PHOTO: Graves at Mount Herzl National Cemetery in Jerusalem decorated in flowers and flags for Yom HaZikaron - Israeli Memorial Day Wednesday, Apr. 30. (Carolyn Weinstein)
They had all visited before.
When and how many times they had come before varied. For Kyle Mezrahi, it was his fourth trip. Carolyn Weinstein recalled that Laurie Rogoway guessed it was her 25th visit.
But something called to all 13 people on the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland’s 2025 Israel Mission to return to Eretz Yisrael.
“I know other people before me have gone since Oct. 7, and I’ve been very interested in their response and what it meant to them,” Weinstein said. “Everybody had said that the people were so glad that we were coming. I thought that that was important.”
Some came early and some stayed after to visit friends and family and see other sights. But for eight days, these 13 journeyed across Israel together for a common purpose: to stand witness, to mourn, to remember, and to celebrate.
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Following a first night dinner in Tel Aviv, the group headed south into the area close to Gaza. Very close to Gaza.
“There was a fence. I could see right through it,” Weinstein recalled. “I was on one side, and Gaza was literally on the other.”
They travelled to Kibbutz Nir Oz to visit the grave of Ohad Yehalomi, the brother of Portland’s Efrat Avsker. Debbie Plawner, a participant in the trip who is closely connected with Avsker and others in Yehalomi’s family in Portland, spoke at his graveside.
“It was really an honor to be able to share what I’ve had the opportunity to hear directly from his family, with all of the people on the mission, and we spent quite a bit of time honoring his memory,” Plawner said.
The group was not originally scheduled to tour Kibbutz Nir Oz. Circumstances intervened in the form of the cemetery’s caretaker, who was there preparing the area for the upcoming holiday. He seemed perturbed; sensing this, the group’s guide spoke with him.
“He was offended that we had come all the way to Nir Oz without coming to actually go into the kibbutz and to hear his story,” Plawner recalled. “We gathered as a group, and we said, ‘that is, of course, what we want to do.’ And then we had the opportunity to walk through the kibbutz with him, and I’m so grateful.”
Of 229 homes in Nir Oz, only six were left untouched by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7.
“You could see these the gardens had been beautifully tended and kept up, both in the common areas and around the houses, very intentionally, I think, to preserve the beauty that had been there,” trip participant Sally Rosenfeld said. But then if you looked more closely at the houses, they were just destroyed.”
“You heard the birds chirping,” Mezrahi remembered of walking through Nir Oz. “To me, it just felt weird walking in a beautiful place where this horrible event happened. It was hard to process.”
The group had a similar experience in Kibbutz Kfar Aza earlier in the morning, when Weinstein could look through the fence and see Gaza.
“The kibbutz had been a beautiful little village. Most of the buildings were white stucco, and many of them had sweet flowers painted around the windows,” Weinstein said of Kfar Aza. “Inside, we saw floors, ceilings and windows totally riddled with bullets. Stuff smashed. All the furnishings destroyed. House after house after house, it was just sheer destruction. It was devastating.”
There was less physical evidence of the devastation wrought on Oct. 7 at the Nova Festival site, the group’s next stop, but the story told by a survivor from the festival who spoke to the group painted the picture.
“She talked about grabbing three other young women and running across fields to find a safe place. She found a place where they could dig in and cover themselves with branches, and they stayed there for 10 hours, lying still while they could hear Hamas running around looking for them,” Weinstein said.
“She was telling us how she was praying to die from a rocket because she didn’t want to be taken hostage or she didn’t want to be raped by a terrorist,” Mezrahi said. “It’s just like stories that you would hear in a movie that you wouldn’t think it’s possible for a human to go through it, but they went through it.”
She continued to add that she was now speaking about her experiences throughout Europe and beyond and working to help support other survivors from Nova who are battling depression and survivor’s guilt.
“The thing that hits me is that we always have these aversions to challenge and crisis as humans, and yet the most profound societal innovations happen because there are people who say there’s got to be something we can do and do differently and do better,” Plawner said. “In Israel, it’s the norm that everyone is really trying to figure out how they can bring some light to a very dark time.”
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The holiday that the cemetery at Kibbutz Nir Oz was being prepared for was Yom HaZikaron – Memorial Day.
In the United States, Memorial Day is often just a day off unless one happens to have a family member or close friend who was killed while serving in the military. In Israel, a country of around 10 million people with mandatory military service, which has fought no fewer than 19 wars in the 77 years following its establishment, it’s not a question of if one has a friend or close family member who was killed in a war, but a question of how many.
“We’re so removed from generations of people who have sacrificed their lives for us and for our democracy,” Plawner said. “That’s not the case in this young democracy of Israel. Everyone knows someone or is a family member who’s grieving.”
Accordingly, Memorial Day is done differently in the Jewish state.
“Tuesday night, about eight o’clock at night, you hear a siren,” Weinstein said, “and you stop whatever you’re doing, and you stand at attention. The next morning, at 11 o’clock for about five minutes, the siren goes off. If you’re driving in a car, you stop, you get out. If you’re in a house, you get out, you stop, you stand still. Wherever you are, you stand at attention, and you pay tribute to all those who have fallen over however many wars there have been in Israel.”
