Aluf Stone in the News

Heeding the Call: Why do some Americans choose to serve in the Israeli army?

By Allison Hoffman  
February 17, 2009
www.nextbook.org

Every time Israel goes to war, Daniel Katz knows his phone will ring in Jerusalem with queries from young Americans—most, but not all of them, Jews—asking how they can volunteer to defend the Jewish state. This winter was no different; during the three-week Gaza offensive last month, calls to Katz, who coordinates a special program for non-Israelis who want to join the Israel Defense Force, jumped tenfold. Katz says he doesn't know how many of those who call eventually serve, but those that do join a long history of Diaspora Jews who volunteer to fight alongside Israelis, and sometimes become Israeli in order to fight, but return home once their service is done.

Their patron saint is Mickey Marcus, who was immortalized by Kirk Douglas in the 1966 film Cast a Giant Shadow—a tough from Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood who made it to West Point and went on during World War II to command the U.S. Army's newly formed Ranger school, parachuted into Normandy on D-Day and, after the German surrender, was appointed head of the War Crimes Division, where he set the procedures for the Nuremberg tribunals. But in 1947, he was called upon by David Ben-Gurion to come help the Jews of Palestine establish the underground Haganah as a regular army. Under the assumed name Michael Stone—a pseudonym adopted as a condition of service, designed to mask his American background from the British—he became the first general of the first Jewish army Israel had seen since the Maccabees.

The stories of those who followed vary across generations, from the Americans who snuck into Palestine in 1948 to fight for the new state to those who went in the wake of the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War, inspired by the prospect of helping defend against a concrete threat to the Jewish state at a time when the U.S. was bogged down in the murk of Vietnam. Younger veterans, who may only barely remember those wars, put their desire to serve Israel less in terms of specific circumstances and more in terms of their own desires: to feel they were doing their part for the Jewish homeland, yes, but also to measure up to the young Sabras they met on youth missions and at summer camps.

“The guys who went into World War II were very tough—even if they didn't handle firearms, they grew up on tough streets, they boxed, there were ideas of masculinity that were very different then in later generations,” said Deborah Dash Moore, a professor of history at the University of Michigan and the author of the book GI Jews. “Now you have this very suburban idea of masculinity, that Jews are not tough, and the counterpoint to that is the Israeli, who is macho and tough.”

In some cases, they say they served in order to alleviate the youthful frustration of growing up talking about Zionism but letting others live it, with all the attendant risks. “I thought it would be hypocritical of me to make like I'm all about Israel and not to do this thing that all these kids my age were doing,” said Marc Leibowitz, who went to serve as a paratrooper in 1992, after watching scuds fall on Tel Aviv from his dorm at Columbia, where he went to satisfy his father's demand that he get a degree before heading to Israel. “I felt Israel really did need everybody, literally every body that was capable and ready to serve—I felt America’s place in the world was safe and Israel’s was less so, not that Israel was going to cease to exist if I didn't come save it, but I did feel like it needed me.”

But Leibowitz, like many of his American comrades, acknowledged he needed the Israel Defense Force as much as he felt it needed him. “It was an obligation,” he said. “I knew you could never be fully accepted as an Israeli if you hadn't done that, at least not for the life I wanted, which would have been a Tel Aviv life among Israelis rather than a Jerusalem life among Anglos.”

In Israel—without families to fall back on, and in many cases without their parents’ support—they encountered the questions of mystified Israelis who wondered what kind of freier (sucker) would have thought it was a good idea to give up the cushy privileges of being an American college student or new graduate for days spent in IDF-issue tank tops sweating it out in the desert. Some stay on to make their lives as Israelis, service a first stop on the trek of a complete aliyah; but many have returned home, following job opportunities back to the States or returning to be closer to their families—or because they never intended to stay after completing their basic duties.

Mickey Marcus—still known as Aluf, or General, Stone—himself never faced the choice between staying in the Israel he helped create or returning home to the Diaspora; he was killed on his way home from a midnight walk by a clueless sentry who fired a fatal round after Marcus, who didn't speak Hebrew, answered a security challenge in English. His spiritual heirs now have a group, named for him, that Leibowitz started last year to bring together American veterans of the IDF. Most admit to finding the experience exhilarating, even life-altering, but also draining and unpleasant; like veterans anywhere, most say they were happy when it was over, and if they have regrets about disrupting the progress of their American lives, they keep them private, like good soldiers.



