Wounded IDF Soldiers Enjoy U.S. Vacation
Israeli veterans wounded in their country’s last major military operation in the Gaza Strip arrived in New York City Sunday for a much-anticipated 12-day tour of locations in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern United States.
Organized by the Chabad Israel Center of the Upper East Side and the Chabad-Lubavitch Youth Organization in Israel’s Terror Victims Project, the Belev Echad trip – its name translates to “with one heart” – will take the 10 former soldiers to synagogues in New York, and tourist sites in Washington, D.C. and Niagara Falls. According to Rabbi Yossi Swerdlov, associate director of the Terror Victims Project, the tour, which models similar programs that have taken place in the past two years in Aspen, Colo., gives the soldiers a break from a grueling regimen of surgeries and rehabilitation.