In January, after a Palestinian teen stabbed a Jewish mother of six to death in her home, her husband said “the true solution is love.”
“The message I want to spread and which I have repeated to all those who have come to pay their condolences is to stop sharpening swords, and look for what unites us,” Natan Meir reportedly told Israeli President Reuven Rivlin.
When Ephraim Shapiro, 25, heard about Natan Meir’s remarkable response to personal horror, it resonated. The former Milwaukee Jewish Day School student has served in the Israel Defense Forces and heard Meir’s words through the Israeli news media. Now, Shaprio is slated to visit America and speak at a local event commemorating fallen Israeli soldiers and victims of terror.
“I think that’s a very important message to get across,” said Shapiro, interviewing by Skype from his hostel apartment in Tel Aviv. “You can’t let fear take over.”
“We cannot label and blame an entire group of people.”
Shapiro will speak at the local commemoration of Yom HaZikaron, Israel’s Day of Remembrance, which honors veterans and fallen military personnel of the Israel Defense Forces, other Israeli security services and victims of terror. This year is to give a special honor to victims of terror. The event takes place Wednesday, May 11 at 6 p.m., at the Harry and Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center, 6255 N. Santa Monica Blvd., which is cosponsoring the event with Milwaukee Jewish Federation.
Shapiro is visiting the United States to see friends and family and to speak in Whitefish Bay, years after simultaneously joining the Israel Defense Forces and making aliyah, which literally means to ‘ascend’ and refers to moving to Israel. Shapiro joined the IDF and moved to Israel in 2012, aware that the army is a big part of the social network there. You meet someone and the talk turns to the army, its miseries and that old base you realize you both served at, he said. He had decided that if he was going to move to Israel, he wanted to have that connection.
So Shapiro made aliyah as part of the Garin Tzabar “Lone Soldier” program, which connects foreign transplants with one another to give them a sense of family in Israel, while also easing them into the IDF. Participants live on a kibbutz along with the rest of their group during their military service, creating bonds that often last forever. The idea is that the “lone soldier” is no longer alone.
Shapiro attended Milwaukee Jewish Day School in Whitefish Bay for most of his young life, attending Lake Park Synagogue, 3207 N. Hackett Ave., before moving to Baltimore for his teen years.
“It’s a completely different pace of life. The sense of community is a lot different, really a lot different,” he said, comparing Milwaukee and Baltimore. “I can safely say I prefer the Midwestern mentality over the East Coast any day. It’s much more laid back, slower pace.”
“I didn’t grow up in a sheltered community. My friends growing up were both Jews and non-Jews. It really had an impact on who I am today.”
Shapiro connected to Israel through friends, cousins and other people visiting his home on Milwaukee’s East Side growing up, and through Israeli students who visited America to play basketball with the students of his Baltimore high school, Beth Tfiloh Dahan Community High School.
But before that, he says he loved Milwaukee Jewish Day School, had great teachers and was given a strong foundation there. “It was a great environment,” he recalled.
A teacher once said to him: “In order to truly understand a different culture you have speak the language.” So he learned to speak Arabic.
He went to college at University of Pittsburgh, suspecting he’d make aliyah afterwards and majoring in political science and Arabic.
“I just have this fascination with Arab culture,” he said. “When you compare Arab and Jewish culture and identity we’re not that different. We have the same values, the same traditions. A lot of the biblical stories are rooted in both religions.”
His Arabic may have helped him get into an elite combat unit in the intelligence corps. Today, he’s no longer an active member of the IDF. He’s a financial analyst for an Israeli start-up.
His group of 27 lone soldiers lived at Kibbutz Urim, close to Gaza. He was there when rockets were raining down around the kibbutz, in nearby fields, but the kibbutz was not hit.
There can be important moments in the life of a soldier, like finding a hidden collection of firearms, but soldiers also spend a lot of time standing around, Shapiro said.
“It’s not a glorified Hollywood film.”
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