Anticipation

On Sunday, February 18, I will leave for Israel as part of a support mission sponsored by the Rochester Jewish Community Federation.  We are all traveling independently and will meet up in Jerusalem on arrival; I leave Rochester in the late afternoon for Boston, and will fly on El Al overnight Sunday night, arriving at Ben Gurion airport midday on Monday.  Our first joint activity will be a dinner Monday evening.

The purpose of the visit is to show our support for Israel, to become better informed, and to be helpful in multiple ways.  Each day will include a volunteer work activity, filling in for workers who left their jobs because of the callup of military reserves.  We will work at the Pantry Packers where we will pack food for Israel’s poorest families.  We will make hospital visits to those wounded in the war, and help with thinning of blossoms on peach trees at Kfar Warburg.  We will have multiple meetings with representatives of NGOs and Israeli social service organizations as well as with hostage families and families displaced from the war zones. 

We will visit multiple places, including the Gaza envelope and the Nova festival site. It’s a packed schedule.

I’ll return home the following Sunday, the 25th, leaving Israel just after midnight, and arriving in Rochester at around 1:30 PM Sunday afternoon.

I plan to send notes back to report on the feel and mood in Israel to the best of my ability to explain it.  If you would rather not receive these reports, please let me know.

The next note will probably be Monday night or Tuesday.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Day of Contrast and Emotion

Image
  Tuesday, February 20, 2024 Today was extraordinarily busy and emotionally demanding.   At breakfast we saw a very large number of families with children.   More than 200,000 Israelis have been displaced, and many of them are living in hotels all around Israel, including this one in Jerusalem.   They were evacuated from homes near the northern border with Lebanon because of Hezbollah shelling and from the Gaza envelope because of the war there.   The children and parents are packed into hotel rooms, the children’s play area is the hallways and elevators, and there is a considerable amount of chaos in the hotel.   There is no end to these living accommodations in sight; the children are being schooled. We had a briefing on what to do if and when the sirens sound.   Depending on where in Israel we are, we will have from 15 to 90 seconds to get as safe as possible.   All buildings have recommended safe areas—in the hotel, it’s stairways.   ...
Read more

Am Yisrael Chai---The People of Israel Live

Image
Saturday, February 24, 2024 Our day started at noon with a meeting with an educator named Scott Copland.   He spent an hour with us putting the founding of the State of Israel in historical perspective and discussing the relationship of diaspora Jewry with the people of Israel.   It was a very worthwhile discussion. In the mid-afternoon we traveled to Tel Aviv, and began with a visit to a neighborhood called Florentine after Solomon Florentin, a Greek Jew, who purchased much of the land in the 1920s.   It’s an eclectic neighborhood with lots of cafes and artists’ workshops, but the reason for our visit is that it has become a center for graffiti art, and the art has been especially powerful since the Hamas invasion of October 7.   The first piece we saw was this powerful sarcastic protest against the inept response of the IDF to the attacks: We have an anguished Superman and the title, “Don’t Panic…the IDF protects us.” This artist has lost three, and then fo...
Read more

The Sadness of Young Death and the Joy of Shabbat

Image
  Friday, February 23, 2024 The sadness of young death and the joy of Shabbat.   Another remarkable day of contrasts. Rochester has a very close connection with its sister city, Modi’in.   The city is located about halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and we spent most of the day there, celebrating the connection and mourning with its residents. We met a delegation of Modi’in officials, including the mayor.   Modi’in is a very young city, totally pre-planned and built on vacant land.   It has grown rapidly, from nothing in the mid-1990s to well over 100,000 people today.   The location is the same as the Hasmonian Dynasty city of the same name, which ruled Judea in the Hellenistic period.   The leaders of the city and Meredith Dragon, the CEO of the Rochester Jewish Federation and the leader of our delegation, spoke.   We were introduced to two couples, both of whom lost a child in the IDF on October 7.   The Goutin family spoke of...
Read more