Volunteering in Israel
New Jersey Jews describe what they’ve done to help since Oct. 7
After October 7, Daniel Barenholtz, an attorney who lives in Teaneck, wanted to help. He remembered one of his high school teachers, Mr. Gissinger, talking about how he had gone to Israel to volunteer during the 1967 war and had worked in the fields.
“He is one of the first people I thought about after October 7,” Mr. Barenholtz said, although he hadn’t been in touch with Mr. Gissinger since he was in high school in the 1980s. “He really inspired me to go. It seemed like now was our chance.”
Then the volunteer Montana Cowboys garnered media attention when they flew to Israel to help farmers harvest crops. “When I saw them go over, I thought I should too,” Mr. Barenholtz said.
So he went to Israel in November and looked for volunteer opportunities. He found some posted on WhatsApp groups, but they were all in Hebrew.
He spent two weeks in Israel and for much of that time he did agricultural work. He also volunteered in a kitchen where he and others “prepared thousands of sandwiches each day for soldiers.” During that time, he also connected with other English speakers who were trying to make a difference.
It quickly became clear to him that “there were other Americans who were having a hard time finding ways to contribute,” Mr. Barenholtz said. They “were all scrambling to find ways to be useful, with more or less success.” He thought it would be helpful to have a clearinghouse where all the volunteer opportunities could be found. “We knew they were out there,” he said. “That was clear from all the Hebrew WhatsApp groups. But to a lot of people that was less accessible, and it wasn’t organized in any way.
“There were just dozens of different WhatsApp groups that an Anglo wouldn’t necessarily be able to find or access easily.”
He wanted to do something to make it easier for Americans to find out where to help — and he realized he could do that after he returned to New Jersey.
Soon, another volunteer connected him with Yocheved Kim Ruttenberg.
On October 7, Ms. Ruttenberg was living in Dallas and working in construction sales. She had grown up in Baltimore, gone to college in Florida, and moved to Dallas after graduation because she had friends there.
Her brother was a lone soldier in Israel, and suddenly he was fighting in a war. “I woke up in the morning and I just couldn’t function, I couldn’t believe what was going on,” Ms. Ruttenberg said. “And I decided I needed to be in Israel.”
She raised about $17,000 in five days on social media, filled 23 duffel bags with supplies for soldiers, and flew to Israel. She landed on October 20. Her plan was to be there for two weeks. She spent time with her brother when she could, volunteered, and visited friends.
Three days before Ms. Ruttenberg was scheduled to leave, “I called my job and told them I can’t bring myself to come home,” she said. “I just had a gut feeling that I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t imagine getting on the flight. Like how could I go back to normal life? Life isn’t normal and I’m supposed to go home and pretend like everything is okay?
“I knew that there was something I could do to help. I knew there was something I could do to make a difference in this country. And my brother was here, and my friends were here, and they were fighting a war. And we don’t have other family here.”
When she canceled her flight, Ms. Ruttenberg didn’t know what she was going to do to make a difference, but “it felt like a pull,” she said. “It was an actual pull in me that was like, you just can’t leave. I can’t explain it, I don’t know what it was, I had no plan, I had no place to stay, I didn’t know what I was going to do, and thankfully I ended up really just finding exactly what my purpose in life is.”
She continued fundraising for supplies and then got involved in distributing them. And she started trying to make it easier for English speakers to find volunteer opportunities.
Hagit Greenberg Amar, who lives in Israel, was helping source and distribute gear when Ms. Ruttenberg’s brother went to her home to pick up some things for his unit. He mentioned the work his sister was doing and suggested the two connect. Ms. Amar and Ms. Ruttenberg met and decided to open a Facebook group together. They started the group on November 12 and called it the Sword of Iron – Israel Volunteer Opportunities.
“The idea was to centralize everything going on,” Ms. Ruttenberg said. Like Mr. Barenholtz, she had seen that “finding volunteer opportunities was chaotic. They were posted in Hebrew WhatsApp groups that were hard to find. It was like a mess. You only knew about opportunities if you really knew where to look and who to get in contact with, and even then it was still hard.”
They decided Facebook was a good place to start “because there are already people on there,” Ms. Ruttenberg said. “A website didn’t make sense because you have to drive traffic to it, but there is already traffic on Facebook. So we created the Facebook group. Then Hagit connected me with Hebrew WhatsApp groups, and I was able to google translate and post volunteer opportunities.”
