NEW YORK – Rabbi Josh Diskin was hosting two Israeli soldiers in New York on the Shabbat that Hamas attacked Israel. “Unfortunately, a lot of their friends were murdered,” said Diskin, director of the Israeli Division at The Brownstone, a leadership organization for young Jews and Israelis, which is housed in a five-story brownstone in downtown Manhattan.
“We felt stuck, like how can we help people [in Israel] from here [the US]?” said Diskin, 30. Having grown up in Israel, he realized he could utilize his connections with the army at the airport and with customs agents to help send supplies to Israel. Diskin connected with a group of a dozen Israeli-American volunteers who were banding together to send supplies to their Israeli soldier friends.
“Let’s use The Brownstone to bring everything there, and have volunteers pack and ship the stuff,” Diskin told the Israeli-Americans. The Brownstone Initiative has so far raised $200,000 and sent more than 8,000 items to IDF soldiers. After news of the Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel on October 7, Jews around America took action: some raised money for established organizations, others sent IDF reservists home, and many – from New York to Miami to Chicago and LA – wanted to ensure that those Israeli soldiers were equipped to go into battle.
As Israel called up more than 360,000 reservists, it seemed like half of them were sending requests to Americans for supplies, from the tactical, like ceramic vests and helmets, to the practical, like batteries, socks, and thermals. “A lot of stuff is going to waste,” Diskin said. “People sent thousands of towels and toothpaste, and it’s a shame; they weren’t needed,” he said, noting that other items got stuck in America or at the airport, or at customs. Or worse, the IDF refused thousands of pieces of tactical equipment because they weren’t up to military standards.
“Be very careful giving to small organizations or people you don’t know,” Diskin said, noting that the Brownstone Initiative had set up an official requisition form for IDF units requesting what they needed. On the other side, they created both a donor form and an Amazon wish list, where anyone could buy, say, 650 tactical gloves, 1,000 LED headlights, 750 kneepads, which are among the 40 items most requested by IDF units. More than 200 IDF units have filled out requisition forms. “We decided at the beginning not to send tactical supplies,” said Shlomit Shalit, a New York-based Israeli project manager for a social impact start-up who is the Brownstone Initiative’s operations manager.
Sitting back on a microsuede couch in front of a bookshelf filled with religious and Jewish books in the building’s main floor lobby, instead of millennials socializing or eating Shabbat dinner and discussing lofty Jewish ideas, half a dozen volunteers milled about among the plastic tables piled with supplies such as scarves, phone banks, zip ties, headlamps and batteries. “Attention everyone, the batteries must be packed separately,” blared Tomer Mendler. “They can’t go in a box with anything else!”
A marketing executive from Tel Aviv, Mendler, 27, is the initiative’s logistics manager, making sure only essential supplies were sent to Israel. “We don’t just send random stuff,” he said, fielding a call from a volunteer at Costco purchasing items not available on Amazon. In fact, Shalit was tasked with making sure everyone had a specific job, with jobs ranging from dealing with customs, to contacting army units, to ensuring requested supplies were still needed, to coordinating drivers, to updating the Excel spread sheets, to coordinating the 100 volunteers. “The packages are here! The packages are here!” Mendler told the volunteers, who ran to the front door to get the boxes, slice them open, sort them into the proper piles, and start inventorying them, before repackaging them and sending them off to Israel.
NOT EVERY effort is as finely tuned as the one in New York.
Synagogues collect supplies for the IDF
Across the country, in Los Angeles, many synagogues and individuals started collecting donations simultaneously, unbeknownst to one another. “When the whole thing started, I got a call asking if I could pack suitcases at my synagogue for soldiers, to go to Israel,” says Rachel Kahn, 26, a kindergarten teacher from Miami living in Los Angeles, who got married last month in Israel, where she’d served in the IDF. Kahn headed to the Young Israel of Beverly Hills and started repackaging everything and inventorying it, and after that it “sort of snowballed,” she said. She and two other friends quickly realized that donations were being sent all around the city, some to synagogues, some to people’s houses, and they needed to be centralized. Kahn secured two warehouses – one for military and medical supplies and the other for the nonessentials, including clothes (“so much socks,” one volunteer said); baby supplies, such as formula, and toys; and hygienic supplies, such as shampoo and deodorant.
Kahn said they sent 15 pallets of military and medical equipment with a cargo plane chartered by Israel Friends, and are sending another five pallets this weekend. As far as the nonessential equipment, dozens of volunteers are sifting through the warehouse to sort what will be useful to the civilians of Israel.
“We have so much, but it’s not a priority,” said Kahn, noting that they hope to send the nonessential supplies by the less costly container method in the next month. “A lot of what I learned from this process is that, as a Jewish nation, it’s our passion to help each other, even though some of our efforts are not well spent – we need to be intentional,” she said, noting how she’s learning on the go. “It’s so amazing to come together in unison; the call to action as a nation is insane,” she said. “We all want to be with Israel, to mourn with Israel, and all this feels really, really helpful, when we felt so helpless.”
