Israel's secret weapon in 1973: Diaspora Jews
Just days after Ed Zifkin dropped out of Michigan State University to take the first flight he could to Israel, to volunteer after a surprise attack that became known as the Yom Kippur War, he was waking at 5 A.M. to head to the fields of a kibbutz near the Gaza border where he would climb on a tractor and plant wheat until the sun went down.
Forty years later, he still remembers the feel of the tractor’s clutch underfoot on those rolling fields marked with ravines. He was at Kibbutz Urim. Most of the men in the community were with their combat units in Sinai or on the Golan Heights. Together with a fellow Jewish American volunteer named Sam Stern, a dairy farmer from Connecticut, he worked up to 15 hours a day, six days a week, planting not only wheat but peas, potatoes, onion and melon in what was normally a large, busy agricultural kibbutz. Their one day off from the fields came Saturdays, when they milked cows.
“It was really the most meaningful period of my life,” said Zifkin, who now works in commercial real estate in Chicago. The entire kibbutz threw a party in Zifkin and Stern’s honor as they prepared to leave after several months volunteering, crediting them with helping keep the kibbutz’s agricultural operations afloat.
http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/high-holy-days-2013/yom-kippur-war-40-years-later/.premium-1.546737
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