HaChodesh
(The Month)

Marc Berenbach

Chana, (Jo Ann in the United States) and I, Mati, (Marc in the U.S.) recently returned from a month’s stay in the Sar El Hospital Program. We volunteered previously in Sar El’s Army Base program, and enjoyed our time immensely. We were now ready to try a different Sar El volunteer experience. We hoped the Hospital Program would put us in even closer contact with the people of Israel. The Hospital Program requires at least a month‘s commitment, and the description we read said that volunteers are more on their own, and would help in the care for patients in a hospital or a nursing home setting.

We flew out of the U.S. in the early morning on a cold and snowy New Year’s Day, and arrived 12 or so hours later in a sunny and balmy Tel Aviv afternoon.
Bright and early the next morning, we taxied over to the Sar El offices in Jaffa, where we met our madricha, Ruthi, a 19 year-old bundle of joy and a Corporal from Gadera. Ruthi took us to our volunteer facility in Rishon Le Tzion, the 4th largest city in Israel and close to Tel Aviv. The name of our facility is Ad 120, which refers to an old Jewish blessing wishing you life until 120.

Ad 120 is a modern high-rise building on Smilanski Street, set in an older and well-maintained residential neighborhood of Rishon Le Tzion. Rishon Le Tzion, or the first of Zion, was founded in 1882 by a group of Russian settlers, and is credited with being the first modern agricultural settlement in Israel, hence the name.

Ad 120 provides retirement living. Two units, called Neve Amit, is considered a governmentally run hospital. Neve Amit is where the Sar El volunteers work. Although most residents are elderly, there are a number of younger residents on these care units. Residents are there because they cannot care for themselves. They pay for their care with private funds, or are supported by one of the health care plans of Israel, such as Kupat Cholim.

Ruthi introduced us to the Director of Nursing, Nurit, who showed us around the facility, including our modest but comfortable on-site efficiency apartment that would be our living quarters for the month. Our tour ended in the dining room of the Bet unit of Neve Amit, and, as lunch was about to be served, we slipped into our Ad 120 uniform tops (blue and white short-sleeved jackets with the Ad 120 logo on the breast pocket) and started to help prepare the dining room for lunch. As the residents entered in their wheelchairs, we were assigned specific residents to help feed.

Over the course of the month, we worked on Bet and a closed unit devoted to elderly residents with such issues as Dementia, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Disease, and who require close supervision of their activities of daily living.
On Bet, we fed blended foods to the more physically feeble residents at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Many residents, who had suffered strokes or other paralyzing medical problems, could partially feed themselves, but needed help to cut their food, lift a cup or glass, or wipe their chin with a napkin. We pushed residents in their wheelchairs, ran errands, and in general tried to relate and provide comfort and human contact.

We worked on the closed unit between our mealtime feedings on Bet. The residents there were generally able to feed themselves, but could not leave the unit unattended. So, we would take walks with some residents off the unit, and helped them participate in unit activities, such as exercise groups. Some seemed pleased to just have an interested stranger sit with them for a few minutes and talk.

The staff of Ad 120 is a mixed group of native-born Israelis, Russian and Ethiopian olim, They smiled and welcomed us to our work, and helped us become familiar with the facility and the preferences of the residents who they served daily. On Bet, we quickly learned who liked butter in their hot bowl of kasha in the morning, how someone liked their meat cut up for them at dinner, and who gets lemon in their tea and who got halav cham (hot milk). This was on-the-job training at its best! Olga from Odessa (residents’ names are changed to protect their privacy), her shawl covering her shoulders and her glasses resting on the end of her nose, liked herring and green olives on her breakfast plate and sour cream in her bowl of kasha, and would not let you feed her unless you got everything just right. Matilda, who came to Israel in 1948 from Bulgaria, is 88 years old and no bigger than 4 feet tall. Although she is unable to speak after a series of strokes, her eyes would sparkle and her smile became radiant as I sang “Ovenu Shalom Aleichem” to her while feeding her the morning cereal with chocolate pudding mixed in.

What Chana and I did daily, from Sunday through Thursday, over the course of the month, was to come to know many Israelis. Some had made aliyah before the establishment of the State of Israel, such as Anya, whose parents brought her to Palestine from Germany in the late 1930s. She had operated a small hotel in Rehovot, married and raised children, who were no longer able to care for her at home. Or Rachel, whose parents brought her in the late 1920s to Palestine from Spain, and who still remembers stories about her relatives who were Conversos, or secret Jews, unable to practice Judaism until they arrived in their new home.

Other residents had survived the horrors of World War II and came to the newly established State of Israel to reclaim their lives. Arnold had survived the horrors of Dachau. After 20 years in England, and 20 more in Argentina, he came to Israel with his wife to be near their children, who had made aliyah. Arnold is no longer able to walk unassisted, and yet he still can carry on a conversation in German, Hebrew, English, or Spanish.

Some of the Ad 120 residents are recent arrivals, making aliyah from such places as the former Soviet Union, Argentina, and America. Ruth, 99 years old, is now too frail to live on her own, but enjoys recounting her youth in Harlem, and taking walks on the terrace of Ad 120. Chana would gently hold her under the arm and not go too fast, as Ruth would push her walker and regale Chana with stories of New York City in the days of horse-drawn carriages.

The real challenge during the month was to figure out how to understand and react appropriately to the residents and staff, most of whom spoke little or no English. Even with our English-to-Hebrew books that we brought along, and our memories of long-ago preparation for our Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, we still speak Hebrew on about a three-year-old child’s level. Russian, now the unofficial second language in Israel is Greek to us. We are, sadly, proficient only in modern American. However, rather than panic, we realized that this was our golden opportunity for a personal and informal ulpan. As the residents and staff began to get to know us, they seemed to realize that even though we were pretty awful in our Hebrew, we seemed genuinely interested in learning conversational Hebrew. Israelis, if anything, are friendly and helpful to strangers, and every meal and every activity became a classroom setting.

Many of the residents, even the more physically challenged, functioned as our Hebrew teachers. Someone needing a clean fork became an opportunity to learn the word maslech, and a hungry resident saying “Efo ha marak”, was asking for a bowl of soup.

The month passed by in a flash. Shabbat was up to us. We spent one going on a Sar El sponsored tour of the Negev. On our other Shabbats, we lazed around our apartment, took long and leisurely walks, and explored the old city of Rishon Le Tzion and the seaside promenade at Bat Yam.

Would we do something like this again? Ruthi, over a cup of tea one afternoon during a visit to us at Ad 120 to see how we were doing, told us about a place in Haifa where the young Army soldiers like to improve their English and we could practice with them our Hebrew. Hmmm. I wonder when we can get another month off?

(Marc and Jo Ann Berenbach live in Oregon. Jo Ann is a psychiatric nurse practitioner, and Marc is a clinical social worker.