On our second night, we checked into our hotel โ the Dan Panorama in Tel Aviv. The first 15 minutes that we spent in the hotel was by far the most unexpected part of the trip for me. We pulled up in front of the hotel around pm. When we all got off on minibus, one kid started to climb right inside the bus! Younger kids were riding around the halls on scooter. You could hear dogs barking. Parents were walking around the lobby and halls and looked utterly exhausted.
I was completely unprepared to encounter the total chaos and stress of the experience of these families, who I quickly realized were some of the approximately , displaced people who have been evacuated from their homes near the Gaza or the Northern Border.
Sderot or Kiryat Shemona. Places in the periphery where people have long lived with intense stress from security threats as well as high levels of poverty. Later that night, when we came back to the hotel, I was nervous it was going to be really loud and hard to sleep. It wasn't. But as I was waiting down the hall to my room- I could hear behind each door the familiar pleas of parents trying to get their children to go to bed.
On the final night at the hotel, a few of the Vancouver rabbis went to the lower level of the hotel outside of the dining hall to hand out our remaining Hanukkah cards and letters we had brought with us to deliver. As an aside, handing out the cards that our kids had prepared with messages for soldiers and families was one of my favorite parts of the mission.
That night at the Dan Panorama, we got to have lots of really sweet conversations with people - including lots of rambunctious kids jumping in the furniture. At first, it felt awkward to interrupt these people that look so exhausted. But they really smiled when they read the cards and asked about Jewish people in Canada and why we had come to visit Israel.
