Airlifts from angels
Jews in America mobilize to equip Israel’s soldiers
NEW YORK – Rabbi Josh Diskin was hosting two Israeli soldiers in New York on the Shabbat that Hamas attacked Israel.
“Unfortunately, a lot of their friends were murdered,” said Diskin, director of the Israeli Division at The Brownstone, a leadership organization for young Jews and Israelis, which is housed in a five-story brownstone in downtown Manhattan.
“We felt stuck, like how can we help people [in Israel] from here [the US]?” said Diskin, 30.
Having grown up in Israel, he realized he could utilize his connections with the army at the airport and with customs agents to help send supplies to Israel. Diskin connected with a group of a dozen Israeli-American volunteers who were banding together to send supplies to their Israeli soldier friends.
“Let’s use The Brownstone to bring everything there, and have volunteers pack and ship the stuff,” Diskin told the Israeli-Americans.
The Brownstone Initiative has so far raised $200,000 and sent more than 8,000 items to IDF soldiers.
After news of the Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel on October 7, Jews around America took action: some raised money for established organizations, others sent IDF reservists home, and many – from New York to Miami to Chicago and LA – wanted to ensure that those Israeli soldiers were equipped to go into battle.
As Israel called up more than 360,000 reservists, it seemed like half of them were sending requests to Americans for supplies, from the tactical, like ceramic vests and helmets, to the practical, like batteries, socks, and thermals.
“A lot of stuff is going to waste,” Diskin said. “People sent thousands of towels and toothpaste, and it’s a shame; they weren’t needed,” he said, noting that other items got stuck in America or at the airport, or at customs. Or worse, the IDF refused thousands of pieces of tactical equipment because they weren’t up to military standards.
“Be very careful giving to small organizations or people you don’t know,” Diskin said, noting that the Brownstone Initiative had set up an official requisition form for IDF units requesting what they needed. On the other side, they created both a donor form and an Amazon wish list, where anyone could buy, say, 650 tactical gloves, 1,000 LED headlights, 750 kneepads, which are among the 40 items most requested by IDF units. More than 200 IDF units have filled out requisition forms.
“We decided at the beginning not to send tactical supplies,” said Shlomit Shalit, a New York-based Israeli project manager for a social impact start-up who is the Brownstone Initiative’s operations manager.
Sitting back on a microsuede couch in front of a bookshelf filled with religious and Jewish books in the building’s main floor lobby, instead of millennials socializing or eating Shabbat dinner and discussing lofty Jewish ideas, half a dozen volunteers milled about among the plastic tables piled with supplies such as scarves, phone banks, zip ties, headlamps and batteries.
“Attention everyone, the batteries must be packed separately,” blared Tomer Mendler. “They can’t go in a box with anything else!”
A marketing executive from Tel Aviv, Mendler, 27, is the initiative’s logistics manager, making sure only essential supplies were sent to Israel.
“We don’t just send random stuff,” he said, fielding a call from a volunteer at Costco purchasing items not available on Amazon.
In fact, Shalit was tasked with making sure everyone had a specific job, with jobs ranging from dealing with customs, to contacting army units, to ensuring requested supplies were still needed, to coordinating drivers, to updating the Excel spread sheets, to coordinating the 100 volunteers.
“The packages are here! The packages are here!” Mendler told the volunteers, who ran to the front door to get the boxes, slice them open, sort them into the proper piles, and start inventorying them, before repackaging them and sending them off to Israel.
motorcade was accompanied by 20,000 people – including 1,000 Jews.
The village itself only has a population of 15,000 people, said Darawshe, and people from all the surrounding communities came to pay their last respects. Young people stayed by his grave for hours after the funeral. His Jewish and Arab colleagues who had been at the attack and 50 others from his ambulance company wept over his grave for a long time, he said.
“They gave him a very respectful good-bye and remembered him for his bravery and his compassion, and for keeping the oath,” he said.
In a rare occurrence, the imams from all three of the village’s mosques spoke, and the word that kept coming up was “shahid,” he said.
While for Israeli Jews that word might conjure up images of suicide bombers and terrorists, its true meaning is a pure soul that goes straight to heaven because of the deeds they did in their life, he said.
