The spirit of a nation at war — with Wendy Singer
While there has been a lot of resentment inside Israel towards its political and security leadership, Israeli society has stepped up in ways sometimes impossible for me to describe. So, when I was in Israel, I asked Wendy Singer to join me for a conversation about what most Israelis are seeing and experiencing at the grassroots level, day-to-day, that we may not see.
Wendy Singer is an advisor to several Israeli high-tech start-ups, including Re-Milk — https://www.remilk.com/ Wendy was the executive director of Start-Up Nation Central since its founding in 2013 — https://startupnationcentral.org/ Previously, she was the director of AIPAC’s Israel office for 16 years and served in AIPAC’s Washington office before immigrating to Israel in 1994. Earlier in her career, Wendy was a foreign policy advisor in the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives.
Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
[00:00:00] The way that the Milawim or the reserve story becomes, I think, profound is if you just look, if you're almost like in an airplane looking down into any Israeli city today, 360, 000 people were just pulled out of their lives. So just try to imagine a school where many of the male teachers are gone. The principal could be gone.
Try to imagine universities. Where a large percentage of the students are not there. Try to imagine companies where a large percentage of the workers are not there. From the CEO of a company all the way down to the person who cleans the floors. Holes in everything that you're going to touch in the course of your daily life.
There's this large swath of the population that is at the front.[00:01:00]
It's 5 p. m. on Friday, February 16th in New York City. Shabbat Shalom. It's midnight in Israel. I recently traveled back to the United States from Israel, just before the daring and improbable rescue of two Israeli hostages from Gaza. The collective joy around their release has been a huge story inside Israel, but within the same 24 hours in which Israeli society was welcoming home these hostages and celebrating their release, another five milouim.
Those are reserve soldiers who are plucked out of their civilian lives to go serve in the war in Gaza were killed. Another five reservists were killed. In some ways, these past few days have had a crush of activity around these two realities of post October 7th Israel. The release and rescue of hostages and military casualties.
I have many sources [00:02:00] in Israel who keep me up to date with the war effort, with politics, with the economy. All sources that I hope help you too, the listeners of the Call Me Back podcast. But there is one source. That keeps me up to date with life in Israel, the intangible social and emotional condition that can be felt all around the country since October 7th, just hanging in the air like a fog.
And that source, who helps me understand what's going on, is someone named Wendy Singer, who, full disclosure, is not just any source, she is my sister. She lives in Jerusalem. She made Aliyah to Israel with her husband in 1994. And she has raised three daughters who are young adults today and who have all served in the army.
And I speak to Wendy almost daily, as I imagine many of the listeners to this podcast do with their own family members in Israel since October 7th. Well, there's been a lot of resentment inside [00:03:00] Israel towards the country's political and security leadership. Israeli society has been experiencing something different.
The society has stepped up in ways that is sometimes impossible for me to describe. So when I was in Israel, I asked Wendy to join me for a conversation on this podcast so she could describe what she's seeing and experiencing. Just a little bit of background on Wendy. She currently is an advisor to several Israeli startups, including a company called Remilk.
She was the executive director of Startup Nation Central, an organization I've talked about on this podcast before, which is a nonprofit organization. that deepens ties between the Israeli innovation ecosystem and the global innovation ecosystem. She helped found the organization. Before joining Startup Nation Central, Wendy concluded a 23 year career at AIPAC.
She was director of AIPAC's Israel office for 16 years, and before that, she worked in their [00:04:00] Washington office working with members of Congress. She herself also was an aide on Capitol Hill to a U. S. member of Congress and a U. S. senator. WENDY SINGER on the spirit of a nation at war. This is Call Me Back.
And I am pleased to welcome to this podcast, for the first time, I would say, long time listener, first time guest, but also long time brainstorming partner. On topics for this podcast and just general thought partner, my sister, Wendy Singer, who I am with in person. So instead of us having to do this over the phone, we're doing it in person in Israel, in Tel Aviv at the Startup Nation headquarters at our podcast studio here.
Wend, I'd say it's good to be with you, but I've been with you already on this trip and done some pretty intense things with you on this trip. And we're going to get dinner later on. But, um, so this is not like a formal podcast recording, but [00:05:00] Welcome to Call Me Back. Thanks, Dan. Um, when I've mentioned you and the rest of the family from time to time over the course of these podcast episodes since October 7th, uh, I don't think listeners realize the extent to which I'm constantly, you know, checking in with you, bouncing things off you, you taking the sibling liberty to provide unsolicited feedback, uh, and advice and input.
But I want to go back, I want to start our conversation. With October 7th, the actual day of October 7th, for as long as I can remember, when we were both adults, you know, living in different places, I have never called you on Shabbat over the phone. You're observant. And on October 7th. I just had this instinct to call you that morning, and I knew you would answer, and you did.
And that's when I really started to start processing things, uh, in real time with you. I remember that day [00:06:00] vividly, and one of the things I remember is you telling me that you were going to services, synagogue, that morning for Shabbat and for Simchat Torah, and just the way you went about having to go to synagogue and then how you left synagogue.
And that is when things really started to crystallize for you that this was big. How big? We didn't know. Was this like, it had all the feeling of, you know, what we hear about and read about on of, of October, 1973 of the Yom Kippur War where the same thing people had been, you know, it was a holy day and people remember it as like how they interacted with that day given it was a holy day and given that it was a war and this and that in many respects was similar.
So. I mean, I haven't thought about the story since that day, and then when I knew we were going to be recording a conversation, I thought about it again. Can you tell me that story again? My main memory from that day is just I was hearing the siren. It was around 8. 10, 8. 15 on that [00:07:00] Saturday morning. And I was actually, I just remember I was like stretching to go for like a quick walk before I was going to go to synagogue.
