Joe Biden had not pushed Israel to let fuel flow into Gaza, thinking it might have only prolonged the war.
In Jerusalem, I met Gila Rockman, an educator at Shalem College who has spent much of the past three months scrambling to furnish some of the 200,000 evacuees from Israel’s south and north with everything from diapers to Ritalin. At one point, she said, she gave her teenage son her credit card and had him clean out a camping store. When she later sent him out for feminine hygiene products, he did his best but confessed that he was flummoxed by the range of choices.
One surreal scene, illustrating these challenges, unfolded later at the Cramim Spa & Wine Resort, a posh hotel in the Jerusalem Hills that I visited with the Jewish Center’s delegates.
I vacationed at Cramim when it opened a decade ago; children under 10 were not welcome. Today, Cramim has become a crash pad for 300 people, including scads of youngsters careening down its hallways and courtyards. The temporary occupants hail from Shlomit, a religious village about four miles from Gaza — and even closer to Egypt. Its residents had 20 minutes to collect their things when the army evacuated them on Oct. 8.
“Some did not even pack for Shabbat because they thought they’d be back,’’ said one Shlomit resident, Tamar Ratzon. Four of the community’s 80 families are now headed by women widowed by Oct. 7. Another 40 fathers have been called back to the military.
The remaining adults have been helping teach the children and making plans to rebuild the community they fled. Ratzon has been teaching English in the hotel’s wine room. Another class meets in the manager’s office.
“People hear that we are here and say, “Oh, aren’t you lucky,’’ Ratzon said, referring to the hotel’s luxurious setting. “But all we want to do is go home. We are refugees here.”
Praying in hospitals and making shiva calls
Shana Lev, a Manhattanite I met on the Jewish Center bus, said the interactions she was having with Israelis seemed as impactful as whatever hands-on work she was doing.
“Strangers do have the ability to impact on a very personal level,” said Lev, a 73-year-old grandmother, who represents property owners in the construction industry. “Be it a one-on-one conversation with a soldier who shares his concerns or the very personal conversations you have with the mothers of fallen and wounded soldiers, it is as much about listening as speaking.”
Our group’s first stop was Soroka Medical Center in Be’er Sheva, which receives casualties from Gaza. Dr. Michael Bayme, a surgeon, was briefing us about the hospital’s role in the war when his phone pinged. Two helicopters buzzed overhead.
“This is not good,” he said, dashing off to meet the incoming pair of injured soldiers. Rabbi Levine, led the group in prayer for them. Then, we fanned out across the rehab ward to pass out get-well cards from children back home.
Back in Jerusalem, we swung by an organization called Thank Israeli Soldiers that has taken over the basement of the Museum of Tolerance. Volunteers pack up sleeping bags, thermal underwear and other donated supplies for soldiers who are bunking outdoors. I’d shlepped two oversized duffel bags full of items from the group’s wish-list with me on the plane from New York.
Later, we visited an organization called Migdal Ohr that educates and cares for thousands of orphaned and underprivileged children. An artist had outlined large, playful drawings on the walls of a bunker used by the children. We were given cans of spray paint and told to fill in the drawings. We tried to spray within the lines, but I suspect our handiwork had to be redone the moment we left.
That night in Modi’in, some in our group grilled steaks and burgers for an entire army base; I scooped hummus onto plates.
One of the most meaningful stops was the shiva call we squeezed in with the family of Sgt. Yosef Gitarts, who was killed by an anti-tank missile in southern Gaza on Christmas Day.
His mother, Larissa, told us that Gitarts was an American citizen, had emigrated from Russia at 13, and was a gifted mathematician. She proudly held out a copy of a book, Artificial Intelligence for Healthy Longevity, and pointed to the chapter where her son had contributed material about “the utility of information theory.” How much more he might have advanced society’s understanding of longevity had he himself lived past 25.
Gitarts could have landed a computer job in the army rather than the combat role he sought, his mother noted. In the farewell letter he wrote in case of his death, the soldier he “died honorably for my people” and had “no regrets.’’
“I could have chosen to hide and not to come here,’’ he wrote. “But that would go against everything that I believe in and value and who I consider myself to be.”
Gitarts had what his mother called a “clever” touch, even in this farewell letter. He wrote it in a Google doc, but split the URL into two, giving half to his girlfriend in Russia and half to his brother. Each was told to send their string of letters and numbers to his mother if he did not make it home. Only then was she able to piece the link together and open the document.
Knitting hats for soldiers
I had one last mitzvah in mind before packing up. Like thousands of others, I’ve been knitting hats for Israeli soldiers since the war began. If I could find more of the black worsted yarn that the pattern calls for while in Israel, I figured that would give the economy a little boost.
So I popped into a yarn store in Ra’anana, stocked up, and met a young girl there who was new to knitting. I helped her add a few stitches to the hat taking shape on my needles and thanked her for helping keep a soldier warm.
Earlier in the week, my husband and I met privately with President Isaac Herzog, whom I’ve known for decades, and his wife, Michal, at their official residence in Jerusalem. I left one of my handmade hats for them to give to a soldier.
President Herzog has been working nonstop to draf personal letters of condolence to every bereaved family — of those killed on Oct. 7, those killed in captivity, and all the soldiers the war continues to claim. He feels compelled to write because while he and Michal go to as many shiva houses as possible, they are not able to call in-person on all the families that have lost someone in this war.
Presiding from the same office that his father Chaim once occupied, Herzog proudly showed me a gift bestowed on him by President Joe Biden that gives him hope. It is a framed copy of the letter President Harry Truman wrote on May 14, 1948, recognizing the State of Israel — 11 minutes after its creation.
On the back, Biden had the text translated into Gaelic, in a fond nod to the Irish roots that he shares with Herzog, whose grandfather was Chief Rabbi of Ireland before becoming Chief Rabbi of Israel.
“Biden is a Zionist – in his kishkes,” exclaimed Herzog, grateful that America’s leader seems to grasp quite viscerally — in his intestines — Israel’s need to fight threats that are every bit as poisonous to Jewish survival as the Nazi regime once was.
Back home, many people were shocked to hear I’d been in Israel. “Isn’t it dangerous?” they asked. “Is now a good time to go?”
It’s the best time to go, I think.
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