Posted on November 17, 2023
I’m Shir Achdut, 19 years old, in my second year of preparatory studies before I’m inducted into the army.
In the past four weeks, I’ve been volunteering anywhere I can, and there’s a sense of dynamism in the air. We heard that there’s a hotel in Netanya that evacuees from the Gaza Envelope arrived at and I immediately went up to Netanya with friends and we activated a war room to care for the families who had just then arrived from the front line. A war room for everything: clothing, hygiene products, shoes, and even games and something sweet for the kids, all with the aid of donations that good people brought. Throughout all hours of the day, people arrived, some of them still in shock. A meaningful encounter that I had in the first week was with a pair of girls who arrived late in the evening, when we’d already thought to close. I was absorbed in organizing things and when they entered the room, I immediately asked them, “What do you need? We’ll take care of you!” And they said, “A hug.” I immediately understood that this was the entire point of our being there: to look at people with “embracing eyes” and tell them that we’re here [for them].
After a week and a half of being in Netanya, an application came to us from the Welfare Ministry in the field that the hotels at the Dead Sea needed organizing work. We packed up our bags and went down to the Dead Sea hotels. We went from room to room with the objective of making some order of the chaos, to understand what kind of population was found in the hotels – if there are disabled people or seniors, what ages the children were – in order to transmit that information to the Education Ministry so that a school could be opened for the children, facilities made accessible for the disabled, and which doctors needed to arrive, which rooms needed visits from mental health professionals specializing in trauma, etc. A very meaningful feeling. And also, there, under all of the reasons why they needed us, the true reason that we went from door to door in hotels was in order to say to our brothers and sisters: We’re here with you together. How can we lighten the time you spend here? With what can we help? A feeling of responsibility in its entirety.
This is the feeling of dynamism that I spoke about at the beginning – where they tell us that we’re needed, we’ll take our things and go. It doesn’t matter where and it doesn’t matter what’s required.
With blessings for quiet days for us and for all of our siblings in the Diaspora.