“The political association is a minor association, and the Israeli perception is very ignorant and twisted,” said Darawshe. “Because each and every one of us should aspire to die a shahid, [which means] dying as a pure soul, meeting your God with a pure soul for the deeds you have done in your life. You are promised heaven because of the good deeds you have done in your life. That is how we understand the word “shahid,” how we have been brought up to understand it, and that is how we relate to Awad: a pure soul who didn’t lose his humanity, and he refused to save himself, in order to save lives of the wounded.”
Awad is survived also by his father, Musa, and a brother and three sisters. And though they are strong believers in God and destiny, which helps them put Awad’s death into perspective, the sorrow is very deep.
“They continue to break into tears every couple of hours. We never know what will be the trigger, just a memory of him. Words of comfort actually bring tears because [it brings back memories],” Mohammad Darawshe said.
Friends and extended family have found, over the past few days, that the best way to support the family is just to be with them, to sit with them in silence and let them talk if they want to and smile about the memories they have of Awad: how good he was, how human he was, and how proud they are of his actions and choices. In his grief Musa, the father, says he, too, would like to die like his son, saving the lives of others.
“We are all proud; his whole community is proud,” said Darawshe.
AND YET, the Arab community as a whole is not in a comfortable place right now, he said.
“War is not a comfortable place for us to be in,” he said. “Maybe in time of peace we can act as a bridge for peace, but at the time of war we are less comfortable. Whenever we are in the middle of a tragedy, our tragedy is that our state is at war with our people and we don’t want to pick sides. We pick the side of humanity, and that is what Awad picked.”
Still, he said because of the inability of Israeli authorities to understand the complexity of their national ethnic identity, some 100 Arab citizens who made comments of empathy for the Palestinian civilians in Gaza were arrested. In addition, the Arab-Israeli legal rights center Adalah noted that 40 Arab-Israeli university students received letters of expulsion or suspension from their academic universities for social media posts deemed to be supporting Hamas.
On the other end of the spectrum a bicycle shop owner in the central Arab-Israeli city of Taiba who donated 50 children’s bicycles to evacuees from the South had his shop burned down. A crowdfunding campaign for him amassed $150,000.
According to the nonprofit Mossawa 15 Arab citizens, most of whom were from unrecognized Bedouin villages in the South, have been killed since the beginning of the war. Majed Ibrahim, 19, died after he was wounded by shrapnel that landed near a mosque in Abu Ghosh from a rocket fired by Hamas toward Jerusalem on October 9. He died in Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem several days later.
“We can’t see Palestinian human beings getting killed and not feel towards them,” said Darawshe. “That does not mean we are acting against Israel by voicing our pain and anger about the killing of Palestinian civilians. This is our human duty. Just as it is the human duty of Arab doctors to save Jewish people.”
DARAWSHE WAS among family members of those massacred and taken hostage who were invited to meet with US President Joe Biden during his brief visit to Israel on October 18. Darawshe described the meeting as “very compassionate” and said he had been able to highlight the value Arab citizens of Israel bring to the medical profession.
Tensions surrounding the war remain high, and Standing Together, an Arab-Jewish social activist group, noted in a social media post on October 19 that some members were arrested in Israel the night before for hanging posters which read “Jews and Arabs: We will get through this together,” and police in Haifa violently dispersed a demonstration against the war in Gaza and arrested six people, including two Jews.
Following the massacre, Standing Together started a group “Arabs and Jews Together” to bring together Jews and Arabs to organize initiatives and solidarity actions, and help ward off acts of revenge and violence. Their WhatsApp group has 800 members.
Darawshe noted that despite the calls by Hamas to Arab citizens of Israel to pick up knives and weapons to “kill the occupier,” nothing of the sort happened.
“How many Arab citizens took up that invitation? No one. Not a single person,” he said.
A lot of that had to do with the preparation by civil society organizations, such as Givat Haviva, in light of the riots of July 2014 and May 2021, following Israeli military operations in Gaza, and even before that, of October 2000, in which Israeli police killed 13 Arab citizens during demonstrations in northern Israel, at the outbreak of the Second Intifada, he said.
Now his teams at Givat Haviva have shifted gears into crisis management, he said, and they are in almost daily contact with hundreds of people, including mayors, business leaders, teachers, and youth leaders in some 78 cities and towns throughout Israel, to keep their hands on the pulse of the daily atmosphere in the cities, he said.
“We trickle down this message to keep the neighborly relations,” he said. “We are in touch if they hear of something before it grows, so we can speak to the people [before it gets out of hand]. We find this control to be very helpful, preemptive engagement. This is real-time active engagement to try to reduce damage so the day after we don’t have that much damage to fix and repair. This is the lesson we learned after the October 2000 clashes that took a decade to heal.”
