Being in Israel, Part Two by Barbara Chalom

April 7, 2024 was a very different sort of day. Honestly, most of it, I don’t know how to process yet.

This morning I packed up, and after breakfast and a little walk around the Center City of Jerusalem, I was picked up by Yisrael to go to Yad Vashem. He had mentioned he was a tour guide there and so I had said I would like to go back there. I came to Yad Vashem with the Momentum trip I was on the first time I came to Israel in 2017. He had told me no one is really going there right now since tourism is down. He was so right, when we went today, it was virtually empty. There were groups of soldiers and police trainees and a small group of students, but that was all. As we were leaving there appeared to be a tour bus of people from Korea about to take a tour.

It was such a different experience than before as Yisrael pointed out so many things that I had not heard on my previous tour (that does not mean they were not said, I may have just missed them) about the shape and structure of the building and the intention of the architect. We went to a newer exhibit, the book of names, and found the mother of the child that Rebekah was twinned with for her bat mitzvah project. The scale of the horror of the holocaust never fails to move me. It is one thing to know of it, another to see its evidence in front of my very eyes. 

It is such a powerful, sorrowful place.

From there I went with Yisrael to a solider’s funerul at Har Herzel. There are no words for the sorrow expressed by the family there. The wail of his mother when his coffin came into view not to mention the breaking of his father’s voice while saying Kaddish will always stay with me. At some point over the weekend an Israeli reminded me, they do not have a choice, all of their children that are of age have to serve. I had known that before but it is another thing to see people facing this reality in war time. Especially now that I’ve seen soliders that I had met as children. 

After a run in with the official checking tickets on the light rail - long and unimportant story, but to suffice to say I’ve had a good taste of the government’s inefficiencies firsthand -  I finally made it to the train to go back to Ben Gurion airport to meet the JNF group to begin the our trip.

We had dinner and I met a few people - from all over the US - and we had an introduction and overview meeting in the hotel. It was there that I really understood that we aren’t just volunteering in the sense that it is nice that we came here, but it actually has been essential work for the communities that we are assigned to help. In other words, it is not just fluff for a few pictures. We will actually be replacing a workforce that doesn’t exist in Israel right now. On that note I passed out fully dressed once again, exhausted emotionally and otherwise.

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Monday, April 8, 2024.

After breakfast, which was early, we hopped onto our assigned buses and our group went to Bet Ezra, a farming community that was originally settled by displaced Iraqi Jews, where I worked in a green house to coax cucumber vines to grow upwards by clipping them to a tether coming down from the ceiling. It was hard work for four hours. I will remember to Bless the workers that help bring my food to my table the next time I eat anything grown from the earth.

After four hours of that we were off to Alexander Muss High School and I promptly passed out on the bus. Part of JNF’s current mission is to help those that are continuing to be displaced from the north of Israel, so we were packing gift boxes for soliders we will meet tomorrow with gifts purchased from small businesses from the north. A staff member from JNF spoke about the days after 10/7 and the work that JNF did to get people out of danger and where they needed to go. Of course time after time I hear from Israelis - they were not surprised that they were attacked - but no one understood the scale of what they were facing in real time.

From Muss, after lunch, we traveled to Soroka Hospital. As I was walking in I remembered that a family friend that I used to work with at Suburban Hospital had gone to medical school in Israel. Her grandfather and my mother in law knew each other from Egypt. (We figured this out one night when we were working together.) Since I was walking into a hospital in Israel and I knew she had left the states to go to medical school here I was thinking of her and decided to send her a message.

I heard right back from her, Raquel, and of course, beshert, Soroka is where she is training and she was off today and lives right across the street and within 10 minutes we were reunited. You cannot make this stuff up. Israel. 

Our speaker at Soroka is the head of their Emergency department and he talked to us about 10/7. Just in terms of numbers - 671 trauma patients brought injured in the first 24 hours, 42 of whom where children and 135 were critical - it is unfathmable. People that worked the night shift on 10/6 did not go home. The physician speaking to us had come in, after stopping multiple times for rocket sirens, and did not sleep again until 10/9. He told the story of one pediatric critical care doctor he worked along side for a shift that day. At some point, the doctor had said he had to go check on his community where his wife and children lived. He was murdered on the way there. There were others that were killed and injured from their own hospital because this is the community where they lived, not just where they worked. I heard about the first of many surgeries they did on 10/7 was on a Bedouin woman who had intentionally been shot through the abdomen, which murdered her unborn child. She survived. 

There was a whole slide show. Stretchers full of blood. Piles of belongings. It was what I knew but it was another thing to see. 

We came back to the hotel and ate dinner while listening to a representative speaking to us from the 1 news agency that attempts to gather facts and get press out in Israel - which is a non-profit. As a young woman, she spoke about 10/7 and trying to get press out while seeing photos of her own murdered friends pass before her eyes. She grew up in the U.S. and says she has been unable to maintain many of her friendships there as she has been deemed a colonizer and racist by people she has been friends with for years prior. We live in a time when news can be whatever someone tells you it is. All I will say about this, because it is not the purpose of this blog, is check your sources everyone. Check your sources. 

With that I am exhausted and going to bed.