Ira Feinberg, the son of a fifth-generation Sabra, watched his two older brothers head off to fight in World War II while he stayed home in Brooklyn, too young to volunteer. In 1946, after the war, he heard a Zionist activist speak in Brooklyn about the need for a Jewish state in Palestine, and decided he’d found his cause—but was told by a Zionist group in Brooklyn that he was still too young to go with them to join the Haganah. Instead, he went with a Canadian group, against the wishes of both his mother and his “outstandingly Zionist” father, who asked his teenage son to stay home and volunteer to raise money instead. Feinberg finally convinced his mother to go with him to get a passport, but ultimately did his father's bidding after his return from Palestine and became a fundraiser for Israel bonds, in between service with the U.S. Army during the Korean War: “The message was clear to me as a 16-year-old—that's how old I was when I was bitten by this—that the Jewish state needed Jewish volunteers to fight for it. It felt like a calling. I always equate my father with Abraham, I told him, Abraham was called upon to sacrifice his son Isaac, you have to be willing to sacrifice your son Ira. . . . There are people in life who always look for adventure, for things to do, and I am one of them—Israel was one experience for me.”

Tzvi Bar-Shai grew up in the Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan, the son of Holocaust survivors who had applied for visas to both the U.S. and Palestine, and wound up in New York. His ardently Zionist mother, who came from Romania, worshipped the movement's hero Vladimir Jabotinsky, but when her son told her he was moving to Israel, her response was, ‘Where did we go wrong?’ Released from the Vietnam draft because of a childhood spinal injury, Bar-Shai made aliyah in 1968 after saving up enough money working as a runner at the New York Stock Exchange to finance his trip, and was drafted into the army in 1969. He remained in Israel after his basic duty, serving in the Yom Kippur War, but eventually returned to New York to return to work and be closer to his parents, though his daughter has followed him into IDF service: “I went to Israel not even to be an Israeli—I wanted to be a Jew in Israel,” Bar-Shai says. “For me, it was the Holocaust—I wanted to kick butt, but I also believed in creating a place where there were no Sephardim, no Ashkenazim, just Israelis, new Jews, not old Jews. . . . A few years ago, I was in Israel, and when I went to get the exit visa, they said, ‘That's it, you’re done.’ It was like they cut off a leg, telling me I'm demobilized. It didn't make me who I am, but it defined who I am—I'm a romantic.”




Rafi Marom grew up in Queens in an Orthodox, Yiddish-speaking family. He was excused from U.S. military service in Vietnam after pulling a high number in the 1970 draft lottery, but moved to Israel to work on a kibbutz and for “five Israeli pounds” he became a citizen under his Hebrew name. He wound up fighting as a tank driver in the Yom Kippur War, then returned to the U.S., where he eventually married an Israeli woman he met in New York: “The sirens went off at 1:55 on Yom Kippur, and I'm trying to figure out what's going on, because I'd only been in the country a year,” he recalls. “I'm trying to remember, do sirens go off here on Yom Kippur? . . . For Israelis, for someone to give up the way of life we had in America and come to what was a poor country, really, and throw in your lot with them, serve in the military without trying to find a way out, to be willing to do what their children do—it was a big deal. People thought it was bold, but also crazy.”

Scott Berrie grew up feeling like an outsider in suburban Englewood, New Jersey, where his Sephardic Moroccan-born, Montreal-raised mother set him apart from Ashkenazi Jews in the neighborhood, and where his gentile best friend disinvited him to a childhood birthday party because the country club didn't allow Jews. He decided to make aliyah in order to serve in the IDF during a post-college language immersion course in Israel, in search of a meaningful, unbreakable connection to the place. He was released on August 5, 1990, three days after the first Gulf War broke out, and spent the rest of his time in Israel working for ABC News: “I wanted a stronger connection that went beyond the comfortable Bergen County, northern New Jersey link. Whether or not I felt like I could live there for the rest of my life, I don't know, but I wanted to have a deeper relationship. When I told my father, his first reaction was to drop his fork. He said, ‘What are you, Rambo?’ And I said, no, I just want this connection. . . . I really had no desire to see action. If it could be quiet all the time, fine—I had no illusions about it. It was very romantic to me. Everyone said to me when I went, ‘Don't think they'll treat you any differently from other Israelis.’ Well, they called me freier (sucker), but they all said kol hakavod (hats off to you).”



