VIDEO: Yom Ha’atzmaut at Harvard
Dear Harvard Hillel Community,
Growing up in Beit Jann, my family waited for Yom Ha’atzmaut every year. We would gather around the grill, the whole family together. We are not Jewish, but Israel is our country, and this day has always been ours too. So watching students gather around their own grill last month, far from the family BBQs of my childhood, meant more to me than I expected. It is what I love about Israel and about this work: there is room for all of us.
A few weeks ago, on an overcast April afternoon, Harvard Hillel and Harvard Chabad joined forces for an exuberant Yom Ha’atzmaut BBQ blowout, filled with Israeli music, brisket, falafel, and students taking turns sending each other into a dunk tank.
Israel’s 78th birthday, marked exactly as it should be: loud, joyful, a little chaotic, and full of love.
The night before the BBQ, we gathered at Hillel for a different kind of evening: our Yom Hazikaron ceremony, student-led and co-hosted with Chabad. For 26 years, my family has commemorated this day together. My uncle joined Israel’s border police in 1999, and in October 2000 he was killed in the line of duty at Joseph’s Tomb. His story is known across Israel, to Jews and non-Jews alike, as a symbol of integrity and loyalty. Being able to share his story with our students that night meant more to me than I can really say. I listened, too, as Guy, Tomer, and Romi lit candles and shared their own losses, as Apichorus sang Mi Sheberach, as we closed the evening together with Hatikva.
I also spoke that night about a story from my childhood. In the Druze tradition we believe in reincarnation, and once, when I was a kid, a boy from our village came to my grandparents and told them he remembered being my uncle in his previous life. Whatever you make of that, it has always been a
reminder to me that the people we have lost are never fully gone. Their stories keep walking among us, sometimes in unexpected forms.
I know that many of you reading this carry a wide range of feelings about Israel right now. Pride and frustration, hope and worry, sometimes all in the same day. What I have come to feel about this community over my time here is that something deeper holds us together: a real, shared conviction that Israel matters, to each of us and to the future of who we are becoming together.
To everyone who showed up, helped set up, or got dunk-tanked, thank you. To our friends at Chabad: we are so glad we get to do these things together.
Wishing you all a Shabbat Shalom,
