It’s hardly a glamorous getaway. It involves travel to one of the globe’s trouble spots. But 73-year-old Allen Calvin can’t imagine taking a more vital, or inspiring, trip.
Calvin and his wife, Dorothy, recently returned from a two-week sojourn to Israel where they prepared meals, fed patients and performed other orderly-type duties at a rehabilitation hospital in Tel Aviv.
They went because — and not in spite of — the intifada.
“I planned a trip when the discotheque was blown up,” said Calvin, a San Francisco psychologist and president of the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology in Palo Alto. (The Tel Aviv Dolphinarium disco was attacked by a suicide bomber on June 1, killing 22 .) “We needed to go. We needed to make a statement. I’ve never seen the Israelis so depressed.”
The Calvins signed up for their trip through Volunteers for Israel, a New York-based program that helps the Israel Defense Force by sending adult volunteers ages 18 and up to perform menial jobs at military bases and hospitals throughout the country.
At a time when tourism and other visits to Israel have plummeted, the Calvins are among a handful of local Jewish seniors who say they are more committed than ever to helping the Jewish state with their physical presence and manual labor.
“At the present time, it is absolutely imperative that Jews physically appear in Israel to show their support,” says Calvin, who made that appeal at a recent committee meeting at Congregation Emanu-El. He thinks the sight of a planeload of volunteers from San Francisco would dramatically boost the morale of the Israelis.
To those who fret about safety, Calvin responds that volunteers will “be safer on an Israeli army base than walking through downtown San Francisco.”
Diane Swanson, a 63-year-old Walnut Creek resident, returned in August from her eighth volunteer tour of duty. She spent three weeks on an army base in Rishon LeZion, where she sorted medical supplies, packed materials and painted.
“Rain or shine, war or peace, I go,” said Swanson, who took time off from her job in medical records at John Muir Medical Center to make the trip. While sightseeing in Jerusalem on a day off, Aug. 9, Swanson said she heard the blast from the pizzeria bombing about 100 yards away.
She said she wasn’t frightened, noting that life in urban America is fraught with potential hazards.
Every payday, Swanson sets money aside automatically to pay for her annual trips. “I believe once a person goes to Israel, if they really have a Jewish soul, they have to return. Every year, I go back to Israel. Especially during this time, they need our help more than anything.”
Such sentiments are a joy to directors of the volunteer program, which began in 1982 as a response to the war in Lebanon.
From sending 2,000 volunteers annually during the 1980s, the program shrank last year to about 350 participants, according to Bernie Needelman, an 84-year-old board member in the organization’s New York office. This year, he expects to send more than 400 volunteers — a sign, he hopes, of increasing commitment to the effort.
“The seniors always signed up,” said Needelman, who has made 19 trips of his own through the program. “The problem has been getting the younger people.”
As for the risk, Needelman said: “We haven’t lost anyone in 20 years. They’re well cared for, they’re supervised by Israeli soldiers.”
Samuel Borcover, regional director of the volunteer organization’s office in Oakland, acknowledges that “I get sick when I look at how far down the numbers are.
“Israel feels very isolated today in the world,” says Borcover, who joined the program in 1985. “Israel has so few friends. We’re their backbone.”
Besides the moral support, the volunteers lend meaningful, if menial, aid to the Israelis by performing jobs that either would be performed by reservists or maybe not done at all.
Volunteers pay for their own flights to and from Israel. Once there, they generally live in barracks, wear army fatigues and dine with soldiers in military mess halls. “You eat with soldiers and work with soldiers,” says Borcover, who still glows when he thinks of the gratitude voiced by an Israeli soldier when Borcover spent a day pouring quart containers of oil into an empty 55-gallon drum.
“Sometimes, you get your hands dirty.”
Kay Warren, a 60-year-old Oakland resident, was looking forward to doing just that in November. But she had to postpone her three-week stint until the spring because she got sick with bronchitis.
Warren, a retired bank vice president who has participated in the program with husband Welch Warren, says the intifada “encourages me. It sets my resolve because I think Israel needs our trade and travel and they need our moral support.”
She has taken two previous trips to Israel on the program; the most recent was in August 2000, when she was assigned at an air force base to clean rifles before they were stored.
The program, she says, offers huge returns for its participants. “I was a Peace Corps volunteer,” she says. “I consider it an honor to be allowed so far into a society in such a short time. This way, you are on your first day engaged in real conversation with real people about their culture.”
She was touched by the appreciation expressed by Israeli soldiers for her efforts. On her last trip, one approached her in the mess hall and said, “I don’t know who you are or why you are here, but thank you.” To that, “I told him we were there for the food and he laughed.”
Calvin sees the volunteer stints as a way to repay Israel for its courageous service to the Jewish people. “Most people aren’t old enough to know what it was like to be a Jew before there was an Israel,” he said. “We were known as cowards, known as shylocks; we were seen as weak and people with no backbones.
“We owe the Israelis much more than they owe us.”