Mr. Barenholtz connected with Ms. Ruttenberg shortly afterward. He told her his thoughts about the need to organize the many opportunities for volunteers that were constantly coming up and about his ideas on organizing the information in a user-friendly format that would make it accessible. And he offered to provide some logistical and financial support so she could afford to stay in Israel and dedicate some of her time to sourcing and organizing opportunities, and to updating Sword of Iron.
“Yocheved is charismatic, and she really took charge of it,” Mr. Barenholtz said. “She turned out to be the perfect person for the project.”
Ms. Ruttenberg started personally checking out some of the volunteer opportunities she was translating and reposting on the page. Volunteers started to report back and post about their experiences with different organizations. She started highlighting popular opportunities, sourcing opportunities in different places, and answering questions from group members about them. And she started posting inspiring video messages.
“Yocheved manifests optimism, encouragement, and determination to volunteers and would-be volunteers visiting the Facebook page, no matter how dark times have been,” Mr. Barenholtz said. “She recruited a core group of volunteers in Israel who have dedicated countless hours to keeping the page updated, informative, and useful.”
Sword of Iron grew quickly. “We started gaining a lot of traction, and within about a month we became the place to go for volunteering,” Ms. Ruttenberg said. “Some of the large organizations that plan organized trips have told us that they use the page.” The group offers a wide variety of opportunities, including farming, preparing meals, visiting injured soldiers, and coordinating activities for displaced families.
Ms. Ruttenberg attributes the page’s fast growth to its interactive nature. “There is a face to the page,” she said. “It’s not a page where you post and don’t get an answer. And everybody on the page is supportive. It’s really coming down to our values.”
People on this page are united by their connection to Israel and their commitment to volunteering, she added. “The core of what we are is a community. We’re a community of people who understand each other, understand the pain, understand the feeling, understand the pull to come help, and we’re united over the same mission.”
The group now has more than 38,000 members, and Ms. Ruttenberg just won the inaugural Z3 Bridge Builder Award for her work with it. According to z3project.org, the award honors “remarkable efforts to bridge divides within the Jewish community.” Mr. Barenholtz is one of its moderators. He still supports the work and discusses strategy and ideas with Ms. Ruttenberg. “Daniel definitely enabled the growth,” Ms. Ruttenberg said. “Without his help the group probably wouldn’t be where it is.”
“It’s satisfying to see the growth,” Mr. Barenholtz said. And to see the many messages users have posted about “how the group inspired them to volunteer in Israel and helped them find opportunities, and about it being the most satisfying experience of their lives.”
The group is geared to users who want to organize their own trips. Because it’s “a do-it-yourself model, we don’t have a way to know exactly how many people have used the group to volunteer,” he said. But based on the number of posts about users’ volunteer experiences, “we know it’s at least a few thousand.”
Dan Brody lives in New Milford and used the group’s resources early on. He felt a strong connection to Israel all his life and has relatives there. After October 7, “I really felt that I had to do something,” he said.
Mr. Brody was involved with some of the local efforts to help but thought he could be more useful in Israel. “I felt like I’m doing a lot here, helping pack supplies, helping send out duffel bags, and helping secure equipment, but I felt like I need to be there to see how I could make a difference in person.” He went with his two brothers and their brother-in-law.
Mr. Brody heard about different missions going but could not find one that met his schedule, so he started looking for volunteer opportunities online. He came across the Sword of Iron and “I started literally putting together a schedule on my own,” he said. “We were only able to do it because of the way this group was organized and how other users were so giving of their information.”
He used information Ms. Ruttenberg had posted and information others had added. “What’s amazing is how Yocheved has created a group and facilitated its growth,” he said. “I would look at her spreadsheets to get ideas, and then I would see someone made a comment about another opportunity and I would reach out to that person.” He was grateful for both the “valuable content and the valuable connections.
“There were even times when something fell through while we were in Israel, and I was able to go back to the group and fill that space. That was amazing.”
Mr. Brody and his family were in Israel for a little over a week. They packed sandwiches for soldiers and displaced families, spent a few days picking strawberries and another day picking oranges, and helped paint some of the buildings on one of the kibbutzim that terrorists had attacked. “Every day we were doing something, and you really felt like you were making a difference.”
Afterward, Mr. Brody posted videos of the trip and people started asking him for information about their trip. The group has “kind of turned into a force of its own, which is amazing,” he said
Benzi Jaffe of Teaneck went to Israel at the end of November and found the group “helpful in providing information of where to volunteer in real time,” he said.
