MJDS friends join the IDF

   For most of the 2015 high school graduates who are also alumni of the Milwaukee Jewish Day School, the next challenge is adjusting to college. But two MJDS grads are on a very different path.

   Ma’ayan Oren and Alex Hart, whose friendship dates back to their MJDS days, have both chosen to serve in the Israel Defense Forces.

   Both young women will be considered “Lone Soldiers,” the IDF’s term for members with no parents in Israel.

   Oren is a Nicolet High School graduate. Hart completed her freshman year at Nicolet before transferring to the Mosenson Boarding School outside of Tel Aviv, a part of Na’ale Elite Academy, a program for teens interested in making aliyah (moving to Israel).

   Aliyah is a non-issue for Oren. Her grandfather moved to then-Palestine at the age of 14, during World War II.

   “I’ve been thinking about the army since elementary school because my dad’s whole side of the family lives in Israel,” she said. “And that my grandfather could be so passionate about this place at 14 … made me want to be passionate about it, too.”

   Oren applied to several colleges in the U.S., and was accepted at all of them. But because she was also thinking about the IDF, she went to a seminar for prospective Lone Soldiers.

   “I was kind of skeptical about it,” she said, “but the people were amazing. They were talking about wanting to go into the army their whole lives and giving something back to Israel, and I realized I’d been thinking about this my whole life and it kind of clicked, and I knew.”

   As for Hart, she wrote in an email, “While I am a Zionist and I believe that the Jewish state is the home for all Jews and that I feel a responsibility to defend it, I also feel that at a certain point in life you have to do things just for the sake of yourself, without thinking about how it will help you get into this school, or that job, or a certain lifestyle. To do something solely because it is something you want and you love. And for me the IDF is one of those things.”

   Both Oren and Hart attributed part of their decision to their MJDS education, which devotes much time to Israel.

   An Israel trip is part of the MJDS eighth grade experience. For Hart, that trip was a turning point.

   “I fell in love and wanted to go back,” Hart said, “and my mom heard about the Mosenson program and told me about it.”

   The first year at Mosenson was tough. Hart spent 20 hours a week in an ulpan (Hebrew language class) and was assigned a host family that didn’t speak English. Most of her classmates had at least one Israeli parent and already were fluent speakers.

   “They didn’t have accents,” she said. “So whenever I would speak in Hebrew, my classmates would say things like ‘Your accent is so cute!’ So I eventually just stopped speaking.”

   Hart told her mother she wanted to come home. “She told me to stick it out for a year,” she said. “I stayed, and it ended up being the best decision I ever made.”

   Hart said she is trying to enter Oketz, the combat canine unit. Oketz soldiers go on border patrol missions with trained dogs, and is “one of the more interesting options” for female combat soldiers, Hart said.

   Oren wants “to be a therapist for people who have been in combat and have PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] and don’t know how to deal with what they’ve seen,” she said.

   That choice, she said, is related to an aspect of military service to which both women have given much thought.

   “I’ve struggled a lot with [the question of] what if I have to do something I think is immoral and have to hurt people who are supposedly our enemies,” Oren said.

   “If you’re put in a situation where your commander says, ‘This is what you have to do,’ and you don’t do what you’ve been asked, you can get in trouble,” Hart said.

   “But how do you face yourself after you have committed something that goes against your values and your beliefs? That is one of my worries and something I hope I don’t have to deal with.”

   While both have the support of their families, Oren said she’d gotten some pushback from people who had a tough time understanding her motivation.

   “By going into the army, people think I’m supporting the war and that I want to go and fight,” she said.

   “I want to go and focus on the peaceful parts — to try and repair what’s been done and not be part of that cycle where ‘we are going to kill you and you are going to kill us and we keep killing each other.’”

   Amy Waldman is a freelance writer and winner of a Simon Rockower Award for Excellence in Jewish Journalism.