‘I had to come to Israel’
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‘I had to come to Israel’

Two sibling pairs talk about becoming IDF lone soldiers

Agam and Yarden Dadon are with their parents, Anat and Avi, in Israel.
Agam and Yarden Dadon are with their parents, Anat and Avi, in Israel.

“Sorry, I have to run,” Agam Dadon said calmly during a recent video call.

We were discussing her decision to leave Fair Lawn after high school and enlist in the Israel Defense Forces through Garin Tzabar, an organization that supports lone soldiers before, during, and after their service.

She had to run because sirens were wailing on the northwest kibbutz where her “garin” — seed group — of future soldiers is housed, and she had to get to the bomb shelter ASAP.

“Did you hear the booms?” she asked when she returned a few minutes later. “They were pretty loud.”

Being under fire from Hezbollah only makes Agam, 19, even more determined to defend her country. Although she was born and raised in New Jersey, her parents are Israeli and she is a dual citizen.

And she’s not alone; she is following in the footsteps of her 23-year-old brother, Yarden, who also came to Israel after high school through Garin Tzabar and served in the Air Force. He’s now studying at Reichman University in Herzliya.

Their parents, Anat and Avi Dadon, raised Yarden and Agam in a home immersed in Israeli culture. They miss their kids terribly but encouraged them to take this unusual path.

“I’m so proud of them,” Anat said. “I want my kids to stay in Israel and live Israeli lives. There is where our roots are.”

Yarden earned top grades and received several scholarship offers but didn’t feel ready for college when he graduated from Fair Lawn High School. Going to Garin Tzabar informational sessions convinced him that this was the direction he was seeking.

“I thought, at worst, the army gives me a few years to think about what I want to do when I get back and, at best, I continue on to a career after the army,” he said. “I felt that to grow into the person I wanted to be, I had to leave home.

When Agam Dadon arrived in Israel, her brother Yarden surprised her at the airport.

“I had to come to Israel.”

It was a bumpy road for Yarden, though, when his garin arrived at a remote southern kibbutz in the Negev Desert in 2020. That was during the pandemic — because of covid, they ventured out only twice in three months.

The novelty of the isolated sandscape wore off quickly. By the time the garin moved on to a three-month intensive Hebrew immersion program at the northern IDF training base Michve Alon, only a handful were still aboard. Yarden and just one other member of the original garin continued using the southern kibbutz as their home away from home during their military service.

Yarden did, however, serve in a meaningful capacity at a southern Air Force base, performing critical server maintenance. He even took part in a joint training exercise between the Israeli and American air forces in Las Vegas.

He planned to follow up on his military experience by majoring in computer science. But there was another bump in the road: All Israeli institutions of higher learning scrambled to revise planned offerings due to thousands of students and faculty away on reserve duty for many months. Yarden had to be content with the economics and entrepreneurship track.

“One of the lessons of life in Israel is that you’ve got to suck it up; you have to have a Plan B and a Plan C because everything that can fail, will,” Yarden said.

Nevertheless, he said, “I see myself planting roots here in Israel, having a family, and settling down. We had a wonderful life in America with our parents, but it was very sheltered. I appreciate the freedom here, being able to make my own decisions and having control over my life.”

Agam’s experience so far has been smoother, aside from the red alerts that send her scurrying for shelter at least three times a day.

Like her brother, Agam felt she needed “a little break” before continuing her education, and October 7 gave her additional impetus to join Garin Tzabar and ultimately the IDF.

She proudly listed the IDF as her destination on her graduating class “commitment page,” which the Fair Lawn High School administration took down after receiving “a bunch of hateful messages” in response.

Sisters Shiraz, left, and Shelly Bendor of Cresskill both joined the IDF.

She felt this decision was unfair; she would have preferred leaving the page online even with the negative comments. They didn’t bother her, she said. “All that mattered to me was that my close friends were able to help me when I was struggling and doubting that I was doing the right thing. At first, they thought I was crazy, but now they’re very proud and supportive.”