And we heard the siren and it just, the first thing that goes off in your mind is like, that's a mistake. This is just, it's a mistake. That just doesn't make any sense. And there are rarely sirens in Jerusalem. Rarely. Because it's the southern part of the country that is typically under threat, and the closest that, that anyone really gets in the major cities to those sirens is Tel Aviv.
Yeah, it's even beyond that, that there's a theory that Hamas and Islamic Jihad, they don't want to Mess around with the Temple Mount so anything you're gonna do in the whole Jerusalem area could like set off a regional war if it's errant Right. So if the if Muslims had initiated military action that hit the Dome of the Rock This could be explosive in so many directions.
And so in that sense Jerusalem is [00:08:00] somewhat protected, and yet the sirens went off. Exactly, and it, it, it just, something, it was just surreal that we all piled into the safe room, and there was another siren, and another siren, another siren, and still nothing about the day felt like I wasn't going to go to synagogue.
It was, that's the day when we also say the Yizkor prayer in memory of our Father, and it just, I was going to go about my day. Okay, so you hear the siren, so then what? We met in the safe room with Saul and the kids, and then there was another siren and another siren, like, several minutes apart. And then by mid morning, I was setting off to synagogue, and I went outside, and there was just not a soul in the streets.
I thought, okay, uh, I'm just gonna go, okay, so I'll go to a closer synagogue. And when I went, I just remember they were still dancing with the Torahs and it was a smaller crowd than usual, this much closer [00:09:00] synagogue than the one we normally go to. And there was definitely something in the air, like there was, people were, were buzzing at that point and talking about it.
And then right in the middle of the service, um, the Home, Homefront Command, um, came into the synagogue and said, you have to close down. And it didn't make sense, it didn't compute, so the person in charge at the Yael Synagogue just said, uh, we're gonna have to all do Musaf, which is the last part of the prayer on Simchat Torah and Shabbat.
We're gonna have to all do Musaf at home. We have to close down and then someone yelled out, but no, we're not leaving until we say the prayer for the state of Israel and the prayer for the soldiers and at that point people knew something big was happening and I just, which is why they need to do the prayers for the soldiers.
Well, anyway, you do those prayers on the Saturday. Prayer, but it's towards the end of the service, they were insistent [00:10:00] that they do it. Exactly. Right. So the other prayers they could dispense with, but the prayer for the soldiers, they had to do like, we were not going to leave. We were not going to shut down as we've been told to do until we said those two prayers.
And we did. And I went home and then the rest of the day is kind of a blur. Yeah. Because it wasn't until later afternoon that we understood something much bigger was going on. And I remember you telling me three things. One, I remember you telling me that when you were walking back from synagogue home, really running, you're running home.
Yes. You were seeing religious men with yarmulkes on. Yeah. They were driving in their cars, which again, in Jerusalem, especially in your neighborhood on Shabbat, on any major Jewish holiday, the streets are quiet. You don't see cars. You certainly don't see men with yarmulkes, which means they're religious driving.
And they were driving, which means these were people who were probably being called up for reserves from Elohim. And they had to get somewhere, and that was also a sign [00:11:00] of that something big was happening. The second thing I remember you telling me was that Saul, who was living in Israel in October of 1973.
He, that's when his family had moved here for what was supposed to be a year and then wound up being many more years. It was like a trigger for him, like it brought him back to that moment, to the Yom Kippur War. And I've never in all your years living in Israel, since you moved here in 1994, I've never heard you, either of you compare any moment you've been in and you've been here for some very hard moments through the Second Intifada, through various Rabin assassination.
Rabin assassination, Gaza wars. I've never heard you compare what you were going through to something as, um, as pivotal as a major Israeli Arab war. And the third thing I remember is you said you had spoken to a friend of ours we have in common who was pretty dialed into what was happening on the security situation and he said, um.
And this was at the end of the day. And by that day, the end of the day, things were [00:12:00] pretty bad, what we were learning. And he said that he had told you, he thought that based on what he knew the next day, what we were going to learn is, is it was going to be much worse than what we thought on day one. I remember that.
I remember that vividly. But when you talk about the men with the, with the, with the kippot, with the yarmulkes driving, these are people that were starting to drive to the front. And what we were seeing during the day, Heading down to the Gaza Envelope. Exactly. And what we were seeing during the day, which played out for hours, were, um, husbands and wives saying goodbye to each other as the men got in the cars and went to, to the call up.
And those were poignant scenes. And you saw a lot of that. We saw a lot of that all over the neighborhood. Okay, so. Um, what I really wanted to focus on today is a story that I feel that doesn't get enough attention is the wrong word. I don't think there's enough understanding of it for [00:13:00] those outside of Israel, including those who are very involved in Israel.
You know, many people in the Jewish diaspora, um, which is the role of milouim, the role of reserve duty. Because there are countries that fight wars, small wars, large wars, short wars, long wars, But I, I, I'm hard pressed to find a country that Because it's standing army cannot fight a long sustained war like is necessary for the war Israel is in now Um, it has to rely on calling up of reserves.
So as you know, as, as, as this part is well known that, that most Israeli men serve for three years from 18 to 21, 18 years old to 21 females for two years, unless they either them go on to serve in one of the elite units or an officer training, they do an officer training program. They become officers, but by and large, that's what they serve.
But then they have reserve duty for, it could be about up to the next 20 years, depending on the. Yeah. Obligations of reserve duty have, [00:14:00] have declined in recent years, but nonetheless, you, you're on the hook, so to speak, for reserve duty, which means you go back in a couple months, or it could be up to a month, a couple of weeks, up to a month, a year, throughout the course of a year, to go back in and serve with your unit.
