Last Friday afternoon, after Israel launched its strikes on Iranian nuclear and military sites, Rabbi Joe Wolfson received a phone call from his friend, a Druze officer in the IDF reserves, who was worried that he wouldn’t be ready for Shabbat.

The officer had just been called up with several hundred soldiers under his command, who were deployed throughout the center of the country. As Shabbat approached, the troops were without the candles, challah and wine needed to properly mark the Sabbath,  so the officer turned to his friend Wolfson for help.

“That’s pretty special to have a non-Jewish Druze friend calling his Orthodox rabbi friend in order to make sure that the soldiers under his command get what they need for Shabbat,” said Wolfson, the rabbi and co-director of JLIC TLV, a Tel Aviv-based religious community and de facto volunteering operation made up primarily of young foreign-born residents of the city, either new immigrants or temporary visitors.

Wolfson’s relationship had originally been forged with the Druze officers since Oct. 7, 2023, as JLIC TLV volunteers attended funerals in northern Israel for fallen Druze soldiers, and it has since evolved into other more personal connections and has included a joint Shabbaton in Tel Aviv, with a weekend trip to the north in the works for July.  

JLIC — the Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus — is an international initiative affiliated with the Orthodox Union that was initially established to support students on American college campuses. It has since expanded to include other young adults in Israel and has communities in Jerusalem, Herzliya, Givat Shmuel and Tel Aviv.

Though the majority of JLIC TLV members are young people in their 20s and 30s, the community also includes people in their 40s and even 60s, noted Wolfson, who is originally from London and returned to Israel in 2022 with his wife, Corrine, and three children after a seven-year sojourn in the U.S. where they served as an OU-JLIC rabbinic couple at New York University’s Bronfman Center for Jewish Life in New York.

Though the call for Shabbat supplies as sundown approached, Wolfson was able to get the word out quickly on the community’s active WhatsApp group of some 800 volunteers and get enough volunteers to shop for the items and drive them to the army posts for five of the requested drop-offs. Volunteers from the JLIC communities in Herzliya and Givat Shaul picked up the rest.

Knowing there would not be a problem raising the money from donors, JLIC TLV fronted the money, and by Sunday, sufficient donations had flown in that they could carry on with the operations, he said. The group has since been able to put in place a proper kitchen to prepare cooked meals, a team of shoppers to supply fresh food for the soldiers, along with cooks and drivers, and a digital form that units can use to fill out requests.

Most donations are between $30-$100 and come both from the community and from overseas supporters, Wolfson noted.

Earlier in the day, as members of the JLIC TLV community and others started being called up for reserve duty, Wolfson had also already reached out to donors for funding of NIS 500 ($141) for approximately 25 taxi rides to help the soldiers get to their posts more easily.

Though JLIC TLV was already deeply involved in community work before the Oct. 7 attacks, the community became “turbo-charged” after them, supporting the evacuees in Tel Aviv hotels from the south and the north, Wolfson said. This included organizing activities for children, a family matching program, a job placement program and goodbye parties for communities as they were able to return home. Volunteers also attended funerals and shivas of soldiers throughout the country.

“We always pride ourselves on being a community which has at its core a real muscle and identity of being there to help people in need, whenever that may be. That is true in normal times and it’s true in abnormal times,” he said. “My belief is that only if you have the muscle during the normal times of community consciousness and a connection to the civic area around you, only then are you really in a position to scale up significantly in the extraordinary times such as we are in now.”

The connection between JLIC TLV and the Druze community is an example of how a crisis can actually provide an opportunity to break through existing barriers between communities in Israel to create a new dynamic and new connections within Israel, Wolfson said.

“Israel is a small place, but it’s a divided place. Sometimes there is animosity between different parts of society. More frequently, it is just different worlds that don’t intersect with one another,” Wolfson said. “My viewpoint as someone who runs a community and has a deep interest in Israeli society overcoming some of its differences is that a crisis like Oct. 7 and its aftermath provides an opportunity… A crisis could mean someone, or a community, that’s evacuated needs food or clothes or lodging, or a tragedy, such as a death and a shiva, means that initial barriers come down and people who wouldn’t normally meet one another can offer clothes or offer lodging or visit a shiva. Then once that initial connection is made, when the initial crisis moment is over, there is an opportunity to follow up and to convert that into actually a friendship, a relationship with others.”

The JLIC TLV community also formed close ties with members of Kibbutz Nir Am, who have since returned to their kibbutz near Sderot and extended an invitation to the JLIC TLV members to stay there. (The kibbutz has ample bomb shelters and is far from the center — the main target of Iranian barrages.)

Since Friday, the crisis has come closer to home as Iran and Israel continue to trade missile attacks. The war front no longer is just on the southern and northern borders but has come to the center of the country with JLIC TLV community members also sitting in safe rooms and bomb shelters under fire. Yet they continue to provide meals for deployed soldiers in the area, and help within the community, visiting shell-shocked elderly residents whose homes have been destroyed or damaged at the request of the city’s vice mayor, lending a supportive ear, cleaning up what can be cleaned and helping them to fill out insurance forms.

“Given that we are in Tel Aviv, and this is what I think people need to understand: This is now the front lines. It’s not the north or the south, the center of the country is the front lines,” Wolfson said. “Sunday morning, 5 a.m., we woke up to realize that even within our community, many people’s homes have been damaged, some even destroyed.”

JLIC TLV member Elie Horowitz, 40, who made aliyah from New York in September, had to be rescued from his safe room, with soldiers forcing the jammed door open. As he walked out of the room, Horowitz quipped that maybe the experience had now made him into a real Israeli.

“I’m new to Israel and even newer to JLIC, but regardless, the community members are all over me to make sure I have food and am not in need of anything. Rabbi Joe is in contact every day to make sure I am OK. I am new to the ‘family,’ but they don’t let me feel like that,” said Horowitz, who was not injured and is now staying in a hotel, with his belongings stored in a friend’s apartment. “It is hard as someone who has spent a lot of their life volunteering to accept help when you  want to help yourself. But the real people who understand will show up regardless.”