---

For artist Phyllis Franco, 64, the decision to help a besieged Israel by auctioning off her paintings came straight from the heart.

“I got stuck after 9/11,” she said. “I became fearful that the world is becoming more and more polarized - an either/or with no one the winner.”

Walking around her comfortable North Atlanta house, Franco leads the way through hundreds of her paintings, which have been part of numerous exhibits throughout the city and the Southeast. Some of her paintings - which have sold for as much as $5,000 - still have price tags on the frames.

“I was afraid Israel was going to take the brunt of it and it was going to harden the hearts of people on both sides,” Franco said. “That made me sad and I felt very powerless.”

In late spring, Franco had what she calls a breakthrough - a new look at an old organization, Hadassah.

When Franco got married, her mother gave her a life membership in Hadassah, but she says she never really grasped the importance of its mission. Now that she has, Franco has opened her home and sold her paintings to raise money for Jerusalem’s fabled Hadassah Hospital.

Franco’s determination reflects a desire on the part of many Jews in Atlanta and around the United States to do something for Israel at the grassroots level in addition to contributing via the Jewish Federation of Greater Atlanta and other agencies.

For example, Atlanta Realtor Debbie Sonenshine began raising funds a few months ago to buy an ambulance for Magen David Adom, Israel’s equivalent of the Red Cross. So far, she has raised about $50,000 of the $55,000 she needs.

She said the Passover bombing in Netanya set her thinking that she needed to take personal action.

“I had clients that were making aliyah,” she said. “I kept thinking of the firemen rushing up the buildings in the twin towers. I thought these people are doing something, what can I do? I just felt the need to do something - I think everyone just felt so helpless.”

Starting a project herself came naturally, Sonenshine said.

“I’m not a committee person,” she said. “I’m just one of those kind of people who just take the bull by the horns.”

Sonenshine has already ordered the ambulance, which will be assembled in LaGrange, Ga. When it is finished in about three months, she will hold a dedication ceremony.

In addition, Atlantans Sharon Levison and Hadara Ishak began organizing a drive to send candy and personal messages from school children to Israeli students in 2000. Since then, their group, Chaver L’Chayal (Friend of a Soldier) has shipped several tons of sweets and messages of hope to Israel. And the two hope eventually to take their project nationally.

“Because of the Intifada and everything that was happening, we felt that we would like to have the community join in on this simple and sweet way of support,” Ishak said. “Basically what we’re doing in Atlanta is we’re creating a mold that has to work perfectly. Once the mold is completely working we will carry it on to other states in the U.S.”

Ishak and Levison have contracted with the Israeli Defense Forces to bring soldiers to classrooms, synagogues and youth groups this winter. Over the summer, they also started working with day camps.

Ishak said one of her biggest motivations for creating this program was to help young people support Israel.

“We’re basically broadening the awareness and education among our own children of the importance of Israel,” she said.

Two Atlantans, meanwhile, are organizing their own solidarity missions to Israel. Jonathan Minnen and Renee Werbin have planned a community solidarity mission for early November.

Minnen, a partner with the Smith, Gambrell and Russell law firm and a boardmember of the American-Israel Chamber of Commerce, said he was inspired while on a business trip to Israel in June.

“I was totally overwhelmed by how appreciative these people were of my mere willingness to come to Israel,” Minnen said.

He and Werbin have reserved 75 airplane seats and are hoping for at least 40 participants.

Minnen said he hopes a successful trip will inspire more people to sign up for the Jewish Federation of Atlanta solidarity trip in January.

“It’s going to take a group of people who have been there, who have had successful trips,” he said. “My feeling was, I wanted to try and do something on the grassroots level. Some of the trips that I have seen advertised - and I very much admire the people who are doing it - but they tend to be more touristy oriented. What I wanted to do was something that was not at all tourist-oriented, that was truly a mission of solidarity.”

 

Eye-opening stories

 

Franco says National Public Radio and USA Today stories opened her eyes to the work being done at Hadassah Hospital.

