Who will lead us? Finding models of leadership for Israel in troubling times - opinion

Kibbutz Magen should have been celebrating its 75th anniversary this month.

Magen was established in August 1949 on the site of the biblical Bethul (Joshua 19:4). It was a battlefield in the War of Independence. The kibbutz was much in the news last week, after the heroic rescue of hostage Kaid Farhan al-Alkadi, 52, a Bedouin father of 11 and grandfather of one, who worked as a guard in the kibbutz packaging facility.

The joy of that rescue faded immediately after the horrific news of the slaughter a kilometer away of hostages Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Alex Lobanov, Carmel Gat, and Almog Sarusi, all of blessed memory.

Like many American Israelis in Jerusalem, my connection was strongest with Hersh Goldberg-Polin. His parents, Rachel and Jon, are among the most exceptional persons I have ever met. Living in that “other planet” of “parallel universe of unadulterated torment” that Rachel has often spoken about since Oct. 7, she and Jon have managed to articulate their love and desperation and hope and leadership to an impotent world.

Our country, as well as the president of the United States, failed to return their beloved, wounded, abused young adult son from Hamas captivity.

In a speech Rachel gave on June 24 to the Institute of Policy and Strategy at the Herzliya Conference, drawing from the Talmud, she spoke of leadership as the ability to engage a different opinion with respect. She couched her remarks with a reminder to the policy experts that in the world before the stealing of their son, she only “worked in a high school.”

Imagine that moment where Rachel and Jon risked being booed by thousands of misguided Palestinian sympathizers, viewed by millions at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Their presence transformed the voices in the hall to a loud cry for freedom for the hostages. It changed the tone of the convention for participants and people around the world.

That’s leadership.

Model leadership post-October 7

IN THE tumultuous world in which we live, while the horrors that began on Oct. 7 seem to intensify, I’m thinking of another couple who model leadership as well.

Readers of this column may recall their story from last October. I want to report that after 10 months, Mina and Baruch Cohen have returned to Kibbutz Magen.

You may remember that I met Mina Nazrian Cohen on October 8, in the intensive care unit at Hadassah-University Medical Center in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem. Inside one of the rooms of the unit lay her husband, Baruch, 72. Baruch Cohen had come back from the dead.

The Cohens, like one-third of Kibbutz Magen members, are senior citizens and kibbutz old-timers. They’d met when Mina was in the Armored Corps. She had a different boyfriend, but Baruch was blond, blue-eyed, and very persuasive.

“Living on the kibbutz was his dream, not mine,” she told me while we watched Baruch sleep, attached to many tubes and monitors. A paratrooper who had fought in the Yom Kippur War, Baruch was committed to the ideal of living where they could provide protection for Israel. He wanted to do it by living on the vulnerable border with Gaza.

The kibbutzniks grew wheat, peanuts, and potatoes, and later built hi-tech solar energy systems. Mina, with a talent for management, combined studies while taking on kibbutz projects. Among the projects was building the kibbutz safe rooms.

For 17 years, Baruch wore the esteemed title of ravshatz, a Hebrew acronym for head of the civil defense squad on the kibbutz. Baruch was involved in hundreds of security incidents, many dangerous, some dramatic. Their agreement as a couple was that Mina couldn’t contact him while he was on duty. The stress took its toll. Mina went for resilience training.

Baruch’s running nightmare was that a day would come when waves of armed Gazans would infiltrate the kibbutzim. He trained his volunteer fighters for such a grave possibility. On Oct. 7, when the rockets rained down, he told Mina to lock the door and windows when she entered the safe room.

When Baruch drove his car to the perimeter of the kibbutz to lock the iron gates, he was hit by an RPG and afterward shot by a Kalashnikov. How he was evacuated to a safer area is still something of a mystery because the roads were already filled with terrorist snipers. Somehow he reached a helicopter pad and was flown to Hadassah in Jerusalem.

Meanwhile, at the kibbutz, Baruch’s well-trained squad held off the terrorists.

On the kibbutz, those who had seen Baruch’s wounds assumed he had not survived. Mina left her safe room and began setting up the living room for sitting shiva. One of their sons who lives outside of the kibbutz went to identify his body in the Hadassah morgue.

But Baruch Cohen wasn’t there. He was upstairs in intensive care. A doctor whose name is also Baruch brought him from the trauma unit to intensive care.

The leg hit by the RPG needed to be amputated, but within days Baruch was being interviewed by CNN.

For a long time, Mina wasn’t sure they’d go back to the kibbutz. But like most of their fellow kibbutzniks, she and Baruch are back living on the border. They’re in temporary quarters while their home is made handicapped accessible. I get teary whenever I watch the video she sent me of their return.

Some days are better than others. It’s an adjustment, Mina says. It’s good to be home.

You can see Rafah from their fields. Rafah is where Kaid Farhan Alkadi, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Alex Lobanov, Carmel Gat, and Almog Sarusi were all hidden in the elaborate underground tunnels that our enemies built with suitcases of millions in cash.

How do we go forward? Who will lead us?

How can we dare ask more of Rachel and Jon Goldberg-Polin, of Mina and Baruch Cohen, and the other Israelis who have taught us about wisdom and courage in these challenging times? But we need them.

May God give them, and us, strength. 

The writer is the Israel director of public relations at Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. Her latest book is A Daughter of Many Mothers.