She has come to believe that “Garin Tzabar was the best decision, because I don’t think I would have been able to do this alone. They provide a support system to help with everything. I always knew my real life would be in Israel, and I felt this was my best way of getting there. I needed the push of reality, a wakeup call.”

Her 16-person garin is close and committed. “We are all best friends,” she said. “The war is hard, and at first we didn’t have a shelter and had to be evacuated to Tel Aviv for a week, but we all coped together.”

In December, her garin will go to Michve Alon, and then she’ll begin her service; she hopes to be accepted into a search-and-rescue unit.

“At first, I was scared of being a combat soldier, but after seeing the eagerness of everyone in my garin wanting to do it, that motivated me too,” she said.

Agam — her name means “lake” — said that she missed having grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins around when she was growing up. She, her brother, and their parents went to Israel to visit Anat’s mother and Avi’s father and other relatives once a year. Now she sees them frequently.

Anat Dadon came to the United States 27 years ago and Avi came 34 years ago. Avi also has three older sons — two live in Israel and the third is in Fair Lawn. Anat said the couple hopes to return to their homeland in about two years, after Yarden finishes university and Agam finishes military service.

“My goal is to give my kids a home in Israel,” Anat said. “We feel this is the right thing to do.”

The Dadons are not the only sibling pair following a similar road back to Israel.

Another local example is sisters Shiraz and Shelly Bendor, born to Israeli immigrants Hagit and Arik and raised in Cresskill, in a Hebrew-speaking home, with many Israeli expat families nearby.

Agam and Yarden Dadon are with their grandmother, uncle, and cousins at Agam’s welcome ceremony for Garin Tzabar.

Shiraz, now 22, completed a year-long military prep program — “mechina” in Hebrew — after graduating from Cresskill High School. She served as a combat engineering instructor in the tank corps for two years and recently moved to Tel Aviv and started university studies.

Shelly, now 19, followed Shiraz to the same mechina. But her experience was different because the program, based on a kibbutz near the Lebanese border, sent participants home after just a week and a half, because of the Hezbollah attacks that started on October 8, 2023.

“I volunteered for a week and then my parents flew me home until things calmed down,” Shelly said. “After about six weeks, we realized the war was going to take a long time, so I came back.”

The program had relocated to a different kibbutz. It moved back to its home base on January 1 with the goal of assisting people still living in the area. Shelly pitched in by caring for the kibbutz’s horses and helping in the toddler daycare as well as volunteering with the elderly at a neighboring kibbutz.

“We felt, why not come back home if we can?” she said. “It’s a very livable place. We did have sirens but not too many to disrupt our daily routine.” She was speaking from Ra’anana, where she completed a Garin Tzabar program after her mechina finished last spring.

She could have returned to America and entered the college to which she’d deferred admission, but she decided to stay in Israel and recently was accepted into the army as a combat engineering instructor.

Not everyone agreed with her choice; even her grandparents in Tel Aviv “thought I should go home and be comfortable,” she said.

“It’s hard for the older generation to understand why younger people now want to make aliyah, but we see it as a privilege to serve our country,” Shelly said. “Although I could have gone to college here without drafting, we were encouraged in our mechina to improve and learn and become strong before going into the army to have a meaningful service.”

These values were already taking root in Shelly in her early teens, when she was an active member of Hashomer Hatzair – the Young Guard, a Labor Zionist Jewish youth movement. “They have activities all year, but it was in the summer camp in Liberty, New York, that I met my best friends,” she said.

The summer before her junior year, she went to Israel on a Hashomer Hatzair leadership-training program, and she took on leadership responsibilities in the northeast branch of the organization during her last two years of high school.

Shelly acknowledges that the path she has chosen is foreign to most of her peers from Cresskill High School.

“My close friends fully understand it, especially the Jewish ones,” she said. “But most don’t know that all Israelis draft at 18 and don’t understand why I wanted to do it. I took a route that’s super different from them, and from more distant friends I got some unpleasant remarks. I think the most mature thing is to hear them out and ask them to hear you out.

“You’re not going to convince anyone, but you can try to educate them and move on.”

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