As soon as he woke up on Oct. 7, 2023, Adir Schwarz knew that he had to do something. By noon, the Jerusalem city councilman had helped to create an organization called the Jerusalem Civilian Command Center. By nightfall, it had 100 volunteers and some office space.
It would soon grow to 7,000 volunteers and take over the entire building—a new and half-empty building with safe rooms loaned to it by Jerusalem’s Nissan Nativ Acting School.
Informally calling themselves Hamal, or the War Room, they jumped in to address many concerns the government couldn’t handle fast enough, Mr. Schwarz told The Epoch Times in a March interview.
The government didn’t have a protocol for an extensive evacuation. Civilians left homeless by Hamas’s surprise attack needed shelter and clothing. Waking up to the horrifying attack on their border community, some had fled literally in their underwear.
And they needed warm clothing in Jerusalem, at a higher elevation and with a cooler climate.
Once they had that clothing, they needed laundry done. Hotels are set up to turn around large numbers of sheets and towels, not people’s clothing.
About 60 Jerusalem hotels lodged 30,000 displaced people for free, and they needed activities. Mr. Schwarz termed a hotel “a refugee camp with a lobby,” which was uncomfortable for longer-term residency.
Hotels couldn’t necessarily feed that many people—whole families crammed into a single room—three meals a day.
Some of the hotels were bed and breakfasts. What about lunch and dinner?
Hamal volunteers soon were producing 40,000 hot meals a day.
The War Room found new problems emerging as fast as they could create departments to handle the old ones.
Israel has a tradition of spontaneous organizing. Jerusalem had also had a War Room during the COVID-19 pandemic. And it’s not the first time Jerusalem has hosted families fleeing violence around Gaza, Mr. Schwarz said.
They found their office space on Facebook on Oct. 7. The building was a new construction, and it had safe rooms. The acting school welcomed families who needed to take shelter.
Mr. Schwarz said they asked to set up a table with a couple of laptops.
Pretty soon, he said, they'd taken over “every corridor, room, and electric socket on six floors of the building.”
They opened a warehouse. They started a housing department even before official evacuations began.
“We started a mental health department and we started a funeral department,” he said. “Whenever needs came, we opened another department, and another department, and another department.”
Within two or three days, they had about 20 departments, managers, and a hierarchy. They stayed open around the clock for the first few weeks.
“The pace, the tempo, was unbelievable,” Mr. Schwarz said.
They had security guards. They had to post a bouncer to turn away volunteers because they had too many.
Many Israelis wanted to help.
Alon Shamir, a 26-year-old veteran and engineering student, works the counter of the War Room’s coffee shop.
“I came here on the ninth of October,” he told The Epoch Times. “I felt useless. I needed to do something. I just came here in the morning and stayed here.”
“It’s for me, and the bonus is that it helps other people,” he said.
“A lot of what we did was matchmaking,” Mr. Schwarz said. For instance, Hamal connected those needing laundry done with those willing to take it home and do it for them.
And they did it all along with “an exit strategy,” he said.
They knew the government would sooner or later take over what they were doing. They planned for and welcomed that. The state took over feeding the evacuees, and Hamal didn’t have to do it anymore.
They wanted to deliver services while allowing recipients to maintain dignity and self-respect, he said, pointing to the thrift-shop-style clothing store set up in Hamal’s lobby.
“You can get lunch in a box and get diapers and baby formula in a box. You don’t want to get clothing in a box,” he said.
“Clothing has a lot to do with what we call in Hebrew ‘kavod adam,’ human dignity. ‘Kavod,’ which in Hebrew means honor, dignity, respect, pride, is a big thing in time of war.
“When something terrible happens to you, you don’t want to feel a burden to anybody. You don’t want to lose yourself. You don’t want to lose agency in every aspect of your life.”
Clients’ freedom to pick out what they like helps do that, he said. Volunteers carefully sort through donations and don’t allow anything with stains or holes to get in.
“There are some very nice items here,” Mr. Schwarz said. “Everything is branded. You can see the logo.”
Israel has a long tradition of what he calls “civil society”—citizen groups emerging spontaneously to get something done, he said.
Mr. Schwarz said when he woke up on Oct. 7, he was sure that what he was hearing were false alarms.
But he said the second time, when he checked it out on social media—including in Arabic, which he speaks—he understood this was something big.
“Like nothing we are familiar with,” he said. “We were familiar with a lot. We’ve been through the Intifada. We know terror. But this was like nothing we knew already.”
It wasn’t just civilians who needed help. Israel’s unprecedented call-up of 400,000 reserve troops strained its military logistics.
The group was one of many that stepped in to collect and then donate goods—clothing, cold-weather gear, headlamps, gloves, and sleeping bags—for reservists.
On Oct. 7, the first order of business was getting reservists to the front.
Jerusalem’s buses weren’t running because it was Saturday—the Sabbath—and calling the bus drivers back in was a ticklish matter, as most were Arabs.
By early Saturday afternoon, Hamal was arranging rides for reservists reporting for duty.
They gathered supplies—winter gear, lifesaving equipment—for soldiers, then focused on civilian needs.
In January, with the government having taken over the role of helping civilians but with many reservists getting home leave, Hamal turned its attention to soldier clients with mental health or family problems.
Creating a “civil society” has been a part of Mr. Schwarz’s political mission.
Just 30, he is already in his second term on the city council and is the head of his party’s list there.
The descendant of immigrants from Scandinavia, he served three years as a paratrooper. An injury exempts him from reserve duty.
His day job—city council members get no salary—is raising money for nonprofits, so he knows what charities do and how they do it.
He talked of the challenge of Jerusalem’s changing demographics. Only a minority of the city population are what he calls “Zionists.”
The city now has an ultra-Orthodox majority, he said.
Ultra-Orthodox men almost never serve in the military, half of them don’t work to instead devote themselves to prayer and study, and they neither support the Jewish state’s creation nor participate in the broader society, Mr. Schwarz said.
Many more residents are Arabs.
A shrinking number are secular Jews, he said, the “Zionists” most committed to the broader state, to its growth and future.
Modern Orthodox men work, serve in the military, and often side with secular Jews politically, he said.
The city government has met their needs less in recent years, Mr. Schwarz said.
In a 2023 interview, he noted that it was opening yeshivas and closing kindergartens, catering to its ultra-Orthodox constituency but not to others.
Jerusalem’s economy is stagnant, he said. Wages are half those in the Tel Aviv metro area.
Young people leave, albeit for different reasons: the religious for more affordable housing, the secular for opportunity and quality of life.
Mr. Schwarz said in that interview he sought a Jerusalem that was “Zionist, productive, and tolerant.”
“If we want to have a brighter future for the working class, we need to strengthen dramatically the civil society here, and not be dependent on City Hall,” he told The Epoch Times.
Groups such as Hamal succeed in Israel because “this is the startup nation,” he said, citing the bestselling book about Israel’s entrepreneurial side by Dan Senor and Saul Singer.
“We are very problem-oriented,” he said. “This is why we complain the most, but we can do the most.”