That's one thing, and truth be told, that's all I've really known. There have been periods where there've been call ups where I'm in, where I've been involved in Israel, like in the 2006 second Lebanon war, but I've never quite seen anything like this, where reserves call up the country. Can you, so can you talk a little bit about the reserve duty system?
It's again, the Hebrew word is miloim, you'll hear Israelis all the time talking about miloim. I'm just, that's a little background for our listeners. The role it plays in Israeli society and how we're seeing it now. Well, I think the most important thing to understand to, to kind of bring this to life for, for people that don't live here is that it's from every layer of society.[00:15:00]
I know you've talked about now in two books successively about how the IDF military service is a kind of a socioeconomic mashup. People from all walks of life that have to do this mandatory military service and then all these networks that are created as a result of having that. Common service experience.
So the way that the Milawim or the reserve story becomes, I think, profound is if you just look, if you're almost like in a, in an airplane looking down into any Israeli city today, and you're aware that until a couple of weeks ago, 360, 000 people were just pulled out of their lives. Okay. So, so population of 9.
2 ish people, 9. 2 million people in change is the population. Yep. 360, 000 people have been, that is inclusive of the [00:16:00] standing army? No. 360, 000 reservists are called up. So that you got the standing army, they're also being mobilized. And then you've got 360, 000 people I mean, that's extraordinary. And they are being called up from their lives, and it can be all walks of life.
All walks of life. But, but try to, Dan, think about as an economy. Think about an education system. Think about the family structure that, and it's not all men, by the way. It's in the thousands, the women that have been called up, not all of them are inside Gaza or on the northern front. Although in recent decades, women have been allowed to transition to combat positions, so you do have women in combat too, not just men.
Exactly. In fact, there's some very powerful stories about some of the battles that the women were involved with, both on October 7th and since. So just try to imagine a school where many of the male [00:17:00] teachers The principal could be gone. Try to imagine universities where a large percentage of the students Are not there.
We, a large percentage of the lecturers, the professors are not there. Try to imagine companies where a large percentage of the workers are not there. And I don't, it's important to, to, to state here. It's from the founder of a company or the CEO of a company all the way down. to the person who cleans the floors.
That's the range of people that are going into miloueme, into reserve duty. So if you think about, again, from the professional level of just holes in every single company, in every single, uh, uh, store, in every, in, in everything that you're going to touch in the course of your daily life, there are this, this large swath of the population that is at the front.
So just again, [00:18:00] doctors, cab drivers, teachers, as you said, technology executives, people you work with at startups here. I mean, it could be CEOs, social workers, psychologists, product managers, architects. I know you had recently on the podcast, uh, our friend Sherry Mendez, who's an architect and we know what she did in her, it does in her reserve duty.
And in terms of she's in the IDF unit that prepares. Female IDF soldiers that have been killed for burial and because of that role, she was one of the first people to really start seeing evidence of sexual violence. We have another friend, uh, near, near Katz who, who just got out of, um, reserve duty after almost four months, um, serving, um, in and out of Gaza.
And he by day is a founder of a startup. Um, in the health tech space and in the army, he was, um, an air support officer that was helping, um, guide the helicopters [00:19:00] toward where to gather the wounded soldiers. So, there is no correlation between your day job and what you're doing in Milouim. And again, you just have to think about holes everywhere.
in society. The other thing that is, is kind of hard to wrap your head around is what it means for the family structure. So explain. So you've got the, the family structure and, um, let's just say in most, but not all cases, the husband is going off to be Louise. Just think about the layers of needs that the.
Woman and young children who are left behind, what is the meaning of one day you have a partner that's hopefully doing 50 percent of what happens from the minute that a family with young kids gets up until they're, you know, showered and in bed at night and Getting them dressed and doing the laundry and going to school and to kindergarten and [00:20:00] from kindergarten and all the myriad needs that come up in the life of a family in a given day and suddenly you're, you know, your right arm is gone in terms of your support and I mean, it's another story which I would love to expand on, but just the vast amount of stepping up that Other members of society did in order to help these families get through this to explain look society's been stepping up in many many ways because if you go through the list of needs that this war has created.
In terms of it, it's almost like a carousel of needs or a carousel of challenges and if you get up in the morning and you think about well, there's the families of the hostages, there's the families of the wounded soldiers, there's the families of fallen soldiers, there's the families who have soldiers [00:21:00] in Miluim and there's burials and there's shivas.
This morning period and just the vast amount of things that need to be done on a given day to support all these different communities is profound. And I know you've had, I know that Khabib has talked extensively on the podcast about the ways, um, I think he had, he had a great line talked about the country.
Rediscovering its ethos in terms of just the resilience and the unity and the stepping up to the plate and becoming aware, once again, that Israeli institutions not strong, Israeli society, Israeli networks, very strong. There's a number of different NGOs that organized in a way that I found. Stunning. Um, one of them is called One Heart, and they're basically a [00:22:00] civilian response network that only, they're like a pop up network, and they only pop up when there's an emergency.
And in the case of this emergency, I'm now going back, dialing back to the Milouane piece, they have been able to trigger an army of volunteers. Whose only role is to support the families who have someone in Miluim. So there are scores of WhatsApp groups, which just list the needs. This one needs a babysitter.
This one needs a carpool driver. This one needs someone to take a kid to a doctor. This one needs to go grocery shopping. And, and it just, Things are just getting done in the most creative, bottom up way, and One Heart is not the only one, but they're sort of the most, um, someone described them as B to C.
