With You in Your Pain 

When a group of professionals from New Jersey decided to take a week out of their pressured, busy lives to give chizuk (and badly needed material support) to soldiers, hostage families, displaced people, and grieving parents, they knew the scenes they’d see and the stories they’d hear would be wrenching — but in the end, they received a lot more than they bargained for

Where We’re Needed

Rabbi Yosef Tzvi Rimon, who serves as rabbi of the Gush Etzion Regional Council, has been going from army base to army base every day since the October 7 war started, to make sure soldiers have their spiritual support as well as basic material supplies. While on his rounds, he found that those on base and on the front — many of them sleeping under the sky — were short on winter accessories, especially as the weather was getting colder.

And that was prescient for a group of community members from Clifton and Passaic, New Jersey, who were organizing their own solidarity trip to Eretz Yisrael on behalf of their local tzedakah organization, Chazak Yemin Yisrael. The group of seven — lawyers, accountants, and business owners — pressed pause on their professions for almost a week to carry out a five-pronged mission: to give chizuk to hostage families, to visit grieving families, to give financial support to displaced families, to visit injured soldiers, and even to roll up their sleeves and work the abandoned fields.

Yet after days of giving and giving, they insist that they got much more in return.

Between the group’s connection to Rabbi Rimon and to General Benzi Gruber — vice commander of the 252nd armored division with over 30,000 soldiers under his command — the volunteers compiled a list of items the soldiers needed and started filling duffle bags. They also got many boxes of clothing from Yad Leah in Clifton, which sends $5 million worth of clothing annually to 25 communities throughout Eretz Yisrael, expediting their standard delivery of warm clothing.