‘Voluntourism’ is a Growing Part of Life in Israel

It is called “voluntourism,” the movement to bring individuals to Israel to help the country weather the food crisis and other issues of daily life that have accelerated during the recent military campaign in Gaza and along the Lebanese border.

Volunteers of all ages have journeyed to Israel for a few weeks or a few days to help out on farms in need of day laborers. Prior to Oct. 7, 2023, much of this work was done by foreign workers, but many of them have left. The labor shortage has been exacerbated as well by military manpower needs.

That why Leket Israel, the country’s leading food bank, decided to step up its volunteer program sending near a dozen busloads of volunteers to work on the farms of Southern Israel and help farmers there continue production.

According to Joseph Gitler, who visited Atlanta recently, the organization has welcomed over 100,000 volunteers since Oct. 7 of last year. They are either working in the field or in a network of distribution centers around the country. One of Gitler’s stops while he was here was at the Jewish Federation of Greater Atlanta where he told the organization’s leaders of the need for expanding the role of volunteers in Israel.

“When Federation has trips, the men’s mission, the big community mission, the birthright trips we want to make to ensure that they are working with us,” Gitler said. “We hope to develop this relationship more strategically and more deeply.”

To help strengthen the ties the organization is developing in the Southeast, Leket Israel has just appointed a liaison based in Israel who plans to visit this part of the America to encourage volunteerism and to boost financial support. The new liaison, Sally Poolat, who made Aliyah four years ago, visited Atlanta and then included a swing through some of the smaller communities in the Southeast like Greenville and Aiken, S.C.

One of the issues that has not gotten much media attention is the impact that the strike by Hamas had on agriculture, particularly in the Negev, where agriculture is a major industry.

One of the recent visitors to Israel was Dan Glickman, the first Jewish Secretary of Agriculture who worked in the Clinton administration from 1995 to 2001, who visited the Western Negev, where it is estimated that 70 percent of the country’s vegetables and 20 percent of its fruit is grown. On Oct. 7, in addition to the human losses that day, greenhouses and crops were burned, irrigation systems were destroyed, and farm animals were killed.

“Israel was founded on the kibbutz movement,” Glickman told the Jewish Insider. “Hamas was pretty clear that it not only wanted to kill people but also impact Israeli agriculture.”

Israel is also using volunteers to harvest food that might ordinarily go to waste if not redistributed to those who are in need. Each week, Gitler says his organization helps to feed 330,000 Israelis through a network of several hundred non-profit agencies. He says that his organization has distributed about three million cooked meals, aided again by the work of volunteers.

“Mostly, the meals are going to homeless shelters and battered women’s shelters and after school clubs for kids and that frees up their time to focus on their work.”

Birthright Israel has also announced that it’s expanding its volunteer program that began shortly after the Oct. 7 attacks.

The president and CEO of the Birthright Israel Foundation, Elias Saratovsky, told the eJP news site that the expansion is the result of a greater than expected response. This year, the program is expected to bring 8,000 participants to the Jewish state.

“We brought twice as many volunteers as we thought would come this year, and we expanded our budget to accommodate them because we understand the needs in Israel are great, and the desire among young people to volunteer is great as well,” Saratovsky said. “We continue to see dozens of new applicants every single day; hundreds of new volunteers come.”

The program, which is run in partnership with Mosaic Israel in the country’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, is expected to grow by 50 percent in 2025, from its current $18 million budget to $24 million as donors to the Birthright Foundation have stepped up their support.

“We started this as an experiment,” Saratovsky continued. “We saw a massive demand from Diaspora Jews and we saw a massive need in Israel. None of those have dissipated since we launched the project. We are constantly adding new partners in Israel that require volunteers. We believe this will happen for years to come, as the needs in Israel will continue to exist.”