Like, they, they just are able to get to the needs of thousands and thousands of families of Milowim. Now, one of your three [00:23:00] daughters was called up in reserves, uh, in Milowim, and can you describe the unit that she's in? So, uh, Noah, who is our oldest daughter, um, served for her regular military service from age 18 to 20 in a unit, um, it's called Nifkaim.
It's the unit of fallen soldiers. And this is the unit that is charged with notifying families. When they have a relative who fell in battle, and that's kind of what the unit is most famous for. What the unit also does is deals with the. Layers of logistics and layers of support for the funeral that is then going to take place either the same day or a day later, and for the Shiva period where the immediate family is going to sit at home and, um [00:24:00] And, uh, be, receive, um, condolence visitors for, uh, a period of seven days.
And Noah was called up about a week into the war. And her role on this base just out, outside of Jerusalem was to deal with the logistics around the funerals and some of the, uh, Shiva, Shiva homes. And this is the unit that does the notifications to families. When they have a fallen soldier in their family, you know, she doesn't do that, but she works for the people or the people who do that serve in her unit.
They are, and so that's a whole system that's probably been taxed pretty heavily since the war. I mean, obviously. the weekend of October 7th, given the volume of, of people who were killed, including soldiers, and then, and then obviously since October 7th, given the number of, of fatalities, number of casualties.
So that's the, the unit that does the door knocking, but the other thing I'm struck by in people I speak to, and I hear this from you, this came up [00:25:00] with Sherry Mendez, speaking of Sherry, and I hear this all the time, I was just meeting with someone tonight who talked about this, the number of everyday average Israelis who have to go to multiple funerals or shivas a week is Hard to imagine, not just the, the pain, but the logistics of, you know, as Sherry told me that she had the, the week we interviewed, I think three soldiers were killed all in a, in a single day and her family had connections to all three of them.
And so they would normally all go to, if any one of them had passed away, they would've gone to the shiva, the funeral, the whole family. But because all three, and given the timing of it and the proximity and uh, uh, of the funerals to each other in terms of time, but not in terms of geography, they had to like divide up, okay, you take this one, you take this one.
And I'm, I literally was with, with someone tonight who said, told me that he's at, on average, he goes to two Shivas a week. Can you talk a little bit about how that, how pervasive that is? So, well, first [00:26:00] of all, when you mentioned the knocking on the door, I, I just want to, because I, I know that it's so important to bring the whole reserve, reservist component story to life.
Even the teams that go from that unit to knock on the door, those people are mainly in Milouim. Okay, so a lot of thought for every family that needs to be given notice, a lot of thought is given to what is the trio that's going to go knock on that door. And here too, you can have a social worker, a teacher, a product manager, and a technician.
be in the team. It can also be a rabbi. It could be a doctor. This too is a microcosm. That Milawim unit within that unit for fallen soldiers is a microcosm of that larger story. The vast amount of funerals and shivas, and I have to go back to this [00:27:00] point about how the country, how the people have just stepped up.
I couldn't make it. To one of the shivas that I really wanted to go to, uh, for the son in law of a friend of mine named Polly Mordechai. And so, in a world where you're just like going a hundred miles an hour, and I had another shiva to go to that day, and I couldn't drive to Rosh Ha'Ayin. So I just left.
I left him a message. I left the guy, General Mordechai, whose son in law had been killed, a message, and he sent me back a voicemail. It was a nine second voicemail, and I'm just never going to forget it. He said, Thanks, Wendy. These are tough days, but it seems that this is our shift. And somehow that nine second message captured what I think has been the response of this generation.
That as one friend of mine, um, Shlomit said, it's like, it's their turn. And [00:28:00] that's what you saw, the 120 percent response to this call up. What's that? Right. So you're referring to the IDF when they're doing their call ups of reserves of Milouim, they make a projection of what they need and what they think turnout will be.
And so they overshoot on call up in the hope that they get the turnout they need. And it turns out they didn't need to overshoot because they had 120 percent turnout. They had more people than they knew what to do with. People coming from within the country wanting to serve and people coming from outside the country coming back to Israel who are living abroad, traveling abroad, working abroad, who said, I'm coming back, I want to join the fight.
And people, you know, you have these stories of these El Al flights pouring, pouring into Israel right after October 7th, where they were just stuffing these planes in ways that I'm sure were hazardous from an airline safety perspective. But the stories of trekkers and travelers and people who were on their post army travel all over the world, the [00:29:00] Far East.
But the other thing, when you talked about just. How one covers so many funerals and so many Shiva visits here to all these NGOs were setting up these war rooms. I think we would call them situation rooms in English, but in Hebrew, it's called a Hamal, which is head or male Hama, which is like a war room.
And you had a war room for the Shiva's and you had a war room for the funerals. You had a war room to help the families of the of the reserves. Jerusalem had a particularly extraordinary war room to deal with all of these civilian needs that was Coordinated by one heart and in every WhatsApp group, it was like, there's a Shiva that's empty.
People need to show up there. And then half an hour later, you see another, what's up? There's a hundred people there. There was an Ethiopian soldier in Givati who fell, but the family was sitting Shiva in Beit Shemesh, which is a little bit out of the way. That Shiva needs more people. And then you get in your car and you hustle over there and you see 200 people have shown up.
So that, that to [00:30:00] me is, is sort of the culmination of, of everything I've been describing. The other thing that is an important part of the Milawim story. Is the percentage of casualties that have been by the, these reserve soldiers were told that it's the majority of the 226 soldiers that have fallen since October 7th in, in battle, not talking about the day of October 7th, and it just Getting your arms around those numbers of, of broken families and what I'm finding to be quite a story right now is this massive transition because most of the reserve soldiers of these 360, 000 are now being gradually released from Gaza.
