WHY THE iCENTER’S ‘MIFGASH THAT MATTERS’ REALLY MATTERS

By David Matlow

How do you teach about Israel today?

Do you focus on the destruction of Oct. 7 or on the rebuilding that follows? Do you speak about the wars or the yearning for peace? Do you focus on the failures of the government or on the spirit of the people? Do you talk about despair or about hope?

The answer to all of these questions is “Yes.”

Israel is complicated. It is a land of contradictions. How best to teach and talk about it is the objective of the “Mifgash that Matters,” an iCenter program that has been running since February 2024. It brings educators and Jewish professionals to Israel to see for themselves what is happening on the ground, hear the stories from people who have been impacted directly by the horrors of Oct. 7 and learn how the people are responding to it.

The ninth and 10th cohorts of the program spent four days in Israel earlier this month, and I had the privilege of participating. The experience was meticulously curated to immerse us in the emotional and thoughtful richness of the struggles in Israel at this time.

We saw the finest 100 documentary photographs of this terrible year, the “winning” entry being a Zaka search-and-rescue volunteer on his hands and knees lovingly searching for tissue fragments in a home attacked by Hamas terrorists. Nearby was a photograph of an Israeli Olympian who had just won a medal.

We toured Kibbutz Kfar Aza guided by longtime resident Shachar. While the group sat on his porch, he pointed to the homes of neighbors who were killed on Oct. 7 and described how he was evacuated under cover of an Israeli tank. He then took us to the gate through which the terrorists entered, now-destroyed buildings of Gaza visible in the near distance, and said we need to figure out how to live together since neither of us is going anywhere.

View full article on eJewish Philanthropy.