One of David Borowich's earliest memories is of hearing the news of the successful Israeli hostage-rescue raid at Entebbe and celebrating with falafel as a six-year-old at Camp Ramah. The son of a doctor, he grew up in a Zionist family in New Rochelle that made regular trips to Israel and an annual pilgrimage to the Israel Day Parade on Fifth Avenue, but it wasn't until the son of a family he was living with on a kibbutz lost a leg to a roadside bomb in Lebanon that he decided to serve: “He was the exact same age, and in one moment, I knew. It’s guilt, like, ‘How could I be on the kibbutz enjoying life, while these people are serving to protect me?' I always thought, ‘That's what they do—I go to college, and they go into service’. . . . I had an overwhelming sensation it was something I had to do. I looked at it not as the Israeli army, but as an army for the Jewish people. I didn't really want to be in it, even when I was there—I didn't love the experience, I'll say that honestly, but there was never any doubt about it, that it was the right thing to do.”

Adam Sager grew up in suburban Marin County, north of San Francisco, in a secular family, but his parents sent him to Jewish summer camps, and in 1994, he went on the March of the Living tour with 3,000 other teenagers to Poland and Israel. Sager got kicked out of his group for sneaking out to meet girls, but once he returned home, he began wearing a kipah to school—a way to wear his Jewishness on his head, if not his sleeve. He decided to make aliyah in order to serve before going to college: “I supported myself all the way through. . . . The main reason I went to Israel was Zionist, not religious—I'd met Israelis who were serving, and the idea that they were going to protect me didn't sit well with me—if I needed protection, I wanted to do it myself. . . . I never even thought of joining the U.S. military—I felt that I wanted to do my part to protect the Jewish people. For me it's the same thing—protecting the state is protecting the Jewish people, because it’s there for all of us.”



As a child in Cleveland, Ohio, Matt Ronen, then known as Matt Synenberg, grew up in an agnostic family that was "almost Christian," celebrating Christmas for his half-Italian Catholic mother and Hanukkah, and not much else. It wasn't until the start of the Second Intifada, when “innocents were being killed because they were Jewish,” that he first felt like a Jew, despite his unfamiliarity with the religion. The decision to make aliyah in order to serve in the IDF came suddenly, in the summer of 2001, while he was at a summer language school learning Spanish in Vermont. When he finally moved to Israel, after graduating college in 2004, he traded his German surname for the name of a boy, Ronen, who had been killed in a roadside attack on the same 2001 summer day he decided to serve: “My parents saw it as a religious thing—they said, ‘We didn't raise you to be Jewish.’ I told them, I’m not moving there permanently, I'm not going to be a soldier for life—I never had the feeling that to be a real Zionist I’d have to move there. . . . I'm still just as non-religious as I ever was—it was about making a decision and following through, not being a hero.”


Allison Hoffman is New York correspondent for The Jerusalem Post.

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American Vets For Israel Pass Torch To New Generation
By Jenny Hazan   
July 08, 2008
www.israel21c.com

"I remember a time when our members used to pack this hall to capacity," says Arthur Bernstein, former chairman of American Veterans for Israel (AVI), as he glanced around the sparsely populated hall in the B'nai Zion complex in Manhattan one Sunday. "I salute all of those who are not with us, and remember them today."

The meeting was the organization's final official one, gathering together a handful of surviving AVI members for a brief and heartfelt ceremony marking the takeover of the organization by a newly appointed board of trustees, AVI Legacy. "In recent years we have been publishing more obituaries and delivering more eulogies than we care to," says Bernstein. "The circle of friends is shrinking. History is now being made without us. But we have managed to leave a footprint on the historical record."

American Veterans for Israel was established in 1963 by the 1,210 of 1,250 Jewish and Christian Americans and Canadians who survived their volunteer service in defense of Israel during the establishment of the state, from 1948-9.

These volunteers, many of whom had served in the American military during WWII, not only endangered their lives, but also jeopardized their civil rights by violating the terms of their American passports (the US had imposed a military embargo against Israel) to serve in all branches of the emerging Israel Defense Force, often in key positions of command.

They brought invaluable experience and expertise to Machal, pre-state infantry units, and Aliyah Bet, a movement of 10 clandestine ships that altogether shuttled 31,000 so-called illegal immigrants, and Holocaust survivors from Europe, to the shores of Palestine.

They were among 3,500 volunteers from 46 countries who came to help defend Israel after she declared independence in 1948, and was promptly attacked by the armies of all six surrounding countries.

