Milwaukee middle-schoolers Shani Arieff, Zach Cohen, Elana Frankenthal and Shuli Rivkin can tell their grandchildren that they were there. So can high school student Gretchen Frankenthal and graduate student Aliza Glaser. And despite the about 15-year-age difference among them, their collective opinion about joining 100,000 other Jews Monday in support of Israel in Washington, D.C., was, in 11-year-old Shani’s words, “really really cool.”
It wasn’t easy for the students, parents and others to make the last minute decision to attend the rally, dubbed by organizers the largest gathering in support of Israel by American Jews since 1948. Business, personal and school appointments and assignments had to be juggled. Still, the opportunity to stand with Israel in our nation’s capital couldn’t be passed up by the 40 people from the Milwaukee-area and the 80 University of Wisconsin-Madison students who attended.
Glaser, a graduate student in psychology in Chicago whose parents, Peggy and Bruce, live in Glendale, said she had “some really important and big things going on in my studies today, but I decided support for Israel was more important.”
For Howard Frankenthal, who heard about the rally only on Friday and traveled with his two daughters and niece, the gathering was “an opportunity to show my kids what support of Israel is all about.” Not that they don’t already know what that is or learn about it in school, he said, but a gathering of 100,000 is an “awesome experience for all of us.”
Anyone who has ever been to such a gathering, and many of the Milwaukeeans had attended previous large rallies for Israel and Russian Jewry, knows the exhilaration of seeing so many Jews gathered in one place. “It’s going to be just like in Israel for one day,” said Rabbi Moshe Rapoport of Congregation Agudas Achim Chabad with boyish excitement as we walked with streams of fellow Jews toward the rally site. “It’s great.”
Despite the relentless heat, Monday was great. It was great to remember that none of us stands alone as an individual, a community or a people — and that the Jewish people are no longer powerless to defend themselves against terrorism. Even the unfortunate fact that it takes a crisis to get us mobilized does not diminish the splendor of the mobilization.
Monday’s extraordinariness lies in every individual from across the nation who dropped everything to get to D.C.; in the national effort by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and the United Jewish Communities to organize the rally in less than a week; and in the work of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation and the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations to help our community be represented.
Not every child or adult in Milwaukee has the opportunity to experience a 100,000-strong Jewish high. But they had the chance especially to understand the power of Jewish peoplehood and the power of their individual decision to belong to it locally this week during Wednesday’s Solidarity Walk for Israel, and they can continue to do so over the next few weeks and months by showing solidarity through advocacy and financial support for Israel.
“It’s very important for all of us to be here with our kids,” said Yaffa Arieff, Shani’s mother. “The old and the young. The grandparents, parents and children.”
Arieff was speaking at and about the rally. But her words are a message for all of us as we go forward in the days ahead.
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