Motivation runs high at national birthday bash for immigrant soldiers

The smell of lighter fluid and hot charcoal cut through the bus fumes of Jerusalem’s Kanfei Nesharim Street, pointing the way to a pre-Independence Day party for 80 new immigrants to Israel, all of whom will be drafted into the army on the first Sunday after Israel turns 65.

The teenagers and young adults hail from 27 countries, and locations as far-flung as California, Turkmenistan and Paris, but the bulk are from the former Soviet States and North America.

There are currently 2,831 new-immigrant lone soldiers serving in the army, according to Nefesh B’Nefesh and the FIDF, which hosted the party last week. Unlike their Israeli peers, these new immigrants were not raised on army stories, and their knowledge of Israel’s military is partial.

While the meat cooked and the crowd waited for the arrival of Minister of Immigrant Absorption Sofa Landver, most sat in groups dictated by common language and looked altogether more subdued than your average class of orientation-week freshmen.

A young man named Alexei Khaisin, a new immigrant from Tuapse, a Russian town on the northeastern shore of the Black Sea, stood on the stairs outside and pulled on a cigarette in a way that suggested he was quite ready for army service.

He moved here at 16, as part of the Jewish Agency’s Naaleh program, which encourages Jewish teenagers to come to Israel before their parents and complete high school here.

I asked if that was difficult. “At 16?” he said. “Without my parents? It was fun.”

Khaisin lived and studied at the Kadoorie Agricultural High School, an institution in the Lower Galilee that was founded during British rule and was, for the Palmach generation, a sort of spartan Eton College. Yitzhak Rabin and Yigal Allon were both graduates.

Khaisin, though, offered little in the way of classic Zionist responses for his immigration to Israel. Asked why he came, he thought for a bit and said, “So I wouldn’t have to go to the army in Russia.”

In his native land there is only a single year of mandatory military service, he said, but “each year there is like 10 in the Israeli army.”

He would like to spend his 36 months in an IDF uniform somewhere away from the front line and far from a desk.

Although he has a perfect 97 profile, meaning that his chances of wearing an infantryman’s boots are rather high, he said, “Maybe I’ll be a truck driver. That’ll give me a profession. Or a Humvee operator. I heard they do one week on, one week off.”

But first, like all of the soon-to-be soldiers present at the barbecue, he would have to go to three months of Hebrew lessons at Michveh Allon, a base in the north of Israel.

Inside, still waiting for the minister, I sat down beside Sharon Amor. Her father is Israeli, a former paratrooper and veteran of the Yom Kippur War. While in 12^th grade in Orange County, California, she committed to attending George Mason University in Washington, DC. But then, after a trip to Israel, she started thinking about doing the army. “I’d always known I want to do something like that but it had never seemed realistic till then,” she said.

Her parents, she said, were “totally fine with it.”

She’ll be serving in the army for two years, perhaps in a front line position, and living in a rented room on a kibbutz north of Netanya.

“I want to go to either Oketz,” she said of the combat dog-handler unit, “or the air force.”

Asked what sort of position in the air force, she said, “the ones that control the planes,” and she mimed the work of an air traffic controller.

As she finished speaking, the minister arrived. Landver wore a bright green jacket and her hair was teased into a frosted state of attention. “The army is one of the most important things in Israel,” she said. She told the new immigrants that Israel was their new home and that “homes need to be guarded.” And that the “future of the state and of all of our houses is in your hands.”

There were long patches of boilerplate in her speech but it also seemed full of true emotion. She told the audience that the army was a melting pot from which everyone “emerges altogether different,” and, as she helped Nefesh B’Nefesh staff hand out individual checks to each new immigrant, it looked to me like she might have been thinking of a younger version of herself as she put an arm around each new oleh and posed for a picture.

Near the food line I caught up with Dave. He is from Caracas, but “it ain’t so great for Jews over there,” he said, and so he has lived for most of his life in Sydney. “I’m a Bondi boy, mate,” he concluded.

Dave, probably around 6′ 5″ and 250 pounds, a master at Tae Kwan Do and karate who represented Australia at the Maccabiah Games, said, “You can call me Big Dave.” But he didn’t want his full name used. “I’m in the security business, mate, and a lot of the guys are Muslim, if you know what I mean.”

Dave, in his early twenties, doesn’t want to be “working at bars at age 30,” he said, and so he thought some army front line experience along with his martial arts skills might send him in the direction of a security company.

He wasn’t sure about full time life in Israel, though. Ideally, he said, he would split his time between summer here and summer down under.

A gentle giant, he stood near the babaganoush and hamburgers and patiently spoke with me as others passed him on line. When I pressed him for his top choice in the army, he sealed his lips and said, “I don’t want to ruin it.”

Finally, I spoke with the fraternal twins Sacha and Dylan Levy of Paris. I’ve always believed that the name you give your child inevitably sends them down a certain path, but Dylan, with a pink eyebrow ring, put a gash in my theory. “My first choice is Sayeret Matkal,” he said of the army’s top unit. “If not that then maybe the Paratroops.”

His brother, Sacha, is keen on the Givati infantry brigade. He swore that this was not on account of their purple berets but rather, with the help of a translator, it seemed that he believed that the Southern Command’s infantry brigade was of a higher intellectual capacity than Golani.

The twins have been coming to Israel on vacation for years and feel as though Paris is no longer a viable option for them. “There’s constant conflict with the Arabs,” said Sacha, who is thinking about becoming a career officer.

I asked if their parents were not concerned sending two brothers together to combat units in the army. “Only a little,” they said. “They want to come to Israel, too.”