Mobilizing cargo for the IDF
IN FLORIDA, the effort reached the highest level: Gov. Ron DeSantis dedicated the Florida Division of Emergency Management, under the leadership of director Kevin Guthrie, to mobilize cargo around the state, and funded cargo planes and logistics centers to transport millions of dollars’ worth of donated medical equipment and supplies for soldiers to Israel, said Joe Zevuloni, the Israeli-American philanthropist and Florida community organizer who helped found Strong for Surfside, which managed the volunteer catastrophe relief center after the condominium collapse in 2021. “Unfortunately, we are experienced in this kind of thing, but we never imagined we would have to mobilize this way for the State of Israel,” he said. “Whenever a plane is available, we send it,” he said, noting that DeSantis gave an executive order that the planes return with Florida residents from Israel.
Zevuloni put together a command center to run the multiple warehouses throughout the state, where organizations like Yedidim USA and restaurateur Lior Hazan run the center to coordinate donations from community organizations, which sent supplies like thermals and socks (“to help keep soldiers warm”) as well as medical supplies from local hospitals in conjunction with Sheba Medical Center in Israel, which distributes equipment to the troops. “We don’t waste resources,” he said. “Whatever we send is licensed and approved in Israel, and is only received from acceptable vendors.” Of the hundreds of pallets sent to Israel, the most heartbreaking item requested was from ZAKA. “I can never be proud to send body bags to Israel,” he said. The Hamas attack on Israel was “something of historic proportions, and our response must be overwhelming, united, and of historic proportions the likes of which the world has never seen before.”
Other American Jews are focusing on smaller operations – some even on one particular item. “I was trying to think about what jewelers can give,” said Aleah Arundale, a jeweler in Chicago who runs the Facebook group “Jewelers helping Jewelers,” which has 30,000 American industry professionals, about 15% of whom are Jewish, she estimates, noting that many of the Christian jewelers around the country also wanted to help. So far, they have sent upwards of 2,000 watches to soldiers in Israel. “The connections we have is how we make a difference,” she said.
“There’s not enough Jews in the world, but you can reach out to your friends; you give what you can, and together we’re able to be awesome.” Another group, Operation Tourniquet, started with an IDF soldier’s request in Miami to bring back to Israel combat tourniquets.
A group of five or six people raised money for the purchase of thousands of tourniquets from a supplier in Philadelphia, and sent them to Israel with individuals traveling there, said Gilad Kabilo, a venture capitalist who lives in Miami and Ra’anana and is helping distribute the tourniquets to army units in Israel. Dalia Strum, whose family owns Army Navy USA, a Queens, New York, store that was helping source the tourniquets and ship them to Israel, and who has sent tens of thousands dollars’ worth of military supplies to Israel from their store, was also working with larger organizations like the UJA to arrange some local initiatives to raise money for Israel.
“I don’t think it’s an either-or – it’s a both,” she said about the debate by American Jews whether it’s preferable for people to give to an established organization with large budgets or to smaller, new initiatives whose sole mission is supplying soldiers in the IDF. “I think every organization has a different initiative,” she said. “Everybody is hurting, everyone needs help.... We have to think about every single part of this; we’re only at the beginning,” she said. “It’s more productive to diversify.”
Operation Tourniquet had to diversify, after the IDF purchased 100,000 combat tourniquets in the US, so the group is now moving to blood-clotting gauze, said Kabilo. “We’re trying to avoid hysteria and burnout and make the most impact by focusing on one high-priority item at a time,” he said.
HYSTERIA IS hard to avoid during wartime, especially for the parents of soldiers in the army. That’s how Aliza Israel got involved in trying to import rain gear for 800 soldiers, a story that exemplifies how difficult it is for an individual to get military supplies to Israel. With three sons and a son-in-law serving in the IDF, the NY-born marketing manager from Gush Etzion realized that it was soldiers’ families who were helping the troops. To raise money from the US and England (where her husband is from), Aliza connected with The Ari Fuld Project, a nonprofit dedicated to continuing the legacy of Fuld, who was murdered by terrorists in 2018. “If Ari had been alive, he’d be leading the charge right now to help soldiers have everything they need, and we’re just trying to continue his legacy,” said Stephen Leavitt, director of projects at the nonprofit.
The Fuld Project helped Aliza build a fundraising page online, and she began sourcing army needs around the country. But there was one item proving impossible to find locally: rain gear. “On Sunday I spent two hours going into army supply stores, and I was frustrated and happy that the IDF had taken everything suitable and the only things left were bright yellow,” Aliza said. “The army is doing its job, but there’s room to help.” But getting the help was harder than it seemed, even with tens of thousands of dollars of donations. She spent days searching for military rain gear abroad, with the help of “tireless” volunteers from Los Angeles, New York, and London.
Each time someone would find an item, they would send her a photo, and she would send it to her military contacts to see if it met IDF standards (“No, because there’s writing on the sleeve,” one army contact said). Then it had to be forwarded to the Fuld Project to see if the price was right. By midweek, Aliza was getting increasingly desperate to find rain gear for 800 soldiers. “I had no clue when I started this that it would be so difficult to source,” she explained.
By the end of the week, most of the rain gear was on its way to Israel, with the help of a British volunteer, Jonathan Shine, who flew from London to Germany to pick up 25 boxes and help send them to Ben-Gurion Airport, where they would hopefully be allowed in the country. Whatever the result, the effort was helping her cope. “We’re all doing our best – trying not to focus too much on things that are difficult to think about,” she said. “I want to try and keep my mind on the things I can do that are positive and have an impact.”