“She could not get the image of this one girl out of her head,” Krifcher recalls. “We hear about the fatalities in detail, but the people who have been injured have often been forgotten.”
Last November, Krifcher and Tessler, along with Avivah Litan and Anne Clemons — all of Potomac, Md. — decided to try to help.
The foursome founded Operation Embrace, delivering help and gifts to Israelis wounded in the intifada — anything from cards and letters from schoolchildren to laptop computers and video games.
Observers say Operation Embrace is part of a trend: Around the United States, more and more Jews are getting involved in grass-roots efforts to help Israelis.
“Certainly interest in Israel” has grown over the past two years, says Andi Milens, national director of community relations and communications at the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. “More people are getting connected, so more are aware of what’s going on.”
The size and scope of efforts depend on each community, Milens said, but the bottom line is that “people care and want to do something.”
Krifcher, whose husband Danny is a JTA board member, already was connected, doing some work for the United Jewish Communities and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
But that work “was not really hands-on,” she says.
Operation Embrace is. What began small — with a trip to Israel to bring letters and visit with intifada victims — expanded as donation checks poured in.
“Initially I thought we would just connect with families” in Israel, she says, but now “wonderful things have happened.”
Often it seems that such grass-roots movements can acquire a momentum all their own.
After witnessing the “Passover massacre” bombing in Netanya, which killed 29 people at a seder last March, Michael Dittleman, of New York, sent an e-mail to 100 acquaintances. He and his wife decided to help buy an ambulance for Magen David Adom, Israel’s Red Cross equivalent.
From that one e-mail on April 25, donations in the form of faxes and letters flooded the home of Dittleman, a marketing director for The Sporting News. His success even compelled him to hold two fund-raisers, and within a few months he had raised the $69,000 needed to bring the group the most up-to-date ambulance.
Some grass-roots movements even have grown into major organizations.
Neil and Susan Thalheim, of Long Island, are co-founders of the Israel Emergency Solidarity Fund, which has raised $5.5 million for families of terror victims.
In October 2000, the Thalheims organized a benefit concert on Long Island to help intifada terror victims’ families — of whom there were only about 10 at the time, Neil Thalheim says.
The event was a huge success, raising about $40,000. When the Thalheims couldn’t find an organization to distribute the money, they traveled to Israel to deliver it.
As the number of attacks has risen, the fund has become a massive full-time endeavor.
The group works with congregations, Jewish groups and schools to fund-raise for needy Israeli families hit by terror. They currently aid some 150 families, and hope to soon pass 500.
Like many smaller grass-roots campaigns, the organization relies less on major benefactors than on creative fund-raising. Its donor base is now close to 40,000 people.
Teamed with Levana Kirschenbaum of New York’s Levana Restaurant, the group hopes to raise $500,000 by selling a million of Levana’s cookies, which will be baked under Kirschenbaum’s oversight by Jewish Community Center volunteers in Manhattan.