The 90-year-old hospital is expanding its Center for Emergency Medicine - where it has treated close to 2,000 trauma victims since the start of the Intifada.

What impressed Franco most, she said, is the fact that the hospital treats all patients equally - Arab or Israeli, terrorist or victim. She said that gives her hope and shows the world that Israel wants peace.

Richard Franco, a neurologist, echoed his wife’s sentiments. “The original intent of Israel was to live in peace with its neighbors,” he said. “The hospital is a wonderful metaphor for what we hope will happen.”

Franco realized that her art gave her the opportunity to help. So in August, she opened her doors, taped price tags on the paintings in her halls and sold her art by appointment and by open house, donating all proceeds to the hospital.

Combined with a donation from an anonymous Hadassah donor, the art sale raised $20,000 for the trauma center.

 

Embracing Israel

 

Similar efforts - large and small - are occurring in Jewish communities around the United States to help Israel as the Palestinian Intifada nears the two-year mark.

“Certainly interest in Israel” has grown over the past two years, said Andi Milens, national director of community relations and communications at the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. “More people are getting connected, so more are aware of what’s going on.”

The size and scope of efforts depend on each community, Milens said, but the bottom line is that “people care and want to do something.”

For example, when Aviva Tessler of Potomac, Md., a Washington suburb, came back from a sabbatical in Israel, she told her friend Jocelyn Krifcher about visiting a young girl who had been wounded in a drive-by shooting by Palestinian terrorists.

“She could not get the image of this one girl out of her head,” Krifcher recalled. “We hear about the fatalities in detail, but the people who have been injured have often been forgotten.”

 

Operation Embrace

 

So in November, Krifcher and Tessler, along with neighbors Avivah Litan and Anne Clemons, decided to help the injured.

The foursome founded Operation Embrace, delivering help and gifts to Israelis wounded in the Intifada - anything from cards and letters from schoolchildren to laptop computers and video games.

Krifcher already was doing some work for the United Jewish Communities and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. But that work “was not really hands-on,” she said. Operation Embrace is.

What began small - with a trip to Israel to bring letters and visit with Intifada victims - has expanded as donation checks poured in. “Initially I thought we would just connect with families” in Israel, Krifcher said, but now “wonderful things have happened.”

Tessler estimates that Operation Embrace has connected with several hundred victims - including many who are not Jews.

Like Tessler, Mari Greenberg, a San Francisco Web designer, said she had to do something after visiting several terror victims when she traveled to Israel in May.

So she has set a goal of buying 20 ipods - tiny MP3 portable music players made by Apple - for terror victims recuperating at Hadassah Hospital.

“Music can alter one’s mood so readily. It serves as a great diversion as these patients try to pass the time each day towards their recovery,” Greenberg wrote in her e-mail appeal.

After he witnessed the “Passover massacre” bombing that killed 29 people at a Netanya seder in March, Michael Dittleman of New York sent an e-mail to about 100 friends and acquaintances. Like Sonenshine, he and his wife had decided to help buy a much-needed ambulance for Magen David Adom.

From that one e-mail on April 25, donations flooded Dittleman’s home.

That early success inspired Dittleman, a marketing director for the Sporting News, to hold two fund-raisers, and within a few months he collected the $70,000 needed to bring the group an ambulance with the most up-to-date features.

Some grassroots movements even have grown into major organizations.

Neil and Susan Thalheim, of Long Island, N.Y., are co-founders of the Israel Emergency Solidarity Fund, which has raised $5.5 million for the families of terror victims.

In October 2000, the Thalheims organized a benefit concert on Long Island to help families of terror victims. The event was a huge success, raising about $40,000. When the Thalheims couldn’t find an organization to distribute the money, they traveled to Israel to deliver the funds personally.

