Sael Abecassis, now an emissary serving with the Central federation, says his prayers while serving with the Israeli army in Gaza before the withdrawal in 2005.
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January 8, 2009
Those who call for “proportionality” in Israel’s response to attacks from Gaza frustrate Sael Abecassis, the Israeli emissary with the Jewish Federation of Central New Jersey.
His family lives in Sderot, the town that has suffered years of rocket fire from Hamas fighters. He lost a young cousin in one such attack. He welcomed New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s comment on a visit to Sderot last week, that when an attacker is at your front door, you defend yourself with all the strength you can muster.
Abecassis served in Gaza with the Israel Defense Forces, and — as expected — he got called up to serve now. His responsibilities as an emissary will keep him here, but at a very high price.
“My heart is torn,” he said. “A part of me wants to be there, to be able to see for myself what is happening with my family, to be part of what is going on there.
“Part of me feels it is very important to be here, to be able to share with people what the reality is in Israel. Most of the media don’t get the real story.”
Getting out the “real story” about Israel’s war on Hamas has become an obsession for many area Jews, just one of many ways the warfare is echoing here. From prayer vigils and fund-raising campaigns to solidarity rallies and teach-ins at religious schools, Jewish individuals and institutions are on a war footing of their own.
For Americans, watching from a distance can be heart-rending too. After Shabbat on Saturday night, Ilissia Kissner, the former director of the religious school at Congregation B’nai Israel in Basking Ridge, caught up with the day’s news on CNN. She grew so frustrated with what she perceived as anti-Israel bias that she couldn’t sleep.
At 2 a.m. the South Orange resident went to Facebook, searching for a pro-Israel group to join. She found “Support Israel, Ignore the Media, and Spread the Truth” begun by Joshua Katchen, a 2007 graduate of Rutgers University.
“I just had to do something to counteract all the negative stuff about Israel,” said Kissner. She said she felt relief after joining. “I felt I needed to communicate with someone who had a similar reaction to mine.”
Kissner was particularly incensed by reports from Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s chief international correspondent. “They are reporting as if there were no rockets going into Israel, no suffering on Israel’s part. Like they just woke up one morning and decided to invade Gaza,” said Kissner.
She also disliked the network’s coverage of anti-Israel demonstrations around the world, which to her sent a message that “if Israel hadn’t done this, the Arabs would not hate us.”
Stanley Stone, Central federation executive vice president, also worries that Israel’s justification for the war is not widely understood.
“It’s a matter of ‘Here we go again.’ You just have to wonder when the world will recognize what is going on,” he said.
In the Central federation’s partner community of Arad, situated on the Dead Sea, the municipality has taken in about 300 mostly low-income families from the “firing zone,” Stone said, to give them temporary respite. Also, between 50 and 100 high school students have been brought to Arad from the area coming under fire, to help them continue with their schooling.
On the home front, Stone said, security at the federation’s offices at the Wilf Jewish Community Campus in Scotch Plains were quietly upgraded after the Mumbai terrorist attack in early December, in coordination with the JCC of Central New Jersey, which shares the premises.
“Adjustments are being made,” he added.
To provide an opportunity for the community to express its solidarity with Israel, Leil Iyun, the Evening of Jewish Growth and Learning scheduled for this Saturday at the Wilf campus, has taken on a new identity: “An Evening of Solidarity with the People of Israel.” The program will begin earlier than planned, at 7:15, with prayers and speeches.
Prayers for the troops
At the synagogues of the Jewish Educational Center in Elizabeth and Union, congregants have been saying extra tehillim, or psalms, for Israel, according to JEC executive director Steve Karp.
The JEC schools have followed that example, each adding activities of its own. At the Rav Teitz Mesivta Academy Boys High School, they are working with the National Council of Young Israel’s “Operation Tefillah, Torah and Troops,” a program launched by Israeli rabbis Simcha HaCohen Kook, the chief rabbi of Rehovot, and Levi Yitzchak Horowitz, the Bostoner Rebbe of Har Nof, Jerusalem. The schools’ 187 students have been provided with the names of 187 soldiers in the IDF, so that each of them can bear in mind that specific soldier when they pray.
The school’s principal, Chanie Moskowitz, said that was an example set long ago. “Moses, when he led the Jewish people to war, had someone designated to pray for each fighter, and King David did the same thing.”
Abecassis expressed his sympathy for the civilians in Gaza, but also his respect for what the Israeli forces are doing there.
“Hamas places its soldiers in civilian areas, and it aims at civilians, but Israelis don’t work that way. As a former soldier and a commander with the IDF, I know they do all that they can to avoid civilian casualties.”
Meanwhile, Abecassis said, he tries to give his family strength when they speak on the phone, but instead, “they give me strength.”
Last week, a rocket hit a house near his grandparents’ home in Sderot, shattering their windows and damaging their deck.
“But for us, this is not the beginning or the end of this situation,” he said. “We have been living with it for so many years.” The big difference now, he added, is that those who before perhaps felt sympathy for the people in Sderot actually share their fear, knowing themselves to be in danger too.
Abecassis doesn’t know where his 20-year-old sister is; she is doing her national service with the Israeli intelligence service, and her whereabouts are secret. His two brothers, age five and 15 — along with all the other school children within 30 miles of the Gaza border — are being kept out of school. The older one is away, in a program designed to give children from the border area a break from the tension. The little one is at home.
His parents are staying put in Sderot — his mother, a social worker, because she works with the city’s emergency services, and his father, a school vice principal, because they are conferring every day about what to do with the schools. The latest plan is a home study system for the students.
“But even if my parents didn’t have to stay, I get the feeling that they would,” Abecassis said.
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