In fact, when I was at hostage square. a couple of weeks ago. Describe what Hostage Square is. Hostage Square is the square in, um, Tel Aviv, which is [00:31:00] like the ground zero for the, for the families of the hostages in Gaza. And it's right in front of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. I was there the other day. And it's, you know, Campbell and I were there.
We were trying to figure out how to describe it. It was This is the wrong word, but I'm going to say it. It felt like a big, live, ongoing shiva. That's the feel of it, of people sitting and telling the story of their loved ones who are in captivity. Obviously they're not dead, God willing, but um, but they're telling the story of their person who's missing from their lives right now.
And they're honoring them and they are also wanting to make sure The movement of the hostages is not forgotten and is not just a detail in this war. And so can you describe the scene there? Yeah, so I'm just gonna, my only, the hair that I'm gonna split with you on the Shiva piece is that it's also a place that's infused with a sense of urgency.
[00:32:00] Pressure for action there. It, it, there's, there's a complexity around it. Mm-Hmm. . But just describe, so in the middle of the square and they have, uh, a big outdoor square, and they have this long Shabbat table with a seat set for every hostage, like a Shabbat dinner. And then there's, and then different hostage families have different.
Um, almost like exhibit areas, if you will, like little corners that they create and they do art and there's music and they do, they sit and they, there's chairs and they can, you can hear stories about the person who's held hostage, all in service of people who want to know more, learn more, both about the hostage movement generally and about the specifically about the lives of these individual hostages.
Well, you, you, you captured it really well. You go there and your, your senses are just like on fire because you go there and you, you get the depth of the agony of these families. We just heard in the meeting we were at a couple days ago with [00:33:00] this delegation that you're, you've been here with, that there are 300.
People from these hostage families of the 136 that are still in Gaza. There's 300 that sleep there every night. So they go to this building nearby to shower and to have meals. That's that's supported by this forum or in Hebrew. It's called the Mottab. It's in which is the hostage families forum. So I was there a couple of weeks ago with a delegation from the Hartman Institute that was here on a solidarity mission from the Hartman board.
And, well, there were two things that were powerful about this. One is 5 p. m. every day, there's a small group that gathers for prayer and singing. And it's not prayer led by a religious organization. It's prayer led by a secular yeshiva. which is like almost a contradiction in terms. It's [00:34:00] actually a project that allows secular Israelis to study Judaism.
And there was a woman who's the head of the secular yeshiva, Avital, and she was leading. prayer, and within a half an hour, 40 minutes, dozens more had gathered and it was almost like pulled to a campfire. And there was religious songs and secular songs and Hatikvah. Hatikvah is the national anthem, which is the hope, ironically, is Israel's national anthem and they're singing Hatikvah, the hope.
The other thing that happened that day that really goes back to your point about the Milouim, about the reserve, um, is that there was a guy there who had just come out of Gaza the day before, and he'd been in almost uninterrupted since October 7th, just now getting to see his family again. And there was a custom.
That when you come out of a moment of danger, there's a special blessing that you're supposed to say. It's called Bearcat [00:35:00] HaGomel, which is basically thanking God for bringing you out of a situation of danger and lots and lots of soldiers coming out of Gaza or from the northern front have been going to Bench Gomel, recognizing this moment and this group of Hartman board members.
We all went over to this guy and we wanted to embrace him and thank him for his service. And we wanted to bench Gomel. For him to bench Gomel, we would say, we would respond with Amen. And his answer was shocking. He said, I can't bench Gomel yet. There's still people that are in there. The other thing that, When you talk about hostage square are really all the ways that the country is almost convulsing with ways to remember, acknowledge, bring to life the stories of the hostages.
You see it wherever you [00:36:00] go. There's a woman named Carmel Gott, who's 38 years old, who's still in captivity in Gaza, and she's a yoga teacher. We even heard stories from some of the hostages who were released that she was doing some kind of yoga lessons where she could in these underground tunnels for other hostages.
And the other day there was a thing in front of the Tel Aviv Museum where a few hundred people got together and did 108 yoga sun salutations to acknowledge the 108 days that Carmel was in captivity. The National Library of Israel has created an installation where they have a circle of chairs with a picture.
Of each hostage on its own chair and on the chair, they put a book that they think that hostage would want to read when they come out of captivity. And there were some where the families were just not in a position to deal with a request from the National Library. So the [00:37:00] curator, this woman Dorit, had to choose a book and she started sharing with me all the different considerations.
that went into choosing which book for which hostage. And one of the ones that I just can't get over is there these two brothers, the Sharabi brothers, Sharabi, that were taken into Gaza as hostages. And Yossi Sharabi's wife and daughters Or in Israel, survived October 7th. And his wife said to their daughters, here's a journal and we're each going to write in the journal things that happen each day that your father's in captivity.
And that way when he gets out of Gaza, we'll be able to share with him this journal about everything that we've lived through so he won't have missed anything in our lives. And the book she put on Yossi Sharabi's chair was Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You by Alice Munro. And then I wrote. The, the curator, I wrote this woman Dorit, uh, I [00:38:00] had to ask her another question about some of these other book choices and she wrote me back.
But I, it's heartbreaking for me to tell you this, Wendy, but since we were last in touch, Yossi Sharabi has been declared, um, dead in, in Gaza. And so each one of these is just a, another punch. But what's interesting about this, this installation is it's become a center of gravity. For people that come to the National Library and go visit the library and be in the reading room and look at all of their phenomenal collections, you can't be at the library now without going and looking at that installation.
