Israeli Jewish-Arab Inspiration for Buffalo

In May 2022, a downtown supermarket in my Western New York community was attacked by an 18-year-old from downstate looking to “kill black people.”  Standing on the street in front of the Tops Friendly Market on Jefferson Avenue the day after the fatal shooting, hundreds of people from all over the region gathered in shock. The fault lines in the community felt like live wires ready to explode. Buffalo, I learned that morning, was the sixth most segregated community in the United States. As a transplant to the area, I knew things were bad, but I had no idea how bad.

For the next 24 hours, I attended vigil after vigil in memory of the ten murdered souls. People like 86-year-old Ruth Whitfield, the mother of a retired fire commissioner; Heyward Patterson, a deacon in his church; Celestine Chaney, a grandmother of six. Beloved, essential people. This was bigger than one tragic event. It was a resounding alarm that we, as a society, needed to change.

As we explored solutions, we turned to as many places as we could for answers.  With that in mind, 17 local civic and faith leaders and I headed to Israel in February  2023. While we were there to sightsee, our primary goal was to find ideas we could bring back to Western New York.

Over eight days, we visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, spoke with Israeli settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank at Roots-Shorashim, visited a Yad B’Yad (Hand in Hand) Israeli Jewish/Muslim/Christian school, met with Ethiopian Jews and learned their history, saw firsthand the separation wall in Bethlehem, and talked with new African arrivals at a youth village. All of this was powerful and insightful.

But it was at Givat Haviva, an educational center near Casarea, where we found a pathway forward. Named after Haviva Reik, a heroic pioneer who parachuted into Europe during the Holocaust, only to be murdered at the hands of the Nazis, Givat Haviva’s 42-acre campus features majestic views of the Mediterranean, but what stood out was the talk we heard by Mohammad Darawshe, their director of strategy, about the center for shared society.

We learned how divided Israeli society is, how young Israeli Arab and Jewish youth rarely interact, and the educational inadequacies in Arabic language schools. Most surprising were the advances Mohammad and his team had made in correcting some of the most egregious errors.

For example, after studies showed insufficient Hebrew proficiency to be the central cause of poor college acceptance rates among Arab citizens of Israel, Givat Haviva helped bring Jewish Hebrew teachers into their school system. Within a few years, this had almost entirely corrected the problem. Currently, 40 Jewish teachers are in 66 Arab schools for weekly one-hour sessions, reaching 23,000 students.

Our issues in Buffalo were immense, overwhelming at times. Givat Haviva showed us that by identifying problems and finding practical fixes, we could make a real difference in our own community. We went home emboldened, full of ideas and energy about how to move forward. Sadly, three years later, we are still a long way from making significant progress in ending Buffalo East Side’s food desert, as well as the violence and poverty that plague the community. And nine months after our trip, October 7 occurred, making bridge building between Israelis and Palestinians much more difficult.

As a leader in my local community, I fervently believe if we keep our eyes and ears open to new ideas, change is possible. Visiting Israel, we encountered many people and organizations dedicated to fixing seemingly insurmountable problems. This is a region where the burden of war and division is greater than our own. And, yet, people like Mohammad Darawshe have not given up hope.

Shared society, a framework aimed at fostering equality and inclusion between Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens, is foreign to most of my congregants, many of whom have lost hope over the last few years. Much of the news from Israel has been about war and bloodshed, but, as we saw on our trip, there is much more there than meets the eye.

In Western New York, we know snow does not fall evenly. Often it is only in one part of the city, not the whole. Likewise, Israeli society is not fully consumed by war. Peace blossoms in organizations like Givat Haviva. As Anne Frank once wrote, “How wonderful it is that nobody needs to wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”