of The Chronicle staff When African American journalist Cookie Lommel of Los Angeles heard about Operation Solomon, Israel’s rescue of some 15,000 Ethiopian Jews in a secret airlift in May 1991, she was intrigued.
Determined to find out more, she traveled to Israel to investigate. She was amazed at what she found there — a society where diverse people were integrated to a degree that is rare in the U.S.
Lommel “saw the airlift as a humanitarian move that spoke to the possibilities of people coming together. She saw it as a reflection of the values embodied in an Israeli kibbutz, a village where cooperative labor provides for all the needs of the participants,” according to her Web site.
Upon her return to Los Angeles, Lommel was inspired to create a program to take African American and Latino high school seniors, who were having difficulties with race relations, to Israel to learn from the kibbutz model about diversity and working together for a common goal.
Established in 1992, Operation Unity first took 17- and 18-year-old students from the impoverished East Los Angeles area, to spend six weeks working on an Israeli kibbutz in 1994.
They lived and worked as full members of the kibbutz but on their days off, Lommel said, the students toured Israel. They visited historical sites, Bedouin and Druze villages and the African Hebrew Israelite community in Dimona.
Lommel spoke in Milwaukee last Sunday, March 18, about Operation Unity. She addressed the annual African American-Jewish Intergroup Seder at Congregation Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun in the afternoon and an audience of some 15 people later that evening at the Burleigh Community Enterprise Center.
Before travel to Israel, Operation Unity participants underwent intensive preparation, including diversity training seminars.
Two fundamentals of the program in Israel were that each student would meet a Holocaust survivor and would have an adopted Israeli family.
The program also included a structured follow-up program that entailed writing an essay about their experiences and speaking to their peers and community groups.
Until 2000, the program sent some 50 students to Israel. But in 2002, Operation Unity created a project in Los Angeles based on the international program.
For the local project, students worked in construction and gardening, and learned to use the Israeli form of irrigation. They participated in seminars about topics such as team building, conflict resolution and human relations training.
The teens also visited various cultural centers and ethnic communities around Los Angeles.
Though students are not now attending the kibbutz program, Operation Unity has developed a traveling photo exhibit from the students’ experiences called “The Young Ambassadors of Harmony.”
In her Milwaukee talk, Lommel, now executive director of the Jewish Labor Committee’s western region, shared some of those students’ insights.
Lommel talked about Pablo Ramos, a Mexican-American student, who stayed on Kibbutz Elifaz in the Negev Desert.
Pablo made a special friend there, who was originally from Korea. In an essay, Pablo said that he had never met anyone from Korea before and he learned a lot from him about Korean culture.
“He was so interested in my culture, it made me feel important. He wanted to go to Mexico with me and meet my family. We worked in the date palm fields together everyday, and everyday we talked about Mexico and Korea,” Pablo wrote.
Later, Lommel said, she pointed out to Pablo that in East L.A., he lived one mile from the largest Korean community outside of Korea. “Isn’t it ironic,” she said to him, “that you had to go all the way to Israel to meet a Korean when there are so many right in your own backyard?”
In her evening talk, Lommel, who is not Jewish, discussed her knowledge of, comfort with and respect for the Jewish community.
“African Americans and Jews have many shared experiences,” she said. And while she acknowledged it is not true for all African Americans or all Jews, “there was always an enlightened group” from the two communities who have worked together.
Lommel’s appearance at the Intergroup Seder was sponsored by the American Jewish Committee-Milwaukee Chapter, the Milwaukee Urban League and Congregation Emanu-El.
Her evening speech was sponsored by Advocates for Israel of Milwaukee, the AJC, and the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations.
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