As the group pulled away from Haifa’s Rambam Medical Center, they saw some 20 to 30 hospital gurneys lined up outside.
That image sticks in Sam Fishman’s head as much as anything he saw in Israel last week, where he traveled for three and a half days on a solidarity mission.
“They’re waiting to take in injured soldiers and other people,” he said. “It really shakes you when you realize what an awful scene that is to have in your mind as you’re leaving this world-renowned hospital.”
Fishman of Berkeley took part in a solidarity mission with American Jewish Committee; he serves as a vice president of the local chapter, and on its national board.
He noted with some pride that AJCommittee was the first Jewish organization to send a solidarity mission to Israel once the recent fighting broke out.
Everywhere they went, they were thanked for coming and told how brave they were, he said. But he didn’t necessarily feel brave; he just felt that “Israel was where we all needed to be right now.” And he especially didn’t feel brave when visiting the wounded soldiers in Rambam Hospital.
“Seeing these young kids with their injuries, you really see the current reality Israel faces,” he said.
They visited a tent city in Nitzanim, hastily constructed to shelter Israelis from the north.
Fishman was impressed by how Israeli teens — both religious and secular, in a rare display of unity — volunteered to work as counselors with the children there.
They also visited Sderot, near the Gaza border. A small city of 23,000, where an average of 20 Kassam rockets rain down daily, few think of leaving, even though up to 80 percent of the city’s children have been diagnosed with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Fishman was deeply moved by a memorial to those who have been killed by the rockets.
While they were in Haifa, they experienced several air raids, during which they had to go in a hallway with no windows.
“Haifa was like a ghost town,” he said. “For the thriving metropolis that it is, you saw nobody, no cars.”
While Fishman came home, fellow Bay Area resident Joy Powers was preparing to leave San Francisco to spend a month at the University of Haifa’s ulpan for overseas students. But a few weeks ago, she was notified that she’d be doing her ulpan at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem instead.
Powers, the director of communications at the Consul General of Israel, chose Haifa because she has family there and had studied there before.
She still plans on spending every weekend with her family in Haifa.
“I’m disappointed not to be as close to my family as I wanted,” she said. “My grandmother is 88, and she’s not going to spend her time in a shelter.”
Powers has an uncle there, too, as her mother was originally from Haifa.
“I think it’s very important that people who support Israel continue to go and not cancel their plans,” Powers said. “That’s home for the Israelis, it’s where they have to live, so by going there, I feel I’m showing my support and that I stand with them.”