Cartons and connections
Look left, look right, it’s a New Jersey transplant
I shouldn’t have been surprised when the young soldier greeting our group of volunteers at Tzrifin army base turned out to be from Teaneck.
As per IDF regulations, I am not permitted to name her or show her picture. I can only say that S’s warmth, enthusiasm, and obvious passion for serving as a lone soldier made me proud.
As I’ve written before, I have found it impossible to participate in any volunteer activity in Israel without running into transplants or visitors from our former lives in the Old Country. I love that!
The perky teen from Teaneck was one of three English- and French-speaking soldiers assigned to our group. We were there with the Sar-El organization, whose flagship program provides volunteers to the Israeli Logistics Corps.
Since the organization was founded in the 1990s, many northern New Jersey residents (my mother-in-law among them) have come to Israel for week-long or weeks-long Sar-El volunteering on army, navy, or air force bases. Common assignments include packing food rations or medical kits, repairing communication equipment, safety-checking gear, cleaning, and gardening.
Sar-El also offers one-day volunteering opportunities publicized through a WhatsApp group. When I saw a message that 40 volunteers were needed to pack field rations for Passover in one of Tzrifin’s large warehouses, I was one of 43 people to sign up. Six of us from Ma’aleh Adumim set out at 6 a.m. on a recent Monday morning to meet the bus in Jerusalem.
I was delighted to see Alex and Leah Moskovits, former acquaintances from Teaneck. Leah was the librarian at Torah Academy of Bergen County when our two boys were students there in the early 2000s. Now they are happy, busy grandparents living in Jerusalem.
Tzrifin is a huge IDF base near Rishon LeZion (where many moons ago I attended end-of-basic-training ceremonies for my older son and then for my daughter). S and her buddies took us inside a warehouse there, where a gazillion canned goods waited to be packed into 4,000 small cartons. Each carton contains enough staples to provide the shelf-stable basis of meals for one combat soldier for one day.
Given that this was six weeks before Passover, all the goods were certified kosher for Pesach (including legumes such as corn and beans, which most Sephardim eat on Passover and most Ashkenazim do not).
Leah and I, plus my upstairs neighbor Malka (Michele) Shrybman, originally from Long Island, and other volunteers including a Canadian émigré, assembled the boxes that were going to get filled by volunteers sitting or standing along a two-sided conveyor belt.
Making cartons from 9 o’clock till noon, and then again from 1:30 to 3 — during the break they served us lunch — could have been awfully tedious. But our task went quickly and pleasantly because it was accompanied by lively conversations with each other and with the logistics soldiers working with us. And a bouncy playlist filled the air with tunes running the full gamut from Israeli top-10 hits to American golden oldies such as “Another One Bites the Dust” and “Macarena.”
S and her comrades kept the crowd pumped, dancing to the music and taking selfies with us; I wish I could share these pictures, but they are permitted only for personal use and can’t be published online.
Meanwhile, two adorable logistics commanders, not much older than my 17-year-old grandson, kibbitzed with us in Hebrew and in passable English as we folded cardboard flaps endlessly. Because Malka’s name translates to “queen” in Hebrew, they dubbed us the Queen’s Crew and thanked us repeatedly for our assistance.
When one of these uniformed cuties told Malka that he likes Metallica and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, she told him that she was at Woodstock in 1969. Naturally, he didn’t understand, but his face lit up with recognition when she mentioned Jimi Hendrix. She further dazzled him by revealing that the son-in-law of our friend and neighbor Gail — she was, at that moment, working down the line packing containers of chocolate spread — is the keyboardist for Israeli star Ishay Ribo. Music is a universal language.
In what was probably the weirdest Jewish geography coincidence I’ve heard in a long time, we discovered that S had been born in the same European country where Alex Moskovits was born after World War II, but 50 years later. Each had taken the identical geographic route, eventually leading to Israel.
Or maybe it’s not so weird. As I remarked to my fellow box-makers at the head of the assembly line, we really are one big family connected by a sliver of a degree of separation.
And that is the special element that makes volunteering so meaningful, whether it’s picking clementines on labor-strapped farms near Gaza, packing surplus carrots for the needy in Jerusalem, or boxing up kosher-for-Pesach provisions for thousands of hardworking combat troops unable to spend the holiday with their families.
For information on many short- and longer-term volunteering opportunities in Israel, including Sar-El, search “Volunteer Programs” on the Nefesh B’Nefesh website, nbn.org.il.
Abigail Klein Leichman, a longtime Jewish Standard correspondent, lived in Teaneck for 20 years. She and her husband made aliyah in 2007 and live in Ma’aleh Adumim.