And it's become a very important touch point for society. The lone soldiers. We talked about the role of Milouim and how many of the fatal casualties are, uh, are Milouim, are reservists. Also, The lone soldiers who are people who make Aliyah, who immigrate to this country often without family, and they [00:39:00] serve in the IDF either as, you know, regular soldiers doing their regular service or later on as reservists, and many of them have They've been killed in action.
And describe the, the kind of funeral movement around supporting lone soldiers. In the case of lone soldiers, before a lone soldier is going to need to be buried, there's like extra, there's like a big uptick in the traffic on these WhatsApp groups. They'll say there's a lone soldier from Kiev. There's a lone soldier from Atlanta, Georgia.
I remember there's one that I went to of a lone soldier, a border police woman from Atlanta who was, um, stabbed to death. Um, this is, she wasn't in Gaza, but she was. Guarding in, in the old city during the war now, and, and as soon as a notice goes out that there's a funeral of a lone soldier, then it's just this, it's like this gush of people rushing to go to these [00:40:00] funerals.
So it's almost unheard of that you would have a funeral of a lone soldier without a couple thousand people who come to attend. I heard one story that there was, they. There was a funeral for a lone soldier on Har Herzl, on the equivalent of Israel's, you know, Arlington Cemetery. And the funeral was scheduled for a certain time, and then on TV they announced there's a funeral scheduled for this time.
We're moving the funeral back by an hour because there aren't enough people there. Because this kid didn't know a lot of people because he was a lone soldier. And it went from not enough people there to something like 3, 000 people showing up. You couldn't get, you couldn't get in, you couldn't find parking, you couldn't find it.
Just within an hour, everyone just mobilized. It was, it was a really unbelievable story. There was a bunch of WhatsApps that morning. That there was going to be this funeral at 12, and because it [00:41:00] was a low soldier, I said to our daughter, Tamara, I was like, you know what, let's just go, like, we, even though you know a lot of people are going to show up, you just, it's very hard to describe, it's like, that's where gravity is propelling you, when, when you know that there needs to be people at X location, it was getting closer and closer to 12, and I had a lot going on at home, I know that's surprising for you, but I decided to just let it go.
And then Tamar came in and said, are we going and finally, I just said, too much going on. I'm sure it's going to be okay. And then we heard on the 12 o'clock news that they had, just like you said, they pushed it off, um, by, um, 45 minutes. And I just, we just looked at each other. We jumped in a cab and we went to Har Hertzell and indeed there were thousands of people that were pouring in there.
And I got to say, Dan. In a country where the institutions are not strong, what the war in this period has shown us is the [00:42:00] ability of civil society, in the early days, in the early weeks, it was holding the country together. Organizations like One Heart, like Brothers and Sisters in Arms, like, uh, Hito Root and Bayit Mishutaf, there's just endless numbers.
Um, it, it was profound, and now you're starting to see more of government institutions that are, becoming part of the resettlement story and it's, it's a, it's a more complicated picture. There's the lone soldiers, there are obviously the casualties generally, which are a big part of the lone soldier story, and then there are the wounded, and the severely wounded.
And for some reason, this is a part of the story that I had not been focused on until I got here, this week. Because I'm fixated on the the news updates about another casualty today or a couple weeks ago, it was, you know, 21 casualties in one incident and then three other casualties. So it was like 24 in the same day.
So you get very fixated on these numbers, [00:43:00] but the numbers of wounded. And like I said, some severely wounded is jarring. And I was at a Sheba hospital earlier this week outside of Tel Aviv. And I I met a number of these seriously wounded soldiers and I would ask them their stories and I'd hear their stories and I'd realize they were reservists and they were people who had other lives and they had spouses and they had children and they had careers and they were doing something else and they were called up and they fought and now their life is about learning how to with one less, yeah, one less limb, one less, and I was there with them when they, I mean, I just, and then I started to get some of the numbers and the numbers are not low when, you know, they're, they're, they're, there's a lot of wounded.
And it's going to be a generation of people, uh, where the number of wounded for life are, you know, are [00:44:00] highly populated in that generation. And it, Again, it's, these are not people who were in the middle of the normal service, not that it changes anything in a sense, but it's just that they were like on another life path.
And then. Look, the thing with the wounded, it's, you, you, you captured it very well. Every family that has a wounded person becomes its own ecosystem. So you have not just getting through the hospitalization and not just through the physical rehab, but then just imagine the layers upon layers upon layers of just mental psychological rehabilitation and all the work that's being done right now, um, to, to both anticipate and start to process.
The mental health. Challenges, the PTSD, the, all of the things that are resulting from someone losing a limb, an eye, an arm, and [00:45:00] whatever else can be done to the human body is immense. Um, I know that you, um, visited a Shiba Hospital with this delegation that you were at, and I don't think there's anything quite like, you can hear these stories.
But when you show up in a ward and you're sitting in front of one of these soldiers and you talk to them, it's, uh, gives you just so much more of a, a deep sense of, of what a single person is going through. And so, again, just, it's not just the human stories, but also just imagine at a hospital like that, the mountains that have to be moved in order to accommodate these sheer numbers.
And that then speaks to just how everybody steps up and every part of society is stepping up. And you've been telling me these stories just about how everybody's volunteering and even this building we're in right now. So we're at Startup Nation Central. We're in a podcast studio in the, at the [00:46:00] offices, but on the main floor is this, a SEIF, this culinary institute.
and restaurant, which is a great place. I highly recommend visiting it to folks traveling to Israel. But can you talk about what Asif was doing to mobilize during the war? So here's a chic, funky, and fun cafe and culinary institute where they do a lot of teaching about Jewish and Israeli culinary culture and history.