Before he went, he had felt “incredibly helpless sitting in New Jersey and watching the news,” he added. He has family and friends who were serving in the IDF or simply “having to manage the daily bombardment of rockets while living through the trauma of the war.” That made him feel responsible for helping.
Mr. Jaffe was in Israel for about a week. He cooked for soldiers and refugees, helped sort vegetables at a warehouse, and picked oranges on a farm owned by a family that immigrated to Israel from Iran in the 1950s. The farm is now run by the original owners’ grandchildren.
He found the volunteering so meaningful that he described the trip as “more therapeutic and selfish in nature than it was helpful for the country.”
Lori Nagel lives in Highland Park and spent three months in Israel last winter. She had planned to go back before October 7 but after the attack decided to change the focus from touring to helping. Ms. Nagel had been in Israel in March 2023, visiting her son, who was there on a gap year. “I had not been to Israel in over 50 years,” she said. “This was really my first trip as an adult.” She broke her ankle a week before and went in a walking boot. “It just was not the trip I envisioned,” she said. “As soon as I got out of the boot, I said I’m going to go back to Israel and I’m going to take the trip that I wanted to have.”
She started planning. She wanted to visit friends who live in the north and other friends who live in the south, and she wanted to explore Jerusalem. And her son was planning to stay for a second gap year. “I had all these visions of vacation that did not include getting up at 6 a.m. so I could be at a kitchen,” Ms. Nagel said. “But I pivoted. I said I’m still going, and now I’m going to do what I can to help.”
She found Sword of Iron on Facebook and used the group to find volunteer opportunities. “Yocheved is enthusiastic and inspiring,” Ms. Nagel said. And she found the group to be a helpful resource. “Things are categorized and streamlined. There’s a spreadsheet with tabs you can click on for different types of opportunities.”
Ms. Nagel wound up doing a lot of food preparation. She volunteered one or two days a week with a group “that had taken over an industrial kitchen in a cooking school and was preparing meals for 800 to 900 soldiers.” Twice a week, she helped a woman who ran a small catering business and “had just put it on hold and was using her resources to cook for families with someone in the reserves.” She also spent time making sandwiches at Chabad of Katamon, which had “a lovely, lively group of volunteers.”
“It was really fulfilling,” Ms. Nagel said. She enjoyed helping the smaller, “sort of more grassroots” organizations. “For me, I felt like it made a bigger impact,” she said. When her husband, Walter, came for a few weeks, the family volunteered together at Pantry Packers, a larger organization that delivers food to poor families.
“It just was so wonderful to be there,” she said. “Everybody appreciated us.”
Malka Marna Erlich of East Bruns-wick used Sword of Iron to find ways to help during her trip to Israel in March. She went with her family to see her son, who was on a gap year, to visit family, and to show support for family and other Israelis. “We wanted them to know that we’re not afraid to be here now and that we’re here for them, because as isolated as we’ve felt, I’m sure Israelis feel even more isolated at times.”
She found the Facebook group “incredible,” she said. “There were so many opportunities to help” and she was able to find “volunteer opportunities for our whole family.”
The extended family volunteered on a farm picking strawberries, and the owner of the farm was “super appreciative,” Ms. Erlich said. “Crops were going bad. You could see the rotten fruit. You knew you were making a difference.” They also helped sort supplies that had been donated for soldiers and displaced families.
“It was amazing,” she said. “It felt great. I felt better there than at home, because at home you feel helpless in many ways. It just felt good to do.”
Ms. Ruttenberg feels it’s important that volunteers keep going to Israel. “Tourism has dropped significantly, and we need people in the country,” she said. “We need people coming, and giving back, and volunteering. The farmers need it, and Israelis need to see that people are here and supporting the country.”
This is “the most meaningful thing I’ve ever done in my entire life,” she concluded. “I’m just incredibly grateful to be doing it.”
For Mr. Barenholtz, last November “was a uniquely powerful time to be in Israel. People were still scared, traumatized, and dealing with rocket barrages, but there was a strong feeling that they were in it together and everyone in the country would need to watch out for one another. From the young men who flew back to the country to join their units in combat, to people of every age and religious persuasion joining mass sandwich-making operations to keep soldiers fed in early chaotic times, there was a feeling of extended family unlike anything I had ever experienced before on a national level, or even ever read about historically. To be able to volunteer and be a small part of it was a hugely rewarding experience. Based on the comments people leave on the page, it seems many others have felt the same way.”
He said that he hopes other people will take the opportunity to contribute, and that they will find it as meaningful as he did.
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