When Going Gets Tough, Jews Pitch In

Screenwriter John Herman Shaner is hefting boxes and stuffing duffel bags for the Israeli Armor Corps these days instead of cutting Hollywood deals.

Jeannette Geller has left Beverly Hills behind to pry the old straps off Israeli army helmets and refurbish them with new camouflage netting. And retired New York policeman Mark Frances has been mopping floors and packaging pills that would be needed during a chemical attack.

Ask them why they are doing this, paying their own way to a country of gas masks and air raid sirens to do grunt work, and the answers are all more or less the same:

“I wanted to put my money where my mouth is--with my body,” Shaner said.

“We wanted to do something to help,” said Geller, sitting on the floor of a dim storeroom amid a welter of helmets and camouflage material. “I never wanted to help only with a checkbook.”

“We want to be here when things are rough,” according to Frances.

“My fear was the fear of sitting home,” Robyn Asch of Sacramento said. “If something happened and I had done nothing, I would have felt awful.”

The decisions these American Jews made were highly personal. But organizers of the programs now gearing up to bring thousands more Americans to Israel say they also hope the volunteers can serve in a larger sense to help make amends for the latest damage to the touchy relationship between the Jewish state and its American Jewish supporters.

When the Jan. 15 deadline for an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait arrived, many Israelis looked around and found the country suddenly almost empty of American solidarity missions, American students, American Jewish leaders. The tourists had been missing for months.

“All of a sudden, when the chips are down, they’re not here,” David Clayman, the Israeli representative of the American Jewish Congress, said. “And there’s a lot of resentment about it.”

“People here are really quite cynical about this remote-control solidarity from New York,” he said. “The American Jews blew it. What we’re doing now is catch-up.”

The catch-up appears to be going strong, however. When the American Jewish Congress published an advertisement for professionals to come to Israel during the crisis and help in institutions for the mentally retarded and elderly, its New York office received 4,000 calls over one weekend, Clayman said.

Volunteers for Israel, the program that brought Shaner, Geller and several other Californians for a three-week stint, has reported receiving up to 750 calls a day from would-be volunteers.

Tom Sharon, the Israeli officer who oversees the volunteers at this central Israel armor camp--Israeli military censorship forbids disclosing its name or location--said the surge of American interest in volunteering had surprised many Israelis.

“Nobody ever believed that in the state we’re in at the moment, that people would go berserk” about coming, he said. “People really are saying, ‘Now is the time. Now I can help.’ ”

A group of 27 mainly middle-aged volunteers sponsored by Hadassah, the Jewish women’s service organization, appears to have been doing the public relations work of a legion among Israelis, remaining in the country since Jan. 8 and driving around in a bus with a giant American flag plastered across its hood.

“Strangers kept stopping us on the street and saying, ‘All honor to you,’ ” one member of the group said.

The Hadassah volunteers have earned their praise, sitting through 15 assorted air raid alarms and working at flower cutting, clerical tasks, medical supply sorting, basic maintenance chores and tutoring around the country.

“When we’re finished with our four-hour shift at Tel Hashomer (hospital), we’re all dragging,”’ said Brenda Seiden of Newburgh, N.Y.

Their trials began on the home front, attempting to explain to children and relatives why they felt the need to volunteer.

Emma Gottlieb of Seal Beach said her brother kept calling and saying, “ ‘You’re an intelligent woman. Change your mind. Israel will still be there six months from now.’ And I said, ‘Have you been on the L.A. freeway lately? You can get killed there.’ ”

Even for such hardy souls, the two-month experience is proving harrowing.

Frances said that 41 years as a New York policeman had not prepared him for the anxiety of sitting with a gas mask in a sealed room waiting for an attack or the all-clear.

“It’s sheer terror at the beginning,” he said. “I’ve been in tight situations all my life, but you can do something about it. Here, you’re passive. You’re sitting in a sealed room, and someone else is handling your fate.”

Compared to the Hadassah group, the California members of Volunteers for Israel had been lucky so far when interviewed late last week: None had experienced the whining of alarm sirens. A group of Hungarians who volunteered at the camp before them had barely put their bags down on their beds when the sirens went off.

Perhaps partly because they had not yet donned their gas masks for real, few expressed any great fear of missile attack.

“The Israelis’ nonchalance is catching,” Eileen Heim of Encino said. “They don’t seem to worry about it, so why should I?”

The Californians also had no complaints about the decidedly Spartan conditions in the camp--dormitories crowded with steel bunk beds supporting three-inch-thick mattresses, with bathrooms an outside trek away.

However, they did have some very personal concerns--like the women’s fingernails, most of which had been mercilessly cut short and stripped of their lacquer before the trip.

Asked when she had last done such manual labor, UCLA student Valerie Hoffman laughed and said, “My cleaning girl does the manual labor at home” as part of a staff that includes a gardener and a pool man.

Shaner, his Rolex watch peeking out from the olive-drab sleeve of his uniform, wondered about the fate of the television movie he had begun putting together when he left, and about his class in screen writing at USC.

Still, he said, “I had to come.”

“What did Woody Allen say about 80% of life is just showing up? Well, I showed up.”

Other Californians showing up not to volunteer but simply to express solidarity have included Los Angeles Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner and Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky. Their trip, with stays in comfortable hotels and meetings with high Israeli officials and new Soviet immigrants, bore little resemblance to the volunteers’ tour of duty.

Many of the volunteers did not even refer to their time in Israel as a trip--”experience” seemed to suit better.

But the labor, discomfort and fear have an up side, too, some said.

“I did also do this a little for the adventure,” Shaner conceded. “I’ll be able to dine out on this for quite a while.”