As Americans have Arlington National Cemetery, Israelis have Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. Named for the founder of modern Zionism, who is entombed at the summit, the rest of the hill’s slopes hold the graves of Israel’s war dead. It’s understandably crowded on Yom HaZikaron, which the group was visiting when the morning siren sounded.
“You’re in this meaningful movement, kind of like if you were in a march. Then the siren happened, and there’s no movement,” Plawner explained. “Every single person who’s there stops.”
Tens of thousands of people, moving in waves along the slopes of the mountain – along with millions more, from Haifa to the Negev – suddenly come to a halt.
“That’s really profound,” Plawner continued. “These people aren’t doing this because it’s a tradition. It’s because this is where their family is buried. They’re coming to pay their respects to their family members.”
Flowers were distributed for visitors to place at their family’s graves – an importation of an American custom, as Jewish grave visitors usually place stones. Mezrahi, who was experiencing his first Yom HaZikaron in Israel, noticed that even in death, Israelis ensure that their fellow countrymen are not abandoned.
“There were some people who were like lone soldiers, that didn’t have anyone from their family to put a flower on their tombstone,” he observed. “There would be a group of people who would be assigned a grave site to go to so they would have a flower, so no one was ever left behind. I thought that was very beautiful.”
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Yom HaZikaron is, quite intentionally, immediately followed by Yom Ha’Atzmaut – Independence Day.
77 years before, by Hebrew calendar reckoning, David Ben-Gurion read out the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel standing underneath a portrait of Herzl. In modern times, the beginning of the celebration is marked with a torch-lighting ceremony at Herzl’s grave atop the mountain which bears his name.
Not this year.
Wildfires had sprung up the previous morning in the Judean Mountains west of Jerusalem. Over 6,000 acres were eventually burned. Highway 1, the main traffic corridor between Jerusalem, where the group had been observing Yom HaZikaron, and Tel Aviv, where they were staying and planning to celebrate Yom Ha’Atzmaut, was closed. The group made its way back along another road, packed with evacuees from threatened areas and others trying to get back to Tel Aviv.
“Our guide was very worried about her husband and her son because they were in the path of having to be evacuated,” Weinstein recalled. “The smoke around us was just unbelievable.”
A few phone calls confirmed that the guide’s family was safe. Eventually the Portland group made it back to their hotel for celebrations with other Federation groups that were also visiting.
“Because of the conditions, all of the parties were canceled. Usually, it would be a really big, fun party, but on the beach, there were no parties, but the music was blasting because we were at a hotel on the beach, so that was almost bizarre,” Plawner said. “We had a private kind of gathering that had been organized with the other federations. We did have our party, and it was nice to be able to sit and meet other people.”
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After the holiday, the Portland delegation headed north. They visited Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights, the Druze village where a Hezbollah-launched rocket killed 12 children in a soccer field. This is not the first time Druze populations have been the victims of militants in the countries along Israel’s northern border.
“There had been a delegation of 500 Druze religious leaders who had come covertly; Israel had opened up its borders for them to do a first-ever pilgrimage to their holy site in Israel,” Plawner recalled being told. “But their WhatsApp group had been infiltrated, and they were being hunted when they got back to Syria and killed.”
Plawner also described the group helping to serve lunch to Israel Defense Forces soldiers at an army base – she had wanted to do a volunteer service trip to the Jewish state in the aftermath of Oct. 7, and the group’s guide joked to her that this was her volunteer service. The food was prepared by a duo of South Americans – an Argentinian and a Uruguayan – who had moved to Israel immediately before Oct. 7 and were looking for some way to give back to their new home country at one of its most vulnerable moments.
“They decided, ‘well, what we really know how to do is grill some really good beef.’ So, they did their first carne asada barbecue at an army base, and they’ve done 1,600 since,” Plawner said. “The joy that you see in these soldiers, who don’t usually get beef like this, and the sense of unity that you see on the base through sharing a meal was really powerful.”
“They would pile six steaks on their little plate and then go back for more,” Weinstein recalled, awed by the soldiers’ appetites. “We interspersed ourselves among them. All of us heard different stories; where these kids came from, how long they’ve been in the service.”
Conversations like these were what made this trip so meaningful for Weinstein.
“This is not what a first timer would do. You would go to Masada, and you would go here, and you would go there, which is fabulous, but that was not what we were there to do. We were there to listen to the people, to talk to the people,” she said. “It was just a remarkable experience to be able to share time with everyone that we came in contact with. It was just so special.”
“It’s good to hear a perspective and an understanding from someone just talking with them, not just seeing something on the news or on social media,” Mezrahi noted. “Just having those conversations were very meaningful to me.”
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Shabbat is always special – it’s the whole point. But on a trip that was so special, Shabbat was even more so.
