JULY 25 • 2024 | 11
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America changed.” 
Detroit native Carole Lewis, 84, who 
now lives in San Francisco, said her father 
was a fighter pilot during the War of 
Independence who helped bring ammuni-
tions to pre-state Israel. When she was in 
her 30s, she volunteered in Israel helping 
wounded soldiers in an underground 
hospital unit during the Yom 
Kippur War. 
Lewis said that being an 
active donor to Birthright 
is a vital way to teach 
today’s generations of 
Jewish youth who need to 
gain a better understand-
ing of Israel’s history and 
the hands-on mentality of 
what it took to bring it into being. 
Outside the scorched remains of a 
once-beautiful home, I caught up with 
president and CEO of the Birthright 
Foundation Elias Saratovsky. He told me 
that this summer, Birthright launched the 

Onward volunteer program. 
“Many are returning this summer with 
Onward for the first time since they went 
on their Birthright trip,
” Saratovsky said. 
“They are giving back upon the gift [of vis-
iting Israel] and helping rebuild what was 
destroyed. A huge element of Birthright is 
to connect them with Israelis. Now the 
Israelis who fought right here [in 
the Gaza envelope] and on the 
northern front are sharing 
their experiences and, in 
turn, our college students 
are sharing with their Israeli 
counterparts what it has 
been like to be a pro-Israel 
student on campus.
” 

SITE OF TRAGEDY

Next, we traveled to the site of the Nova 
music festival. I walked among photographs 
of smiling beautiful young men and women 
with so much life in their eyes. Hundreds 
are posted on poles in an area that seems to 

span several acres in a makeshift memorial. 
Israeli flags waved in the dusty heat. At the 
base of each pole are yahrtzeit candles and 
a metal replica of the kalaniyot, the iconic 
red-petaled wildflowers of Israel’s south. 
Wandering among the memorial I met 
Noa Alterman, 22, of Franklin. Alterman, 
a recent graduate of Indiana University, is a 
Birthright and Onward alumna and was in 
Israel as an Onward volunteer. 
“These past few months, I wanted to get 
back to Israel as soon as I could, just to be 
here and do whatever I could to feel like I 
was making a difference,
” Alterman said. 
“This was a hard year to be on campus, to 
feel how many people are against us. They 
believe the lies they are told [about Israel] 
and then stand against Jews and put so 
much hate into this world.
” 
Alterman said it was a comfort to come 
to Israel, her sixth time, to pay her respects 
to the fallen, to console Israelis and to be 
around so many like-minded Jewish stu-
dents who for months have felt isolated on 
their campuses. She contrasted this visit 
with a trip she took to Poland in March of 
2024. 
“I visited the horrors of the camps, and 
now this place, where so many were killed 
just eight months ago,
” Alterman said. 
“
Auschwitz was a place that was deliber-
ately built to kill as many Jews as possible. 
But here we stand in nature, in a place 
designed for peace, at a place where peo-

Noa Alterman, 22, of Franklin, looks at a photo of 
a victim of the Nova festival massacre in southern 
Israel. Alterman spent time volunteering in Israel 
with Onward, a volunteering project created for 
Birthright alumni.

Tour-goers paid 
respects to the
fallen soldiers at
Har Herzl.

Guide Rami Gold takes the 
group through Kibbutz Be’eri 
as donor Brina Weinstein 
 
(center) listens.

continued on page 12

Detroit native 
Carole Lewis

STACY GITTLEMAN