Story of Impact: Zara Friedman’s Israel

21-year old Zara Friedman loved teaching, but wanted an international Jewish experience. With the help of the Jewish Federation, she traveled and lived in Israel on Otzma—a program where young Jewish adults spend and year volunteering and traveling around Israel.

When recounting her experiences, Zara often speaks of her time in Israel on the Otzma program in the context of a children’s story. Her protagonists, 53 young Jewish adults from Jewish Federations all over America, set off in September 2008 for a ten and a half month stay in Israel.

They learned Hebrew and taught English, volunteered and truly experienced what it’s like to live in a place where everyone and everything around you, from your neighbors to your shopkeepers to the soil under your feet, is Jewish. Her characters saved lives while riding along in ambulances with Magen David Adom, worked on army bases, and spread cheer and progress in communities large and small.

Zara’s tale spins around the travails of their surroundings, especially in Kiryat Malachi: an impoverished community, bombarded by missile strikes and struggling with intercultural divides. They came to understand the depression coupled with a high unemployment rate in our partner city, but they also found an unbelievable spirit exemplified in the surrogate families who adopted them. By the end of their three months in Kiryat Malachi, Zara and her friends had more Shabbat invitations than they could count and a love for a beautiful town they originally mistook for a sad one. The protagonists in Zara’s story see the full Israel, the complete Israel, not just the one that can be seen from the windows of a bus.

Zara and her fellow Otzma participants have all returned to their respective homes now, to share their stories and bring new Jewish understanding to their worlds. Zara will be moving to the Ravenna Kibbutz in the coming weeks, to live in a slice of Israel right here in Seattle. Zara crossed the world and, lucky for our local Jewish community, decided to return to Seattle: her impact can now be felt all the way from tiny Kiryat Malachi to metropolitan Seattle. Let’s hope Zara and her story’s other protagonists live happily ever after—as active in their communities as they were in Israel!

Find out more about Israel experiences the Jewish Federation helps support by contacting BlairF [at] JewishInSeattle [dot] org.