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TEMPLE B'NAI AVIV | ON A MISSION IN ISRAEL
Dropping in to help members of a Weston Synagogue visit Israel with supplies and a morale boost for soliders and villagers
by Beverly Bidney, The Miami Herald, September 24, 2006
When Weston Rabbi Samuel Kieffer heard one of his Israeli friends had been driving to the Israel-Lebanon border with supplies for Israeli soldiers in July, he realized the conflict between Israel and the Hezbollah guerrillas would be different from the skirmishes of the past six years, since Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon.
After a cease-fire was declared on Aug. 14, the spiritual leader of Temple B'nai Aviv wanted to help Israelis who had suffered through the month of brutal fighting.
On Aug. 27, Kieffer and temple members Barry Schecter, David Kessler and Michael Nyman took suitcases loaded with clothing, candy and other items donated by the temple and went to Israel for a four-day Solidarity Mission.
"We wanted to help individuals without going through a big organization," Kieffer said. "We are one people with one heart. When one of us is in pain, all of us feel it."
The group met with wounded soldiers and their families in a Haifa hospital, with Israelis throughout northern Israel, where civilians bore the brunt of the attacks, and with soldiers near the Lebanese border.
In the town of Kiryat Bialik, the group met with Rabbi Mauricio Balter, from Argentina, who leads a community of hundreds of Argentine families. They had spent most of the month living underground in shelters as their town was pummeled by Katyusha rockets. At a destroyed preschool for disabled children, donations from B'nai Aviv made sure all the games and toys will be replaced.
Calling Balter ''a dynamic and inspiring man," Kieffer said: "He conducted three bar mitzvah ceremonies in the shelter."
At Kibbutz Or Haganuz, Kieffer and the others saw homes pockmarked by shrapnel from a rocket that landed near a playground where children had been playing 10 minutes before the attack.
"There is no military significance to this little kibbutz," Kessler said. "It was just a random act of violence and terror by Hezbollah."
The mission continued in the north and happened upon a group of soldiers conducting an inventory of their supplies. Lior Zagury, Kieffer's friend who had inspired the mission, approached the soldiers, who were astonished to see the Americans there. The group offered candy and muchappreciated new socks and underwear, for which the soldiers thanked them repeatedly. In turn, Kieffer thanked the soldiers for serving the Jewish people.
"The soldiers told us we gave them the strength to carry out what they had to do," Schecter said. "They didn't know that people around the world cared about them. It seemed to rejuvenate them."
"It's one thing to write a check," Kessler said. "It's another to... go over there."
The group stopped to say Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, at a makeshift memorial for 12 soldiers killed by a single rocket. Flowers, letters and photographs marked the roadside site near the Lebanese border.
Kieffer and his companions had been to Israel before as tourists, but this visit was a different experience. They marveled that many of the Israelis they met, war-weary but resilient, already had begun to rebuild their homes.
"It was an emotional trip," Schecter said. "It has changed me in ways I haven't completely figured out yet. South Florida is like living in fantasy land. We don't live in the real world. I have so much respect for the Israeli people."
Although Kieffer had been to Israel more than 40 times, he said this was the most meaningful trip for him. "The future will judge us not by what we say, but by what we do. This was the time to do."
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