On gap year between high school and IDF service, students find purpose during wartime
Now enlisted in a wide range of volunteer activities on the home front, participants in a pre-army program – alongside some from abroad – say it’s a ‘once in a lifetime’ experience
Gavriel Fiske is a reporter at The Times of Israel
Eden Mimoun, 18, a gap year student in the northern Golan, was shaken awake early on the morning of October 7.
“My roommate woke me up and said there’s a war,” she said. “I was afraid… We had a schedule for Shabbat, but no one could concentrate, it was really hard. But it was good we were together.”
They were up at Kibbutz Amir, a mere seven kilometers (four miles) from the Lebanese border, part of a group of students who had been together since the end of August. They had all just celebrated the weeklong festival of Sukkot when, early Saturday, news of the Hamas surprise assault from Gaza reached them.
Mimoun, from Tel Aviv, immigrated to Israel from France with her parents as a child and speaks Hebrew with a hint of a French lilt. She is one of a couple dozen students from Mechinat Galil Elyon, the Upper Galilee Leadership Academy. Nine of the students are participating in one of the academy’s modules called Shvilim. The academy is one of the many pre-army, gap-year mechina programs that are popular in Israel.
Shvilim, which means “pathways,” is unique because the 10-month program has a significant number of Jewish students from Europe and the United States. It includes training units on hasbara — Israel advocacy — and Jewish culture in Oslo, Norway, as well as a mini-internship in New York. The program is conducted in English and the students who come from abroad learn leadership skills, some Hebrew, Jewish culture and more, even if they don’t plan to do IDF service.
One of them is Barak Kaufman, 19, from Palo Alto, California, who came to Israel for the program after two years of undergraduate school back home.
“I came to experience things I was missing in college… and then the war started. We were all in a panic and we were sent home,” Kaufman said.
Home for Kaufman meant his grandparents’ house in central Israel.
“I felt useless. There wasn’t much to do; there was some volunteering but all the places had enough people. It didn’t feel like I was doing much,” Kaufman said.
The mechina organizers had sent the students away after the outbreak of the war, which saw shocking and traumatic scenes as several thousand Hamas terrorists broke through the Gaza border with Israel in an early morning assault. Over 1,400 Israelis, most of them civilians, were killed in massacres in kibbutzim and communities adjacent to Gaza and at a large outdoor music festival, and several thousand more were injured. Some 200 people, including children and the elderly, were taken hostage by Hamas.
Since then Israel has been on a war footing and has called up some 350,000 IDF reservists in anticipation of a likely ground assault into Gaza. In addition, some 100,000 residents of the areas immediately around Gaza and bordering Lebanon have been evacuated to other, temporary locations.
With the country in disarray, whole sectors of the population have turned to volunteering, organizing, and pitching in. And with many flights canceled in the days immediately following the outbreak of the war, many gap year programs and university study abroad programs faced the question of how — or whether — to continue.
Shvilim is one of the few programs to still be functioning, as most have had to shut or are operating at a greatly reduced capacity because too many staff are doing reserve duty.
Most of the Shvilim students from abroad were still in the country, so the organizers decided to call all the program participants back. They were able to house them in Kibbutz Beit Zera, just south of the Sea of Galilee, at a site where another mechina program had been running. That program was not able to continue due to staffing shortages.
“We came here and I felt really relieved. Working as a group is a lot easier than working alone… I feel like the mechina is helping me have more of an impact in general,” Kaufman related.
The students are able to plan their own activities, which is one aspect of their leadership training, explains Omer Avital, one of the counselors. Shortly after the war began, the students started a crowdfunding drive in order to raise money for their efforts.
“They are cleaning houses for evacuees, organizing and bringing stuff for soldiers, filling in for childcare,” as well as attending classes and doing sports, Avital said. He added that the students also “create video or written content to help explain the situation, especially for our alumni group.”
Many of the students know people who have been killed or injured, and the program has brought in expanded psychological services and other tools to help them deal with the situation.
During The Times of Israel’s recent visit to Beit Zera, one group of students was busy cleaning out an old kibbutz guesthouse, which was to shortly house several families evacuated from around Gaza. Another group had gone to purchase supplies in order to make dinner and cookies for them.
“We are doing things in connection with the situation in the country, “ explains Naama Altman, 18, a sabra who said it has been wonderful to return to a routine. “It’s good… we are doing important things that we wouldn’t be doing at home.”
There are 60 mechina programs in Israel, with some 4,500 students for the 2023-24 year, according to the Joint Council of Pre-Military Academies (JCM), the umbrella group that represents the programs. It is very competitive: each year Mechinat Galil Elyon in total has about 250 spots and over 2000 candidates. Other mechina programs report even lower rates of acceptance.
There are mechina programs with all different levels of religiosity. Shvilim is nominally secular, although a few students sport small kippahs and the food is kosher.
The Israeli students who choose to do a mechina program are at an age when they could have already been inducted into their mandatory IDF service, but they choose to essentially do an extra year of preparation. Many mechina students go on to join elite commando units, undergo officer training, or find other high-level roles to play in the army. A full 25 percent of IDF officers’ school graduates are mechina alumni, according to the JCM.
For Ofir Behar, 18, being in a mechina instead of the IDF “doesn’t affect how much we can give. I feel totally fine that I am here, although there is a feeling of missing out. We aren’t on the front line, but I am certain that will happen.”
Kaufman, from California, said that he was considering enlisting in the IDF, but had to go back to finish university first.
The intense combination of wartime, youthful experience of togetherness and the particular Jewish internationalism of the Shvilim program has forged a deep bond among the students, who more than once used the phrase “once in a lifetime” to describe their experiences.
Behar noted that before, he couldn’t remember the last time he cried, but now, “I have cried five times! And laughed a lot.”
“We are living so much here, the emotions are so extreme,” Mimoun agreed. “It’s not a bad thing. You feel so much but you are always with people. All the emotions, it’s something good in the end.”
