When Hamas terrorists attacked Israel with horrifying brutality on Oct. 7, Israelis responded immediately.
The nation counterattacked with plans of finishing Hamas, which rules Gaza, once and for all.
At the time, Israelis were embroiled in demonstrations over the conservative ruling coalition’s plan to take control of the nation’s liberal Supreme Court—they set that aside, for now, to face the new threat.
Nearly every Israeli knows someone who was killed, kidnapped, wounded, raped, or left homeless by Hamas that day. Almost every Israeli family has a son, father, husband, or daughter already on active duty or called up in the reserves.
Reservists living overseas flew home to go to war. So did Israelis no longer under military obligation but wanting to rejoin their comrades.
Civilians organized themselves instantly to meet new needs caused by the overnight mobilization of hundreds of thousands of people, usually beating their government to the punch.
“We know we have nowhere else to go. We are in the fight of our lives,” Caryn Oberman told The Epoch Times.
The mother of six, with two sons and a son-in-law now in uniform, joined efforts in her community, Yad Binyamin, to provide supplies to soldiers heading to the frontlines. The community sits at a major crossroads.
Mrs. Oberman credits a 10-year-old boy with realizing, as air-raid sirens wailed and cellphone alerts went off early on Oct. 7, that his brothers were probably being called up and that many soldiers would be passing by.
The boy took food intended for Sabbath and holiday meals that day and started giving it away to soldiers at the community’s front gate, she said.
The boy and other community youth then started distributing bottled water.
Then, people realized that the soldiers needed food.
“The community started making sandwiches and bringing food,” Mrs. Oberman said. They’ve now prepared hundreds of thousands of meals, she said, sending food to supplement soldiers’ army rations.
The soldiers “left [with just] a go bag, which doesn’t have much in it. So we started collecting socks and underwear. Our community started a volunteer logistical center,” she said.
Meals and Supplies
Meira Herman, who lives in Jerusalem, said Israeli soldiers aren’t starving. But their rations can be monotonous, with the IDF overwhelmed, supplying hundreds of thousands of reservists simultaneously.She has volunteered to pack meals. A friend told her that his unit had nothing but falafel and rice for two weeks, she told The Epoch Times.
“I don’t think that they’ve ever had this number of reservists respond and report for duty. They’ve never had this kind of numbers. They didn’t have enough to supply everybody,” David Greene of Jerusalem, who gathers goods to donate, told The Epoch Times.
Three of Mr. Greene’s four sons are in uniform now, two in the IDF and one in the Border Patrol. During the family’s telephone conversation with The Epoch Times on Nov. 12, one of his sons, Aaron Greene, had just arrived home on a 48-hour leave with two buddies.
Aaron Greene told The Epoch Times he'd seen supply shortages for helmets, vests with armor plate carriers, kneepads, and gun scopes.
As a reservist, he said, his unit is a lower priority for late-model gear. They have helmets—older U.S. Army surplus ones that don’t fit well—and older body armor that are heavier and less comfortable.
One of Aaron Greene’s friends told The Epoch Times that he was using a Vietnam-era M-16 rifle, albeit one in fine shape.
“Before you go into Gaza, they usually catch you up with better gear,” Aaron Greene said.
David Greene described different channels that donations move through. At the outset, civilians bought goods at local stores to donate. Those supplies, though, sold out quickly.
Mr. Greene started working with Americans. He has a friend in New York City who always knows people coming to Israel willing to take extra luggage. Mr. Greene orders goods on Amazon, ships them to the New York friend, and she gives them to the travelers.
He said he speaks to soldiers or unit commanders to determine what that unit needs. They need everything from boxer shorts and socks to wipes and Leatherman tools to toothbrushes and toothpaste.
“The wipes we bought here in Israel. Everything else I ordered on Amazon,” he said.
Cold weather gear, particularly for soldiers stationed in the north, facing Hezbollah, is now becoming a priority, Ms. Herman said.
“It’s been getting quite cold. We’ve helped a few units get fleeces so they can stay warm. Thermal gear has been requested a lot,” she said.
Mrs. Oberman said Yad Binyamin found steady traffic available to take goods from there to the front.
Some items won’t be found in U.S. Army surplus stores.
“We need 80 pairs of green tzitzit,” Mr. Greene said as he ticked off a typical list that he might try to gather. Tzitzit are observant Jewish men’s tasseled undershirts. Soldiers wear green ones to blend with their fatigues.
Ms. Herman said she was working on a project to tie the tzitzit tassels onto green T-shirts for soldiers. They’re sent to soldiers requesting them.
“You would not believe the generosity,” Mr. Greene said.
A friend just flew in from New Jersey, Mr. Greene said.
Stepping Up
The crisis has created endless needs, disrupting every aspect of life. The Greenes know retired people folding laundry at labor-strapped hotels. Others have gone to farms to help harvest tomatoes, avocados, and olives.Mothers with small children, their husbands off to war, now need child care as they return to work. Some have moved in with grandparents. New childcare programs have sprung up to help them.
Zak Vilschick immigrated to Israel from the United States over the summer. He'll join the IDF in January.
He’s currently in a program for soon-to-be soldiers like himself, called “lone soldiers,” with no family in Israel. Ramat Yohanan, a kibbutz near Haifa, adopted his group. That means they'll call it home while in the army, going back when on leave or for holidays. They’re living there now.
“The kibbutz has changed,” he told The Epoch Times on Oct. 10. “Because all the young men have, for the most part, been deployed on reserve duty.”
Children were tense, and their mothers were overwhelmed carrying on without their husbands.
“Everything’s a little off. Everyone’s very understaffed here. Our supermarket near the kibbutz has long lines and shorter operating times,” Mr. Vilschick said.
He and his pals were frustrated, he said.
