Until October 7, 2023, Sivan Shefer enjoyed a tranquil existence in Moshav Ein HaBesor, about seven kilometers (four miles) from the Gaza Strip. 

The 49-year-old mom started Dialog with Animals 12 years ago with Shully Clil, to train dogs and therapeutic dog handlers. Shefer also ran a therapeutic horse farm at a rehabilitation village for individuals with complex disabilities.

On October 7, Hamas terrorists attempting to enter the village were successfully thwarted by a security squad headed by Shefer’s partner. However, they killed her 26-year-old nephew in nearby Sde Nitzan and kidnapped her son’s teacher as well as several friends of her kids.

“Afterwards, for a few months I was frozen. We were housed in an Eilat hotel for three months and I was really struggling with everything I believed in,” she recalls. 

Deciding that her method needed a post-October 7 twist, she envisioned a new venture, Dialog L’Chaim (For Life) “to help us find hope and good relationships, to feel safe with ourselves and trust other creatures.”

Her family will donate land for a therapeutic-educational-rehabilitative farm doubling as regional hub for healing and volunteering. Soldiers with PTSD will come with therapists to help us build the farm, where she plans to offer garden therapy, carpentry, yoga and more.

“I think this project can bring hope to others as it does for me,” Shefer says. 

Rebuilding the Otef

Dialog L’Chaim is one of 15 community-rebuilding social initiatives in the devastated Gaza border region (known as the “Envelope” or Otef in Hebrew) taking shape under the auspices of Restart.

Restart was launched last May by Kolot (Voices), a pluralistic beit midrash (house of study) in Lod where leaders from diverse sectors of Israel engage with the Jewish textual tradition to create a shared infrastructure of values aimed at advancing positive social change. 

Restart is dedicated to the memory of a Kolot alumnus, Sha’ar Hanegev Regional Council Head Ofir Libstein, who was murdered on October 7. 

Shefer, coming from a secular background, says, “In the beginning, I didn’t understand the language of a beit midrash, and I thought, ‘It’s not for me.’ But as I continued with the meetings, I understood that the group and the leaders have the values I want for myself and for my dialogs. It’s amazing.”

Over the course of six months, the cohort attended more than a dozen sessions and traveled to the Chicago and Detroit areas to garner support for their community reconstruction plans. 

On November 7, the program culminated with a ceremony in Sderot. A second cohort is now in the works.

A sense of purpose and meaning

“I think everyone in Israel who’s looking at reality understood two things very clearly after October 7,” Leon Wiener Dow, director of Kolot’s Beit Midrash and facilitator of Restart, tells ISRAEL21c.

“Number one is that civic leadership is critical to reimagining the best of what Israel can be, in contrast to the national government and even local governments, which we see as one of the key change agents in Israel. 

“The second thing is how regional Israel is. People from the Otef would have told you a long time ago that people outside the Otef don’t understand what their life is like. But I think now that you have people from the Otef and from the north [affected directly by the war on two fronts], Israel became regional in the way that it wasn’t before.”

Restart is therefore regional in its approach to harnessing civic leadership; Wiener Dow hopes eventually to have branches of Restart in the north and in central Israel as well. The program director for Restart South is Shoshana Steiner Sarfati, COO of Kolot and a displaced resident of Kibbutz Saad near the Gaza border.

The project, Wiener Dow explains, seeks to do three things: 

“First, to give inspiration and nurture a sense of purpose and meaning in terms of what they’re doing. 

“Second, to provide them with a textual learning process that sharpens their moral compass and gives them a language and conceptual tools for what they’re doing. 

“Third, each participant gets professional consulting and advice depending on what their needs are.”

Despair is not a plan of action

Wiener Dow related a pivotal comment during a model learning session for potential participants. 

“The topic of that session was ‘Despair and its escape hatches’ because my operating assumption was that there’s a kind of general despair and we need tools to help us get out of that room,” he says. 

“I saw one person fidgeting in his chair throughout the process. I said to him, ‘You look you look like you’re suffering here; what’s going on?’ And he said, in a kind of gruff Israeli way, ‘Despair is not a plan of action.’

“And so that became a kind of a mantra of the group. We displaced the conversation on despair with a conversation about what it is to have a sense of personal and professional mission, what it means to develop and foster hope, what it means to have vision and transform that vision into a plan of action.”

The trip abroad toward the end of the process not only exposed American communities to the cohort members’ stories and projects but also exposed the Israelis to what North American Jewry has been going through since October 7.

Wiener Dow says the Israelis and Americans forged “a sense of shared destiny and the beginnings of partnerships in this or that project.”

Restart’s first cohort was underwritten mainly by the Jewish Federation of Greater Houston. Kolot has raised seed money to begin the second cohort and is working to raise the rest of the funding privately. 

Watch out for our companion article on Kolot where we will spotlight other initiatives of the first cohort, ranging from cultural festivals to holistic health to leadership training to beautifying bomb shelters. 

For more information on Kolot, click here.