JERUSALEM — She’s tall, thin, has long curly blond hair and a bubbly personality. Rachel Kaplan, the 20-year-old daughter of BIAV members Gary Kaplan and Eileen Kaplan had just walked to the King Solomon Hotel from the Old City after spending most of a week hiking around Israel in a brand-new pre-army training program.
The training program, Mechina Tavor is a preparatory program directed by Amichai Shikli and geared for new immigrant “lone soldiers” those whose parents do not live in Israel or who do not have close relatives here. It is comprised of four women and 15 men who come from the United States, Australia, Chile and South Africa. In addition six Israelis who have already completed the year-long preparatory program are serving as counselors for this group.
Kaplan attributes the decision to come on aliyah and serve in the army totally to growing up in Kansas City.
“Growing up in Kansas City gave me such a great Zionist background from my youth group, NCSY. Now that I’m here, I really appreciate having grown up in such a warm, Jewish community.”
She came to Israel for the first time when she was a ninth-grade student at Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy. She then came again in 11th grade with the “Jerusalem Journey” through NCSY. These experiences motivated her to return for her gap year, after graduating Shawnee Mission South in 2010, for the Bar Ilan University Israel experience. (Bar Ilan, located near Tel Aviv, was conceived in Atlanta and founded by an American rabbi and educator to forge links between the Torah and universal links. Thus in the beginning, students and faculty were religious.)
“Halfway through the year, I realized I wasn’t going to leave Israel,” said Rachel. “This was my country, this was where I should live, and I felt I should serve in the army.”
After returning to Overland Park for a month, she made aliyah in July 2010. Since then, she has attended two kibbutz ulpanim (Hebrew programs) and is now in this pre-army program.
When Rachel goes into the army in November, she will be part of a group called Garin Tzabar, a support system for lone soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces; she will have an apartment at Kibbutz Nir Oz, a secular, agricultural kibbutz in the northwest Negev, 1 1/4 miles from Gaza. There are four others in the preparatory program from her garin and two from another garin who will also be on this kibbutz.
In the preparatory program, Kaplan is the one who has been in Israel the longest, and she is finding it “an incredible experience!”
“It’s giving us the opportunity to experience Israel first hand, alongside Israelis that have been trained a whole year. They explain things in non-stop activities and the whole program is army oriented.”
Among things which stand out in her mind is meeting the parents of a young soldier, Michael Levin, a 21-year-old paratrooper from Philadelphia, who was killed in 2002 while his unit was fighting Hezbollah. An Israeli Jewish Agency friend of Levin’s founded a center to help lone soldiers before, during and after their army service and named it in his memory.
Another experience she especially remembers was going to an abandoned village where Special Forces taught the group to rappel off the side of a building with paint guns, shooting at various targets.
“We’ve had so many opportunities I never thought I would have, learning the country I’m going to be serving,” Kaplan said.
Although Kaplan starts her basic training in November, she is not sure what job she will eventually do in the army.
“I’m in the process of finding a job that fits my skills, that I can give back to the country,” she says.