But talk about their experience during the war. Asif is everything that you just said and it's just hard, again, the layers of creativity here are just mind blowing. Um, what Asif was able to do in the early days is there was suddenly this understanding. That tens of thousands, again, it became over about 360, 000 people were deep in Gaza, or again, at the northern border, and they were having horrible food.
And once it became clear that they weren't going to be there for three days, or seven [00:47:00] days, or ten days, but this was a long haul situation, places like Asif started to ask themselves, what can we do to give these soldiers a little bit of comfort? What can we do to just make their lives a little bit better instead of the, you know, the crappy canned food or whatever they're eating in these, in these bases?
So they galvanized a whole series of restaurants in Tel Aviv that were all in a very tough situation. And they got them to make their kitchens kosher. Because that's the standard for the, for the IDF bases. And then, as a community, all these chefs started doing scaled up cooking of meals. And then a SIF arranged various platforms, like delivery channels, to get them to these bases around the country.
And they were even identifying tour guides. that had vehicles where the tour guides were obviously unemployed because there isn't really any tourism right [00:48:00] now. So they somehow managed to capture all these different layers of the country in order to get something on the order of 40, 000 meals, um, in the, you know, in the first, uh, three months of the war.
And just think if you're out there fighting and living in these Gritty grizzly conditions and you get this like chef meal delivered to you at the end of a day. It's a big deal. Yeah. And then the other thing that Asif did, which is a sort of a different, on that carousel of needs I was describing is the evacuees that are, that are for, that were 120,000 evacuees from the north and the south.
So these are communities in the, so in the South that. It was literally under siege, so they had to get them out of there and they had to evacuate their homes if their homes weren't outright destroyed, but they had to be evacuated regardless. And then because of concern about a possible second front in the north, threat from Hezbollah, there's a whole bunch of communities up there that they could get [00:49:00] out of.
from the North. So they've moved, what's the number? How many people total? 120, people. Again, 120, 000 people in a population of 9. 2 plus million. They had to put them all in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and, you know, in cities in the center of the country. and reconstitute, like, these are kibbutzim, they're like agriculture centered communities.
These are people who used to living out in the country in, you know, think of it in a kind of rural area, in a big community in a rural area, a big spread out community, and then they're suddenly living in these cities. They're living in like apartment buildings and hotels where they're putting them. And, and, I visited one, uh, kibbutz Reem has an amazing facility that they've, they've taken over two condominium towers in Tel Aviv, not far from where we are.
And the kibbutz has taken it over and they've set them up there and they've like, they're reliving their kibbutz life. It's a lot different in an urban area than a rural setting, but it's quite impressive. But, um. They call it a vertical kibbutz. A vertical kibbutz, right. Suddenly, these people are like plucked out of [00:50:00] their communities and their homes and they're plucked into a strange place and they're trying to keep them living some semblance of normalcy, but that's obviously hard to imagine.
And so it, it, Asif, they're doing like workshops, right? Like cooking work. What, what was? Well, what Asif did is they, what they put their finger on is these, there's about 73 hotels in Tel Aviv that are housing. all these different evacuees. That's, by the way, those numbers are starting to go down because there's a massive effort right now, because understanding that it's not sustainable to have this many tens of thousands of people trying to live lives in hotel rooms.
What Asif put his finger on, and I tip my hat to Chico Menashe, who is the CEO at Asif, is that The evacuees living in these hotel rooms, they were desperate to just be able to cook. They, a lot of things that they could swallow about life in a hotel room and [00:51:00] having to find, again, kindergartens and schools and high schools and a whole new setup in a whole new city in a very disorienting way, but somehow not being able to cook in their kitchen was just making them Nuts.
So they set up a thing, a platform, together with the Tel Aviv municipality, where they would match Tel Aviv families with evacuee families, inviting the evacuee family to come to the home of a Tel Avivian to make dinner. And I remember one of the stories that Chico shared was, um, a, a, a gay couple in Tel Aviv that had four kids was hosting an Orthodox woman who was, who has six kids living in a hotel room, and this woman just had this deep desire to make a particular fish dish that she normally makes for her family, and so you've got all these unlikely, again, mashup matchups, uh, going on.
And, Um, that were made possible by just uber creativity. When [00:52:00] when I, so even in the context of this conversation, and I think this is representative of almost every conversation we've had since October 7th, I've just, I've watched you go from moments of, and people can't see you, but I can see you, but I, you know, sadness, you tell the story at hostage square, you know, of that gentleman who didn't feel comfortable saying a certain prayer because.
There were still hostages there, and the experience we had. You and I had a meeting with some of the families the other day, uh, families of hostages. So I, I'm watching you go, even in the, just in this conversation of sadness and, and heaviness. And that's, I will say, if there's one thing about my last few days here, it just felt incredibly heavy.
For all the reasons you're talking about. And then there are moments where you're excited, like you're telling the Sassive story. Or even something sad, like the, what's happening at the National Library, what, the reason they need that exhibit of the books for the hostages. And yet you're moved by the, by the spirit and the [00:53:00] effort.
You, you seem, I don't know, upbeat is the wrong word, somewhere between hopeful and cautiously optimistic. About what? Yeah, I think you've, I think you've put your finger on it. I, I think that, um. Now that you're here, and I think the power of showing up in the way that you showed up with this group of your colleagues and this group of philanthropists that was here to look at the day after story, you have a much stronger sense of the heaviness, but even like a family like the you.