The Portland group spent it at Kibbutz Kfar Giladi. Wedged between Lebanon and the Golan Heights, Kfar Giladi is one of the northernmost kibbutzim in Israel. Founded in 1916, the kibbutz was evacuated for 10 months in 1920 and not again until 2023. A secret arms cachet was dug into a hillside and concealed by a stable – British authorities never discovered the armory during the Mandatory period. Kfar Giladi was evacuated for 17 months after Oct. 7; unusually, the kibbutzniks of Kfar Giladi made a point to remain together throughout the evacuation. Most of the residents had returned quite recently and were gathering together on Friday night for the first time the week that Portland’s delegation joined them.
“They were so joyful and so gracious in wanting to share that experience with us,” Rosenfeld said. “It was like this gift that they were giving to us.”
Mixed in that joy was fiery resolve – most memorably expressed in the words of one elderly kibbutznik.
“We heard the head of the kibbutz talk, and he was talking about the 17 months that they had been evacuated, and he hoped that they would never be evacuated again. And a woman stood up, and she said, ‘We will not be evacuated ever again.’ And everybody cheered and clapped for her,” Weinstein recounted.
“They were talking about how great it was to come back and this one woman said, ‘We will never leave again,” Rosenfeld added. “’We are never leaving again.’”
Easy enough to say, but with a whole different meaning when uttered in a place where you can go up to the balcony in the guest house and see Lebanon on one side and Syria on the other.
“They’re in an area where there have been constant bombings, and you hear this kind of verbalization of how important that kibbutz is to them,” Weinstein continued. “It’s just striking.”
It’s an attitude that speaks to one of the core qualities of Israelis – resilience.
“It is meaningful. It’s purposeful,” Plawner said of that resilience. “The alternative of hiding or being depressed about it, it doesn’t seem to be an option. And that doesn’t mean that people don’t have major moments of crisis. I don’t mean to say that they’re super people, but I think that there’s so many experiences around them that spark a reminder; ‘We’re here to live despite this. We’re here to live.’”
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The trip had one more surprise in store for some of its participants – this one much less pleasant.
On May 4, a hypersonic ballistic missile launched by Houthi terrorists in Yemen penetrated Israeli air defenses and exploded near Ben Gurion International Airport, injuring eight people.
Rosenfeld, along with Jewish Federation of Greater Portland President and CEO Marc Blattner, were at the airport when the missile landed.
“I was in the airport and was walking towards my gate and I heard the siren. At first, nobody was doing anything,” Rosenfeld recalled.
Eventually, people began moving toward a shelter area. Rosenfeld went with.
“We were in a little hallway off of the main walkway to the terminal. It wasn’t very big; 10 feet wide and not that deep. People crowded in there and the sirens continued. I don’t remember if I actually felt the shaking and heard it. I think we did, but it’s kind of a blur.”
Rosenfeld’s flight left an hour and a half behind schedule, she said. Others were not so fortunate. Weinstein was flying out later that day along with Rogoway, planning an overnight stop in London.
“I was just beginning to dry my hair, and the siren went off,” Weinstein said.
She quickly grabbed a robe and headed for the stairwell, which was the hotel’s shelter area. Upon getting to the airport, the pair learned that their scheduled carrier, British Airways, was one of the numerous airlines that had cancelled all flights in and out of Ben Gurion. Fortunately, they managed to get rebooked the next day on an El Al flight to Boston, continuing to Portland on Alaska Airlines. On the way to the airport the next morning, Weinstein asked the cab driver to point out the blast crater.
“You cannot believe how close it was to the front entrance of the airport. If the Houthis had been more accurate, it would have been hundreds of people killed,” she said. “It really brought the whole thing home to us. That’s what people live with every day.”
That should not dissuade those interested from visiting, however.
“I encourage anybody - Jewish, non-Jewish, whatever - if you’re going to travel anywhere this is the country that you will learn the most from,” Weinstein said of the Jewish state.
Not all trips to Israel are the same. This one was unique for its participants in multiple ways: its timing, its itinerary and the unexpected circumstances that are simply realities in a volatile, complicated part of the world. Plawner reflected on this after coming hope and having a conversation with a friend who was stridently opposed to Israel’s continuing military campaign.
“I spent a week having the opportunity to hear firsthand the stories that don’t make it into the media, and I just want you to hold space for the reality of the situation being more complex,” Plawner recalled telling her friend.
“Getting up close and personal helped me see how incredibly, even more complex and challenging it is than what I thought,” she added.
It can be tough to see all that complexity in one lifetime, much less eight days. But Portland’s delegation crammed in a huge swath of it – far more than can be covered in a newspaper article, in both breadth and depth.
“The way our program was set up was very thoughtful and, in a short period of time, created an enormous impression,” Rosenfeld said. “We saw such a spectrum of life in Israel.”
Lives that continue to be altered by ongoing conflict.
“The main reason it was so meaningful was because it’s in a time of war. There are still hostages held in Gaza. There’s been a lot of families that are separated and still not at their homes,” Mezrahi said. “There’s stuff that we’re going through here, like on college campuses, but just seeing what they’ve gone through, some things have been put into perspective. Although [Israelis] were very understanding of our situation and it’s a different battle, they’re fighting a more life-and-death battle, and I think that just felt very powerful and we just wanted to be there for them and do our part.”