At left, Yedidya Harush (center), liaison between the Jewish National Fund and the Negev community of Halutza, is shown here in a photograph taken at the first meeting of the Milwaukee chapter of JNFuture, held Nov. 10. With him are, from left: Mari Komisar, Bradley Komisar, Seth Wenig, Randi Komisar Schachter, Eric Schachter, and JNFuture founder Ben Jablonski. Photograph provided by Sidney Rivkin, JNF Wisconsin Region director.After the most recent Israeli action against the Hamas terrorists and their missile launchers in Gaza, some might question the wisdom of the Israeli government’s decision to pull Jewish settlers out of the Gaza Strip in 2005.
Whatever one thinks about that, there is no question that it was a traumatic experience for the Jews who had tried to make homes there.
And there is also no question that some of those people decided that if they can’t serve Israel by settling in Gaza, they will do so in some other way.
Yedidya Harush, 24, is a fundraiser for the relatively new Halutza community that is a partner of the Jewish National Fund in JNF’s work to build up Israel’s southern Negev Desert region; and he serves as a liaison between the two.
In a conversation with The Chronicle during his visit to Milwaukee he made it clear that he is in both of the above-described groups.
He was born and raised in the Gush Katif bloc of 17 Gaza Jewish settlements. He was 16 at the time of the “disengagement.”
“It was the hardest thing to happen to me in my life,” he said. “Do you realize what it is like for a 16-year-old to say goodbye to his house?”
“If you want to take your kids to show them where you grew up, wherever it is in the world, you could go there,” he said. But “we can’t go back.”
Nevertheless, he did “move on,” and became a member of the Gaza veterans group who, in a manner of speaking, asked the Israeli government and themselves, “What is the next national mission?” This is settling and building up the Negev.
“I feel like it’s a lifetime opportunity for me to be a pioneer in the 21st century,” Harush said. “There aren’t so many communities in Israel these days that are being built from the ground up.”
Harush was in Milwaukee to speak at the first meeting on Nov. 10 of the new local chapter of JNFuture, the international organization created in 2007 “to connect young leaders to JNF and Israel,” according to its web site.
Harush said this was his fourth tour of the U.S. speaking for JNF, and that during one of the earlier trips he had spoken at a JNFuture meeting in Los Angeles.
“I found it a very good and exciting program,” he said, “especially in this generation when people take the state of Israel for granted, take it for a fact.”
“My biggest fear is that people will forget about the Holocaust, will forget that Israel still has challenges, or basically will just forget about the state of Isreal,” he said. JNFuture helps make its participants “committed to the state” and “teaches about what we go through.”
Harush said he believes that Israel and Diaspora Jewry “are responsible for each other and committed to each other… It’s like in football; if you hurt your right arm, you can’t play with just your left.”
Though this is his fourth trip to the U.S., Harush has more personal knowledge of U.S. life than most Israelis. After his family was removed from Gush Katif, he had the opportunity to come to the U.S. on a scholarship.
He finished his last two years of high school in Highland Park, N.J. He then returned to Israel for military service, and was accepted into the elite paratroopers.
He and his wife, Shiran, have been married for a year-and-a-half and are expecting their first child soon. He presently lives in Yad Binyamin, where his parents live, but said he and his wife will soon be moving into Halutza.
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