This preemptive strategy was put into action in 2006, and he believes it is the reason that, despite occasional flare-ups, Jews and Arabs “know how to live together most of the time.”
“It is not an ideal situation; we are improving with time. We continue to make mistakes, sometimes by leaders, sometimes by individuals. But we are trying to do something... with a sense of more inclusiveness, more tolerance, and more interdependency that is developing, yet there are a lot of missing components – especially equality. We don’t have equality, and that is the worst part,” said Darawshe.
There are also politicians like National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who called for a “Guardian of the Walls II” against Arabs following the massacre; politicians who make a “nasty career” by trying to create more friction between communities, he said, but this time mayors – including the mayor of Lod – are doing the exact opposite.
“All mayors and activists in mixed cities are working with great heroism, preventing an escalation which would cause the loss of more human lives and that will derail us from the successes we have had in Jewish-Arab partnership and the building of a shared society,” he said.
For now, on a more personal level, together with Awad’s more extended family, Darawshe is concentrating on how to commemorate his young cousin’s name and legacy. Some thoughts have been around about a scholarship for Jewish and Arab paramedic or medical students, or a dedicated room at the Givat Haviva campus for Jewish-Arab dialogue between youth.
“We are tossing up ideas of how to maintain his legacy of heroism in medical care and his humanity in Jewish-Arab cooperation,” said Darawshe. “That is what he stood for, this is the lesson he has taught us, and this is the lesson that needs to be taught over and over again.” •
NOT EVERY effort is as finely tuned as the one in New York. Across the country, in Los Angeles, many synagogues and individuals started collecting donations simultaneously, unbeknownst to one another.
“When the whole thing started, I got a call asking if I could pack suitcases at my synagogue for soldiers, to go to Israel,” says Rachel Kahn, 26, a kindergarten teacher from Miami living in Los Angeles, who got married last month in Israel, where she’d served in the IDF.
Kahn headed to the Young Israel of Beverly Hills and started repackaging everything and inventorying it, and after that it “sort of snowballed,” she said. She and two other friends quickly realized that donations were being sent all around the city, some to synagogues, some to people’s houses, and they needed to be centralized.
Kahn secured two warehouses – one for military and medical supplies and the other for the nonessentials, including clothes (“so much socks,” one volunteer said); baby supplies, such as formula, and toys; and hygienic supplies, such as shampoo and deodorant. Kahn said they sent 15 pallets of military and medical equipment with a cargo plane chartered by Israel Friends, and are sending another five pallets this weekend.
As far as the nonessential equipment, dozens of volunteers are sifting through the warehouse to sort what will be useful to the civilians of Israel.
“We have so much, but it’s not a priority,” said Kahn, noting that they hope to send the nonessential supplies by the less costly container method in the next month.
“A lot of what I learned from this process is that, as a Jewish nation, it’s our passion to help each other, even though some of our efforts are not well spent – we need to be intentional,” she said, noting how she’s learning on the go. “It’s so amazing to come together in unison; the call to action as a nation is insane,” she said. “We all want to be with Israel, to mourn with Israel, and all this feels really, really helpful, when we felt so helpless.”
IN FLORIDA, the effort reached the highest level: Gov. Ron DeSantis dedicated the Florida Division of Emergency Management, under the leadership of director Kevin Guthrie, to mobilize cargo around the state, and funded cargo planes and logistics centers to transport millions of dollars’ worth of donated medical equipment and supplies for soldiers to Israel, said Joe Zevuloni, the Israeli-American philanthropist and Florida community organizer who helped found Strong for Surfside, which managed the volunteer catastrophe relief center after the condominium collapse in 2021.
“Unfortunately, we are experienced in this kind of thing, but we never imagined we would have to mobilize this way for the State of Israel,” he said.
“Whenever a plane is available, we send it,” he said, noting that DeSantis gave an executive order that the planes return with Florida residents from Israel.
Zevuloni put together a command center to run the multiple warehouses throughout the state, where organizations like Yedidim USA and restaurateur Lior Hazan run the center to coordinate donations from community organizations, which sent supplies like thermals and socks (“to help keep soldiers warm”) as well as medical supplies from local hospitals in conjunction with Sheba Medical Center in Israel, which distributes equipment to the troops.