As the number of attacks has risen, the solidarity fund has become a massive endeavor that now occupies the couple full time. The group works with congregations, Jewish groups and schools around the United States to fund-raise for needy Israeli families hit by terror. It currently aids some 150 families, and hopes to pass 500 by the end of the year.

Like many smaller grassroots campaigns, the organization relies less on major benefactors than on creative fund-raising. Its donor base is now close to 40,000 people.

The group’s latest campaign is in especially good taste: Teamed with Levana Kirschenbaum of New York’s Levana Restaurant, the fund hopes to raise $500,000 by selling a million of Levana’s cookies, which will be baked under Kirschenbaum’s oversight by community center volunteers in Manhattan.

“Everything we do comes from other people’s ideas,” Thalheim said. “We provide people a tangible way to make connections.”

The fund also sells $5 bracelets imprinted with the name and age of a terror victim. So far it has sold 75,000 bracelets, including many to high school and middle school students. The bracelets were modeled after ones for American POWs in the Vietnam War, but they have a special resonance for Jewish activism: Such bracelets also were used to show support for Soviet Jews.

Thalheim, whose background is on Wall Street, said it is important for him to devote his energies to Israel in its moment of need.

Many American Jews clearly share Thalheim’s commitment, but for some the motives are more immediate and personal.

When Shmuel Greenbaum’s wife, Shoshana, was killed in the Aug. 9, 2001, bombing at the Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem, Greenbaum, a computer programmer in New York, created Partners in Kindness, a nonsectarian group that tries to promote kindness through daily e-mails and a monthly essay contest.

Two months ago, Greenbaum also formed Traditions of Kindness, which works with Jewish organizations, he said, “to show all religions the kindness of Jews.”

Greenbaum recently traveled to Israel for his wife’s yahrzeit and to meet with various officials in the Education Ministry, which has pledged to work with Traditions in Kindness.

“People are just fascinated with the concept of taking a tragedy and converting it into something wonderful,” said Greenbaum.

Grassroots movements for Israel have always existed, according to Harriet Mandel, director of Israel and international affairs for the New York chapter of the Jewish Community Relations Council. But, she adds, “when there are any of these terrorist attacks, people get angry, frustrated - and mobilized.”

 

Part of a process

 

Phyllis Franco says she doesn’t see herself as a fund-raiser.

A theme in Franco’s art is the idea of something both personal and universal; an eternal process of holding something close and sharing it with the world.

“I think we hold on and let go at the same time, all the time,” she said. “I think Israel is doing that. Their mission has been to be there and also accept the changes around them.”

Giving her art to help Israel was a way for Franco to be part of that process, she said, because “the greatest byproduct of a creative process is applying it to life.”

Franco’s determination to help Israel intensified when she started hearing the political rhetoric get harder both here and in Israel.

“That’s why I decided I, too, have a voice,” she said. “The grassroots elements have got to see themselves as important enough to make that message.”

Greater Atlanta Hadassah Chapter President Anita Levy was ecstatic at Franco’s interest and initiative. She says efforts such as Franco’s will help the chapter meet its goal of raising $250,000 this year to help the trauma center.

“This is new for us and this is fabulous,” Levy said. “This may inspire other people to give of their talents as well. In fund-raising, you have people who can give their time and you have some people who can give their money, and now we have a person who has given of her talent. It just goes to show that everyone has something to contribute.”

 

To Get Involved

¥ To help with Phyllis Franco’s project or to donate to the trauma center call Greater Atlanta Hadassah (404) 256-5007.

¥ To sign up for Jonathan Minnen’s Community Solidarity Trip (deadline Sept. 18) Jonathan Minnen (404) 815-3658 or Renee Werbin, SRI Travel, (770) 451-9399.

¥ To help with Chaver L’Chayal: e-mail Hadara Ishak at hadaragoldy@aol.com.

¥ To contribute to Debbie Sonenshine’s campaign to purchase an ambulance for Magen David Adom, call (404) 252-4908.

 

Max Heuer of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency contributed to this story.