SAR Embarks on Solidarity Mission to Israel

A group of 70 SAR students, faculty members, and parents, traveled for a three-day mission to Israel. Participants saw firsthand the many on-the-ground initiatives supporting victims, evacuees, soldiers, and all of Am Yisrael at this critical time.

We experienced the pervasive sense of grieving that could be found all over. At the same time, we experienced the strength of an entire people, bonding over a common mission of supporting each other, from trauma therapists traveling daily to yam hamelach to work with kids from the south to new olim making carnivals for families where a father has been out of the house for thirty days. 

We met with hostage families holding vigil outside of the Tel Aviv museum and visited soldiers recovering from their harrowing experiences at Sheba and Shaare Tzedek hospitals. We actively volunteered for organizations committed to mobilizing their services to offer assistance where it’s most needed and met with entrepreneurs spending 70 percent of their time on resettling refugees or providing supplies and doing what the government hasn’t been able to do.

We traveled South to help the shorthanded farmers of Pri Gan clear their trees of ready-to-pick avocados and visited Sderot, a devastated city now frozen in time, as sukkot still stand on people’s patios and clothes still hanging from the clotheslines. At Yam HaMelach, we tried to bring chizuk to displaced families, refugees in their own country, living out of hotel rooms in the Dead Sea resort area turned makeshift community and met with the trauma therapists and teachers who have mobilized to create whatever routine and support possible for the impacted children.

We came together for an evening of chizuk for 250 SAR alumni, former teachers, former Principals Rabbi Yonah Fuld and Rabbi Joel Cohn, and a greeting from US Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew, an SAR grandparent and Riverdale resident just two weeks into his tenure at the most challenging time in many decades.

Throughout the trip, we witnessed firsthand the magnitude of the devastation and the pressing needs of soldiers, displaced families, and traumatized children, highlighting an unprecedented situation in the history of Medinat Yisrael. Your support is crucial in enabling us to continue our assistance efforts. Please contribute to the SAR Supports Israel Fund, empowering us to provide aid wherever possible.