“We’re here to draft. Everything’s happening and we’re unable to do anything,” he said.
They opted to pitch in around the kibbutz.
“A lot of that has been helping young families,” he said.
They started a daycare for three hours a day.
“We have arts and crafts and soccer,” giving the moms a break, he said.
It’s not just children who need care. A reservist who Ms. Herman knows has a rescue animal. With its owner called up indefinitely, the blind dog needs reliable care. Ms. Herman took in Coco on Oct. 12.
Some animals need foster care like this. Others were orphaned when their families were murdered on Oct. 7. Some are taking in those animals as well, David Greene’s wife, Kerry Greene, told The Epoch Times.
She said chat groups on WhatsApp list all kinds of volunteer opportunities. She’s seen neighbors gathering new and slightly used clothing for evacuees and mounting a toy drive for evacuee children for Chanukah in December. People donate snacks such as beef jerky and Bamba, a popular Israeli snack brand.
“There are a lot of weddings on the fly. Caterers and wedding planners are just donating their time, their energy, their efforts, anything to get these young couples married,” she said.
Opportunities for Everyone
Some volunteers have put their professional skills to work.Adina Kamien is the modern art curator at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and has a son serving in Gaza.
The first weeks after Oct. 7, she told The Epoch Times, she worked making sandwiches at the Casa Lavi restaurant, which lent itself to donating food to soldiers and others in need.
Then she saw an ad looking for volunteers to work with evacuees at the Grand Court Hotel in East Jerusalem, now housing those fleeing from communities attacked on Oct. 7 or under rocket attack by Hezbollah in the north.
Two educators launched a makeshift school and kindergarten at the hotel.
“It was natural for me to do something in art,” she said.
She got together some other women in their 50s to start an art court for the school, with tables set up for crafts such as gouache, collage, beads, and pompoms, “just simple stuff.”
It started out being open in the morning. As schools reopened and the Ministry of Education took this one over, the project moved to afternoons to give children an after-school activity.
“It’s still like that now,” she said. It’s supported by donated supplies and money, plus help from youth volunteers doing a community service gap year.
Ms. Kamien had the time to do this initially because the art museum halted normal functioning.
Other professionals with disrupted routines were freed up to help as well. Allison Pollock, a health care social worker, found time on her hands as hospitals and clinics cut back non-essential operations.
“So I started working in this hotel with older senior citizens, older adults from Yechini, a Yemenite moshav near Sderot,” she told The Epoch Times. Moshavs in Israel are rural communities, but not collective farms like the kibbutzes.
They’re a tight-knit community, she said.
“They’ve been there for 60 years at least. They all know each other. Some of them married each other’s relatives. They’ve known each other forever.”
They came as young children and have acclimated to Israeli life, she said. But some don’t know their exact birthdays.
Two groups formed, she said, one for those from Yechini and one for those from Sderot. Social workers and psychologists work there to keep acute trauma from turning into PTSD.
Yechini lost five or six people on Oct. 7 but wasn’t as heavily damaged as some other communities, Ms. Pollock said. A man ran from house to house to warn residents. Most hid in their safe rooms for hours.
One woman in her group lives near the front gate and witnessed a soldier killed in front of her house. It’s unclear when they'll return home. A few have been back to keep agriculture going.
Her clients, older, are not that oriented toward therapy. Sometimes, they want to talk, but other times, they feel like it’s all been said.
So she looks for other activities.
“We’re going to have a cooking workshop. There’s apparently a full two-hour process for how you make couscous from scratch,” she said.
Mrs. Pollock has a son doing his regular army service, a daughter doing her service working with wounded soldiers, and that daughter’s twin sister is a civilian working with children after school.
Labor-intensive volunteer projects help in other ways, Ms. Herman said.
When the crisis began, life first turned upside down, with much work halted, schools closed, and people throwing themselves into volunteer work. Now, many return to jobs and businesses, to normal life—but only to a point.
How normal can life be with a war raging, with so many men called up, with so many grieving those murdered, kidnapped, or abused on Oct. 7? She thinks of this time as “the Twilight Zone,” she said.
“It’s a weird time. At the beginning, people needed something to do with their time. Now, a lot of people go to their normal day of work, [but] it’s incredibly hard” to stay focused, she said.
“They need to feel like they’re giving back to someone. A lot of people need to stay distracted, especially if they have people close to them in the service right now.
“It’s good for the soul,” she said. “The worst thing people can do during times like this is sit at home, do nothing, and feel overwhelmed.”
Working with other people and spending time with them helps alleviate the misery.
Mrs. Oberman said her volunteer work helps her cope. As a physical therapist and with her husband a doctor, she’s lately worked gathering medical supplies. Israeli health care has been impacted. The pool therapy she does with the elderly has been put on hold because they can’t get to safe rooms quickly enough under rocket attack.
She wasn’t the only interviewee who told The Epoch Times she isolates herself from news about the Hamas attack.
“I have chosen not to read and not to hear about the horror. I don’t feel like I need to know the extent of how barbaric it is. I made a decision that I am focusing on the kindness and the unity that the people are doing,” she said.
American Jews, she said, “have to know it. I don’t have to know it, because everywhere I go, I see the change in people’s behavior. I can feel it in the air. I see the signs. There’s nowhere you go where somebody doesn’t know somebody that’s been murdered or kidnapped.
“Every now and then, I read a sentence or hear a sentence, and I wish I didn’t know. Because I like the naivete of thinking that nobody can be that barbaric.”
She wants, she said, “to focus on the good in human nature and the good in people, and the resilience and the kindness of what everybody’s doing for each other.” And her volunteer work is part of that.
“If you remember, on Oct. 6, the country was very divided. And literally, that very, very quickly turned. So it’s my own personal choice. I like my bubble,” she said.
