Where else but to Israel do people make the effort to come to an active war zone? An impressive stream of international supporters have arrived to volunteer and participate in various missions. Two recent delegations are of special significance.
As the war started by Hamas on October 7 entered its third month, another war front rages and is spreading around the world on the Internet. The battles on social media sometimes feel overwhelming, with the evil and hate that spew from anti-Israel sources.
The American Jewish Committee @ajc.global Project Interchange’s missions aim to educate and bear witness to the atrocities of October 7. One group consisted of ten social media influencers who shared their experiences on various social media with their millions of followers. Reaching the younger populations active on Instagram and TikTok who are being influenced by the hate from pro-Palestinian sources is extremely difficult but crucial.
Melinda Strauss: The popular social media influencer educating about Orthodox Judaism
One of the social media influencers invited on the short but intensive mission was Melinda Strauss, a Jewish content creator with over a million followers on TikTok and Instagram. She is known for her educational videos about Orthodox Judaism, kosher recipes, and sharing her everyday life as a wife, mother of two teenagers, dog mom, and Type 1 diabetic. Strauss has been blogging and sharing her recipes since 2011, and her followers include many non-Jews who appreciate her honest responses to their questions.
The AJC delegation fit so much into two days, she told The Jerusalem Report. “It felt like we were going from lows to highs, back to lows, back to highs.”
She found it hard to choose one part of the trip that was most important; however, she came to realize how every person in Israel has been affected by this terror. “I will say that going to the Nova exhibition in Tel Aviv and seeing the burnt-out cars hit me harder than anything else because, at that moment, I saw the people in my mind who were hiding in those cars who were burnt alive by Hamas.”
The AJC influencers did not hear the warning sirens in Tel Aviv where they were based because they were at Kibbutz Be’eri when the sirens sounded. Then two days later, when a barrage of 37 rockets from Hamas were aimed at Tel Aviv, Strauss and a friend had gone to volunteer at Just One Chesed in Gush Etzion.
The AJC influencers came from across the United States. KKL-Jewish National Fund and the World Zionist Organization co-sponsored a mission for participants of their international Zionist Leadership Academy.
On short notice, 18 of the 60 professionals in the leadership program, aged 25-35, came from around the world for a three-day seminar to express their solidarity with Israel.
They met senior IDF and government officials, survivors of the October 7 attack, wounded soldiers and civilians and the doctors who treated them, and visited the Gaza envelope communities to help farmers. The delegation also participated in a tree-planting ceremony in the Ben Shemen Forest.
At Sheba Medical Center, they met survivors from October 7 to hear personal stories from the Supernova music festival. Following their experience at Kibbutz Kfar Aza in southern Israel, Deborah Naomi Abramov from Vienna said, “Our hearts will forever be broken from this and never heal entirely after, but it was so important to see with our own eyes.”
All the mission participants are now witnesses and can respond with firsthand knowledge about the brutality and destruction on October 7 and are better prepared for the challenges ahead online and in their personal lives in regard to antisemitism.
“The thing about the Jewish people is we don’t just survive, we thrive!” Strauss concluded. “For thousands of years, our enemies have tried to destroy us, and we’ve seen how that ends every single time. That is the beauty of learning our history; we can see the pattern. The Jewish people live! People say in the comments of my videos all the time, “Stop playing the victim.” But I know we are not the victims! Yes, we are being victimized and attacked, but we as Jews do not allow ourselves to stay down. From this massacre, our people have become more united and stronger than ever.” ■