“We don’t waste resources,” he said. “Whatever we send is licensed
and approved in Israel, and is only received from acceptable vendors.”
Of the hundreds of pallets sent to Israel, the most heartbreaking item requested was from ZAKA. “I can never be proud to send body bags to Israel,” he said.
The Hamas attack on Israel was “something of historic proportions, and our response must be overwhelming, united, and of historic proportions the likes of which the world has never seen before.”
Other American Jews are focusing on smaller operations – some even on one particular item.
“I was trying to think about what jewelers can give,” said Aleah Arundale, a jeweler in Chicago who runs the Facebook group “Jewelers helping Jewelers,” which has 30,000 American industry professionals, about 15% of whom are Jewish, she estimates, noting that many of the Christian jewelers around the country also wanted to help. So far, they have sent upwards of 2,000 watches to soldiers in Israel.
“The connections we have is how we make a difference,” she said. “There’s not enough Jews in the world, but you can reach out to your friends; you give what you can, and together we’re able to be awesome.”
Another group, Operation Tourniquet, started with an IDF soldier’s request in Miami to bring back to Israel combat tourniquets. A group of five or six people raised money for the purchase of thousands of tourniquets from a supplier in Philadelphia, and sent them to Israel with individuals traveling there, said Gilad Kabilo, a venture capitalist who lives in Miami and Ra’anana and is helping distribute the tourniquets to army units in Israel.
Dalia Strum, whose family owns Army Navy USA, a Queens, New York, store that was helping source the tourniquets and ship them to Israel, and who has sent tens of thousands dollars’ worth of military supplies to Israel from their store, was also working with larger organizations like the UJA to arrange some local initiatives to raise money for Israel.
“I don’t think it’s an either-or – it’s a both,” she said about the debate by American Jews whether it’s preferable for people to give to an established organization with large budgets or to smaller, new initiatives whose sole mission is supplying soldiers in the IDF. “I think every organization has a different initiative,” she said. “Everybody is hurting, everyone needs help .... We have to think about every single part of this; we’re only at the beginning,” she said. “It’s more productive to diversify.”
Operation Tourniquet had to diversify, after the IDF purchased 100,000 combat tourniquets in the US, so the group is now moving to blood-clotting gauze, said Kabilo. “We’re trying to avoid hysteria and burnout and make the most impact by focusing on one high-priority item at a time,” he said.
HYSTERIA IS hard to avoid during wartime, especially for the parents of soldiers in the army. That’s how Aliza Israel got involved in trying to import rain gear for 800 soldiers, a story that exemplifies how difficult it is for an individual to get military supplies to Israel.
With three sons and a son-in-law serving in the IDF, the NY-born marketing manager from Gush Etzion realized that it was soldiers’ families who were helping the troops. To raise money from the US and England (where her husband is from), Aliza connected with The Ari Fuld Project, a nonprofit dedicated to continuing the legacy of Fuld, who was murdered by terrorists in 2018.
“If Ari had been alive, he’d be leading the charge right now to help soldiers have everything they need, and we’re just trying to continue his legacy,” said Stephen Leavitt, director of projects at the nonprofit.
The Fuld Project helped Aliza build a fundraising page online, and she began sourcing army needs around the country. But there was one item proving impossible to find locally: rain gear.
“On Sunday I spent two hours going into army supply stores, and I was frustrated and happy that the IDF had taken everything suitable and the only things left were bright yellow,” Aliza said. “The army is doing its job, but there’s room to help.”
But getting the help was harder than it seemed, even with tens of thousands of dollars of donations. She spent days searching for military rain gear abroad, with the help of “tireless” volunteers from Los Angeles, New York, and London. Each time someone would find an item, they would send her a photo, and she would send it to her military contacts to see if it met IDF standards (“No, because there’s writing on the sleeve,” one army contact said). Then it had to be forwarded to the Fuld Project to see if the price was right. By midweek, Aliza was getting increasingly desperate to find rain gear for 800 soldiers.
“I had no clue when I started this that it would be so difficult to source,” she explained.
By the end of the week, most of the rain gear was on its way to Israel, with the help of a British volunteer, Jonathan Shine, who flew from London to Germany to pick up 25 boxes and help send them to Ben-Gurion Airport, where they would hopefully be allowed in the country. Whatever the result, the effort was helping her cope.
“We’re all doing our best – trying not to focus too much on things that are difficult to think about,” she said. “I want to try and keep my mind on the things I can do that are positive and have an impact.”