While 17-year-old Yifat Shoshani was collecting bugs in Fredonia, her friends and family in northern Israel were ducking into shelters.
But rather than feel happy to be far from danger, Shoshani felt anxious and powerless. “I felt like it’s so wrong to be here,” she said. “My country is being bombed.”
When a bomb hit close to her home in Mizpa, near Tiberias, she called her mother. “I was very afraid because it was the first time [the rockets were] so close, and she yelled at me, ‘Stop crying, there is nothing you can do.’”
“My friend emailed me about all the people she knew who got killed and wounded…. I don’t know how to help her,” said Shoshani, a counselor at Albert & Ann Deshur JCC Rainbow Day Camp.
Shoshani is one of several Israelis who have spent the summer as counselors at local Jewish camps as part of the Partnership 2000 relationship between Milwaukee and Israel’s Sovev Kinneret (around the Sea of Galilee) region.
These young people arrived in early summer, far before the kidnappings and subsequent fighting in Israel and Lebanon began on July 12.
During a telephone interview this week, Einav Gafni, who is a counselor at Steve and Shari Sadek Family Camp Interlaken, admitted that it is difficult to be away from home now.
“It was really hard because I couldn’t talk to my family all the time, and communication was hard,” said Gafni, who arrived in Milwaukee on Aug. 5, 2005 and spent the past year working as an emissary in the community through the Shnat Sherut Shlishit (Shin Shin) program .
However, Gafni viewed her presence at the camp as an opportunity to “represent Israel,” she said. She said that talking to the campers made it “more realistic for them.”
She tried to lead activities with the campers to “keep the kids posted about what’s going on in Israel.” Sometimes the discussions involved Gafni’s “personal stuff,” and sometimes she tried to convey a more general understanding about the situation in Israel.
According to Gafni, a tour guide from the camp’s trip to Israel during the summer of 2005 was killed recently. “It suddenly made it real for them,” she said. “I think it helped them to understand a little of what it was like.”
Gafni was scheduled to return to Israel on Thursday, Aug. 17, and will go into the army in October. “I’m really excited to go back,” she said.
However, she said that she is “sad to leave all the people I got attached to in Milwaukee.”
For Hadar Cohen, a 21-year-old counselor at Rainbow Day Camp, being far away is a balancing act. “I can say I’m really having fun here, and I’m not sad all the time.”
However, when she hears news from Israel, she feels differently.
“It’s like, ‘OK, Hadar, you have to be happy,’ but my head is in Israel right now,” she said.
Cohen, who finished her army service before she arrived in Milwaukee on June 9 said, “I have a lot of friends who are still in [the army]. I talk with their families and write mail and jump on the computer to see if everything is OK.”
Cohen expressed gratitude for the support she has received from people in Milwaukee.
About her host families, she said, “I have no words to explain how much they give me. It makes it easier, and it makes my smile real.”
Shoshani feels the same feelings about her hosts. “My host family is like my real family.”
For Alina Yermonenok, a former Shin Shin emissary to Milwaukee in 2002-2003, coming to Milwaukee was “like coming home. I met some of the people I worked with, so it was really exciting for me.”
Still, of being away from Israel during the war with Hezbullah, she said, “It’s hard, it’s scary.”
“My brother was recruited, so I was very nervous about that,” Yermonenok said. “It’s hard to be away, but at the same time, I’m glad I’m here.”
In Israeli post-military tradition, both she and Cohen plan to travel throughout the U.S. before returning to Israel. Cohen plans to return at the end of October.
Yermonenok, however, plans to travel until February. Afterward, she hopes to take university entrance exams before taking more time to travel next summer.
Shoshani said that she enjoyed her time as a counselor. When she returns to Israel on Aug. 20, she will volunteer in small villages for a year before beginning her army service, working with teenagers and children through a program called “Service Ir (City).”
“I’ll actually be a counselor 24/7,” she said.
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