A MIFGASH OF SOULS AND MINDS

By Diana Diner

I didn’t even want to go.

I was offered the chance to go on an amazing trip to Israel sponsored by the iCenter specifically for Israel educators, and my only thought was: “Why?”

I had worked with the iCenter in the past and knew their Israel programs and educational tools were always thoughtful and engaging. They recently created a program called “Mifgash that Matters.” Mifgash means encounters, and the program is a way for educators to come together in Israel and not only process what Israel education looks like, but also find ways to move forward after the horrors of October 7.

As much as I value the iCenter and consider this mifgash important, still, all I could think of was “Why? Why should I go? What will it do for me as an educator?”

It’s not that I didn’t want to learn about October 7th; it’s just that I didn’t think I needed to learn more about October 7th. That’s all I had been doing since the horrible attack occurred. I had spent the last 10 months getting any scrap of media coverage I could find. It felt like I had been talking about Israel for 20 hours a day since the war started.

In reality, I have spent the last 20 years talking about Israel. I am the Zionism Educator at Hadassah and I have focused my entire career on creating educational programs that center on all aspects of modern Israel. While I had grown accustomed to talking about antisemitism, what happened in Israel brought anti-Zionism to horrible new lows.

My brain was oversaturated with everything related to October 7th and I knew my nerves were numb to all the horror I had learned about. It wasn’t the egomaniacal question “How can I possibly learn more?” It was more of a feeling of “I am not the one who needs this education.”

But I decided to go nonetheless.

The week before I left I was speaking to a friend of mine, also an Israel educator, who was going on the trip, and we were both stumped. Normally, a trip to Israel filled us with excitement—but this time we felt apprehensive. We couldn’t even figure out what clothing to pack. At one point I asked, “Is it okay to wear shorts and a tank-top to a shiva?” Because to both of us, that’s what the trip felt like.

Even as I flew to Israel on July 28th, I had to convince myself that I would be okay.

I had seen the itinerary and had steeled myself for trips to the Gaza border. I knew we would be seeing some pretty horrific sights. At the same time, those were all places I had seen before through a variety of different media outlets.

What threw me for a loop was the realization that, whereas before, I was hearing about these places from reporters and it felt like I was reading a novel—a bit disconnected from real life—on this trip, I was incredibly affected by all the first-hand accounts, all the incredible personal connections and stories I would later come home with.

When I was speaking with my supervisor at Hadassah about going on the trip, she asked me to think of ways to bring parts of my trip home for our almost 300,000 members. While in Israel, I kept thinking about them and the daily emails, phone calls and social media messages I was getting from them. It felt like every day another member contacted me and wanted to talk about something – anything – related to what was going on in Israel. Hadassah members – and their families – are passionate Zionists who care deeply about Israel. They were all shocked by the horror of October 7th and have spent the last 10 months visiting Israel and raising money for the Hadassah Medical Organization, Hadassah’s nonprofit medical center in Jerusalem, which has been treating the physical and emotional wounds of military and civilian casualties, and the medical center’s new Gandel Rehabilitation Center, where those casualties are recuperating from often horrific injuries. Still, I knew they also wanted to have more personal conversations about Israel.

The Zionist programs our members really loved those in which we bring speakers to talk about their personal experiences with Israel. On this trip, I thought of all the times I spoke with our members, and there was one common thread – our members talked about people they knew in Israel. I realized that we will in a very similar boat. It wasn’t the stories that drew our attention; it was first-person stories that helped us have all these incredible emotions and drew us closer to our friends in Israel.

Mifgash that Matters was a very short trip. In the span of 96 hours, we met with poets, writers, educators, professors, artists, kibbutz members, families of hostages, displaced families, religious Jews, secular Jews, Bedouins, Arabs, Israelis. Each one had a story to share. And each story drew me in.

While I came on this program a bit of a skeptic, I came home eager to share all the personal connections with the incredible Hadassah volunteers who work with the Hadassah staff to create programming for all members. The volunteers are all members and have seen the power of what Hadassah can do. I knew that by bringing these incredible connections to the volunteers I work with we would be able to work together to create Israel and Zionism programming on a deeper and much more personal level.

I cannot wait to work with the volunteers to figure out how best to translate what I experienced into something I can use to take our members to another level of understanding.

Diana Diner, Hadassah’s Israel and Zionism Educator, is the driving force behind a group of Hadassah programs designed to showcase the diversity of Zionism today. The programs include Hadassah’s annual “18 American Zionist Women You Should Know” list; “What Zionism Means to Me,” a series of panel discussions around the country, and “Inspire Zionism,” Hadassah’s first Zionist symposium. The daughter of Russian immigrants, Diner credits the 10 days she spent in 2005 on Birthright Israel with inspiring her career in Zionism education. Before joining Hadassah in 2020, she spent almost 20 years working with teens and young adults at Birthright, Hillel International, the Israel on Campus Coalition, Masa Israel Journey, Young Judaea and the Israeli Consulate in New York. The mother of two young children, she lives in New Jersey with her husband.