By Leyna Krow, Assistant Editor, JTNews
Editor’s note: In March of this year, JTNews Assistant Editor Leyna Krow spent two weeks traveling Israel. The following is a dispatch from her trip:
It felt like about 8 million degrees outside and I was doing a better job of covering my white Adidas with salmon-colored paint than the wall in front of me. From time to time, a Livnot U’Lehibanot staff member would come by, and, cigarette dangling from his mouth, he would take the brush from my hand to demonstrate, sans English, the proper technique.
“Ken, ken,” I said, although little improvement was made on my part.
I am not the artsy type, but six hours of salmoning up this bomb shelter bought me another free night’s stay in the Israeli hill town of Tzfat, so I was willing to try.
I was not the first Livnot volunteer to spend a day painting a bomb shelter. Far from it. In fact, in the last two years, Livnot U’Lehibanot program participants, stemming from all over the world, have painted, furnished, refloored, rewired, and replumbed 130 such structures in Israel’s Northern Galilee region.
The birthplace of Jewish mysticism, as well as a thriving artist’s colony, Tzfat was one of a number of cities in the north of Israel to fall victim to heavy shelling during the 2006 war with Lebanon. Aharon Botzer, the founding director of Livnot U’Lehibanot and a long-time Tzfat resident, estimates that more than 500 rockets were fired at the city that summer, although only a handful struck homes or businesses. Three people were killed.
When the shelling started, most of Tzfat’s residents were evacuated, including, according to Botzer, 95 percent of city officials. (This claim could not be validated by the Tzfat Municipality.)
Still, when the municipality’s phone system became overloaded, emergency calls began being routed to the Livnot offices, located in the city’s artist’s quarter, amidst a maze of narrow winding streets and tiny galleries. As others fled, Livnot called in 200 volunteers from around the country to come to Tzfat to pick up the slack.
According to Eli Yefet, manager of Livnot volunteer projects in Northern Galilee, these volunteers spent the duration of the war working to make the city’s bomb shelters inhabitable.
“We ran from shelter to shelter,” said the energetic Yefet over tea in the lounge of Livnot’s Tzfat campus. “Nobody ever thought about them. They were in terrible shape. No one even knew who had the keys.”
Volunteers also took over the care of some 70 elderly and infirm Tzfat residents whose caretakers had evacuated, leaving them behind.
Rolan Jarufi, the owner of a Yemenite café/Kabbalah reading room across the street from the Livnot campus, believes that the war could have been much worse for Tzfat, given the number of rockets fired at the city.
“It was a miracle. Hundreds of missiles were shot, but there were only minor damages. Very few of them actually hit. The Arabs were a very poor shot,” he told me, as I ate something resembling a fried pancake stuffed with tomatoes, hardboiled eggs and a myriad of spices, bought from his walk-up counter one afternoon.
I asked him if he had been in the Tzfat during the war with Lebanon. He said that his wife and kids had evacuated, but he had stayed.
“It’s my place, my country. I’m not afraid of wars,” he offered by way of explanation.
When the war ended, the municipality went to work cleaning up the damage. Although there are a number of relics left behind from skirmishes in 1948, when Tzfat was a hotly contested site during the war for independence, little evidence remains in the city today to suggest that it has been victim of a more recent conflict. Life in the vibrant, mystical city quickly returned to normal.
For the staff of Livnot, however, going back to the way things were before the war seemed irresponsible, knowing what they do now about the condition of the city’s bomb shelters.
“After the war, we began to understand the extent of the situation,” Yefet said.
During their efforts in the summer of 2006, Livnot staff and volunteers had found most of the shelters to be in dismal condition. They lacked proper plumbing and were sparsely furnished. Many were without kitchens or even working electricity. Repairing these aging structures has become the news raison d’etre for Livnot.
Livnot U’Lehibanot (which, translated, means “to build and be built”) began in 1980 with the aim of bringing young adults who identify as Jews, but who have little or no Jewish background, to Israel to learn about the country (much like the case of Taglit-Birthright Israel, with whom the organization frequently partners). Programs last anywhere from two weeks to five months, and, along with hiking excursions and Jewish educational activities, they include a host of volunteer projects, such as working in soup kitchens, distributing clothing and food to elderly and low-income Israelis, and renovating and repairing schools and community centers.
Livnot representatives boast that their alumni roster includes young Jews from all around the world, although, in actuality, most come from the United States. Individuals who don’t have time for a whole program are still welcome to lend a hand volunteering on specific projects, in exchange for room and board.
This core arrangement hasn’t changed. A number of the people I met with during my free and paint-splattered stay at Livnot’s subterranean Tzfat campus in March told me that they had worked to spruce up the homes of elderly Tzfat residents and to rehabilitate playgrounds, as well as bomb shelters.
Tej Green of Oakland, Calif. first arrived in Israel last winter as part of a 14-day joint Livnot and birthright trip that began as a sightseeing tour, and wrapped up with four days of volunteer service in Tzfat. Green stayed in Israel after her tour ended, traveling around on her own. She said she has returned to Tzfat on several occasions in the last three months to participate in individual projects, such as repainting the home of an older gentleman who had been identified as a Good Samaritan by the larger community.
“It felt really good to do something for this guy that he obviously wasn’t capable of doing for himself anymore,” Green said.
Of course, Green noted, she had also spent a fair amount of her time with Livnot working in and around a number of the region’s many bomb shelters.
The ultimate goal of the shelter repair program, according to Livnot’s Yefet, is to make the shelters into dual-purpose facilities, so that they function both as bomb shelters as well as community centers. The hope is that this will make the spaces more familiar to local residents, and also more of a priority for neighborhoods to maintain.
“This way, when families have to go into the shelters, the kids won’t be so traumatized because they’ll have been in them before and know they aren’t so scary,” Yefet said.
Before my fellow volunteers and I set to work on our shelter, Yefet took us to see a recently revamped structure that is now also home to an after-school program for developmentally disabled children. Outside is a mural of several children, varying in age and race, holding hands. Inside, a narrow staircase gives way to a spacious, well-lit room with multi-colored walls and hardwood floors. A smaller, separate room contains plastic chairs, tumbling mats and hula hoops.
“Now, when you go inside this bomb shelter, it makes you smile, especially if you know what it was before,” Yefet announced, as he flipped on the new fluorescent lights, illuminating his vision turned into reality.
And indeed, he was smiling.