"The 'Machalnics' served in the best American tradition, the people's struggle for freedom," said Si Spiegelman, AVI's outgoing executive vice president, who after losing almost his entire extended family in Poland during the Holocaust, traveled to Israel in 1948, where he spent a year and a half collecting arms for the Hagana and helping to smuggle in US fighter pilots. "The memory of Machal needs to be passed on as a legacy to present and future generations. In order to ensure this continuity, today we place the torch in the hands of our trustees."

Spiegelman was joined at the ceremony by a few other 1948 Israel vets. Naomi Kantey, 83, from New York, served as a nurse for the Hagana and after statehood was declared, became an officer of the IDF. After working as a nurse in a naval hospital in Long Island treating WWII veterans, she snuck onto a clandestine ship, the Marine Club, in December 1947, a month after the UN passed its Partition Plan for Palestine. "Originally, I wanted to go to Europe to help the survivors of the Holocaust," said Kantey, "But when the unrest began in Israel, I thought my military experience would be put to better use there."

In the two years following her arrival to Palestine, Kantey served in locations across the country, at all sites of the most intense battles. "I was happy to help in whatever way I could," she says. A few years after returning to the US, she and her husband, an Israeli vet from South Africa, began visiting Israel annually. "At first we couldn't afford it," she says. "But after a few years we started going. I left a big chunk of myself there. It is still there."

George Goldman, 87, from Teaneck, New Jersey, was part of the Aliyah Bet movement. After serving with the US Merchant Marines, shipping war materials to the fighting fronts, Goldman snuck out of the US on the Geula, a ship that carried 1,388 Holocaust survivors from Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, and Hungary, to Palestine in 1947. At the Haifa port the ship was detained, its passengers transferred by the British forces onto a prisoner ship bound for a detention camp in Cyprus, where Goldman and his shipmates spent seven weeks until the Hagana busted them out. "After we understood what had happened in Europe, I realized that my part in the war wasn't over yet," says Goldman. "So, I volunteered."

Since the war, Goldman only returned to Israel once, five years ago, with an AVI-organized tour. "There was always work to do and bills to pay," he says. "But to this day, I am a supporter of Israel, all the way."

Phillip Strauss, 87, also a former US Merchant Marine man, helped to organize the Israeli navy. After working on a Canadian Aliyah Bet ship docked in Brooklyn, he managed to fly to Israel and volunteer at the Haifa port, where it was his job to plan the logistics of the future naval forces. He was one of the navy's first officers; the ship he had worked on in Brooklyn later became one of the navy's first ships.

"Volunteering made me feel very Jewish," says Strauss, who has visited Israel almost every year since he returned to the US in January, 1949. "I think Israel is fabulous. It's beautiful. I love Israel and I will give her all the help I can, in every way possible," he said. "I am proud of the strong connection that still exists between our two great countries."

Maintaining this historical connection between AVI and contemporary Israel will be one of the many charges of the new board of trustees. AVI Legacy, comprised of five individuals, will also be charged with remembrance in the US, in addition to all management functions of the organization. They will continue to hold an annual ceremony at West Point in honor of fallen American veteran for Israel, David "Mickey" Marcus, "A Soldier for all Humanity", as his epitaph reads, and the only war vet buried at the military cemetery who did not fall in an American war.

AVI Legacy will maintain the organization's website along with its archives and museum at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

"I am honored and humbled to be your representative. I guarantee we will work our hardest to keep this history, your legacy, alive," said Jeffrey Margolis, incoming chairman of AVI Legacy. "We are dedicated to promoting the legacy of brave heroes and heroines, without whom I think many would agree, there would be no state of Israel today."

The AVI legacy will also be carried on by a new organization, Aluf Stone, which has as its mandate the ingathering of all North American Machal volunteers, from all years of service.

"We wanted to create a support network for current volunteers, a place where they can seek fellowship and counsel when they return home from their service and are having trouble readjusting to civilian life in America," explained co-founder of Aluf Stone, Matthew Ronen, 26, who served as a volunteer in an infantry unit of the IDF from 2004-6.

His partner, Marc Leibowitz served from 1992-4. "We think of our group as a successor of AVI. We want to preserve the history of the 1948 vets, and to continue in the spirit of the amazing tradition they started, of contributing to the defense of Israel in really meaningful ways."

"It is very touching to me that this same passion for Israel and sense of obligation to her future still exists among some American Jewish youth, and that today's generation is doing what we did," says Spiegelman. "I feel wonderful about our continuity with AVI Legacy and Aluf Stone. Our history is in good hands."

Hundreds of American volunteers endangered their lives, and their US citizenship by fighting alongside Israel in 1948.

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