Pauline Goldberg family and their son Hirsch and the way that Rachel wears this piece of masking tape on her sweater every single day and she writes the number of days that Hirsch has been in captivity. Even this family that's in [00:54:00] agony. Somehow manages to give hope and so I, I watch them, I watch them very closely, they're in our community and I watch how they're handling the, the pain and the anguish and the not knowing and they're on such a campaign, it's like a campaign, something about being a part of the, the, the society and the community around people like that gives me hope and the other thing that, that, that I, um, I, I don't know if I shared this with you earlier, but even where I'm working at Remilk, which is this, I think one of Israel's most exciting companies in the, in the climate tech space, it's, it's, it's basically leading a new dairy revolution to create
It's a, it's a big story and I think the company is, is, is taking the world by storm. We, and, and, [00:55:00] in many ways what happened at Remilk in the last four months is, is a microcosm for what's happening at many other innovative companies. We had 20%. of the team was at the front, okay, and many of them serving, serving in elite units.
And at the same time that 20 percent of the team was at the front, there were some really off the charts breakthroughs on the R& D side. And there had already been some very ambitious, very tight deadlines that needed to be met, war or no war. And suddenly, um, this R& D team was like marching into the lab every single day.
sometimes short staffed, and they were just crushing it in terms of what was happening on the R& D side. And the other day, I sat down with one of the microbiologists named Anna, and I, I said, Anna, what happened? Like, how were you able to, to pull this off during [00:56:00] this period when everyone was under such stress?
And she basically said, and this, In my mind, kind of captured what I've been going through, a lot of my friends and my family have been going through is that what was going on out there with so many friends and so much family, um, at the front and the hostages and the evacuees and the funerals, it was a world that was spinning out of control.
But somehow when you walk into the headquarters of Remilk and you go into the lab, you go into hyper focus. Because that's something you can control. And when she said that, it, it kind of made a lot of order for me. Because I think that these microbiologists at one company in Rehovot, that are able to meet and surpass all of these goals, [00:57:00] is in many ways, symblematic.
of what's going on in other parts of the country. So, yes, Dan, to the heavy. And also, yes, to just being optimistic by this very solution oriented country that's around me. All right, Gwen, we will leave it there. This, this conversation is to be continued. I take it you encourage people to Come, to come on these missions, to come experience the, the heaviness, and to experience the, to the extent that you can, but I think most people can't experience it, it's palpable, and experience the hope, and, and help out, and participate, right?
There's a lot to do. Yeah, I mean, Dan, you, you showed up. And your colleagues and a lot of the people in your community all spent a couple days here this week and like you touched it. And, um, I get [00:58:00] dozens and dozens and dozens of questions about what can we do? Can we come? Can we help out? The answer is yes.
You can go to farms, they need, because they lost a lot of their workers, they lost a lot of their foreign workers, you can go pick, so these farms don't go bust and they don't miss harvest, they need, they need arms and legs to go. pick fruit and do whatever one does on farms. And, you know, it's, it's just a lot of labor and they don't, and they need people.
And a lot of people are serving in the army and they need reinforcements helping in these communities. Exactly. And I know that you are, had a conversation with my friend, Danielle Abraham from regrow Israel. And, you know, she talks about there's an NGO, just an NGO in the, in the. And that's right now working with a lot of these, uh, kibbutzim that were attacked, uh, by Hamas and, and really destroyed some of these agri, or tried to destroy some of these agricultural communities.
And she's working with, uh, a number of them. And, and Regro Israel is, is a remarkable, another one of [00:59:00] these remarkable NGOs that's, that's Come up in this period that is literally, um, launched an effort to, um, bring back all of these farms that were destroyed. But not only that, there's a shortage of 30, 000 farm workers right now when you said so that the harvest won't be missed, it's literally so that the harvest won't be missed.
And apparently, um, we've learned that. That burning and looting and destroying all these farms was part of Hamas's strategy for October 7th. And anyone that comes here, whether it's on a delegation to bear witness and to do all the things that you've been doing, and visiting places like Sheba Hospital, and going to Hostage Square, and meeting with government officials, and learning about some of the mental health needs, whatever it is, I think there is something healing.
about going into a farm and [01:00:00] spending a day picking cherry tomatoes. It's that same kind of thing. You feel that the world around you, and Saul and I for a while were doing this, um, one day a week. You feel that the world outside is spinning around, but you're going to get in the car and you're going to show up at this farm And you're going to pick cherry tomatoes and you see, you know, a couple dozen, some places more than that, other Israelis have just decided to drop whatever they're doing that day and pick cherry tomatoes or pack packages of dill or pick avocados or pick your produce, whatever it is, and there is something, um, Healing and focusing about that, and Dan, anyone, you don't need to speak Hebrew, you can just show up here and go help out at these farms.
You hear that? Loyal listeners of the Call Me Back podcast, come to Israel, Wendy will put you to work. [01:01:00] You'll be, you'll be picking, what? Cherry tomatoes. Cherry tomatoes. It's faster than you can imagine, um, and so, uh, that's, I think, the best advertisement for, for coming here to lend a hand. All right, Wendy, as I said before, we'll leave it there, but I'm saying it again, we'll leave it there because we can keep going as we do.
This will be, this, this conversation I'm sure will continue online, offline. Thank you for this. Dan, um, above all, thanks for coming. It's really great to see you. Great to be here.
That's our show for today. Just to put an exclamation point after something Wendy said in this conversation, I could not be more emphatic about the importance of visiting Israel, going there, bearing witness to what happened, volunteering, helping to rebuild the country, witnessing firsthand and participating in this [01:02:00] exhilarating, resilient society that Wendy describes in this podcast.
There are many ways and opportunities and solidarity missions to participate in, and I highly recommend it. I was just participating in one myself. Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.