Shari Goldberg, 24, grew up in a Conservative Jewish household in South Jersey. Her family attended Congregation Beth Tikvah in Marlton. Her father was the synagogue’s president.
As she put it, “It was always instilled in us that being Jewish is important and connecting with other Jewish people is a priority.”
Goldberg mostly did that at the JCC Camps at Medford, where she started as a camper in 2003 when she was 4. She became a counselor in 2014 and assistant director in 2022.
Goldberg went to Israel with her Hebrew school class in high school. She felt a connection. But it wasn’t profound.
That was until Oct. 7.
After the Hamas attack, Goldberg asked her camp director, Sara Sideman, if she could go for two weeks to volunteer. Sideman said of course.
Goldberg told Sideman she “had never felt this compelled to do something,” the director said.
“She left my office, and I cried that day,” Sideman added.
Goldberg spent two weeks in late November and early December volunteering through the Birthright program for HaShomer HaChadash, an organization that places volunteers on farms. She planted cucumbers, picked strawberries and cherry tomatoes and spent four days on a pepper farm. She helped make up for a shortage of farm workers.
Goldberg said, “I knew I wasn’t going to save the world doing that.” But she also said she felt like she needed to do something. Goldberg kept thinking of a lesson that JCC counselors teach campers: tzedakah is more than just donating money.
“I thought, ‘What am I supposed to tell my kids?’” she said.
Goldberg felt an urge to go back to Israel even before Oct. 7. She was supposed to do Birthright with her sister in December. Then Hamas attacked. So, she decided to go anyway.
When Goldberg applied for Birthright’s volunteer program, she got two options: agriculture and logistics. She chose agriculture.
“I thought ag would be cool because I’d work on the land,” Goldberg said. “Talk to other volunteers while picking or planting things.”
Birthright put the volunteers up in Tel Aviv. Each morning, around 30 of them took a bus to a farm. At the farm, they got to talk to the people who ran the operations. One couple told them they thought they were uncertain about their future.
But as the trip went on, she also had some normal Birthright-type experiences. One night, the volunteers heard a lecture from a geopolitical expert on Israeli and Middle Eastern affairs. On other evenings, two or three Americans would get to hang out with an Israeli.
Goldberg viewed art installations inspired by the Oct. 7 attack. She attended a rally where family members of hostages spoke. She baked challah and distributed it. She visited a tent with displaced residents of Kibbutz Be’eri in southern Israel.
They expressed “how proud and grateful they are that people came to work on farms,” Goldberg said.
On the last day that Goldberg was there, while she was in the airport, a siren went off. She had to go into a safe room with another volunteer.
Goldberg called the two weeks “a huge, communal Jewish experience that I don’t think I’ve ever seen in my life before.”
Back in the United States, she realizes that she is lucky that she doesn’t have to deal with sirens and other “external threats.” She said she has “a newfound perspective on Israel” and plans to “visit Israel more often now.”
But since she returned, Goldberg has also noticed something else: Her generation’s reluctance to criticize Hamas. She finds herself reticent about expressing pro-Israel views. Goldberg called the feeling “unsettling.”
“One would think it would be easy for them to say that what happened on that day was such a tragedy and such a horror,” she said.
But Goldberg is undeterred. She views it as her responsibility now to “educate people and my peers.”
“Which isn’t something I ever thought I would need to do,” she said.
Goldberg is ready to speak at local Hebrew schools. The Katz JCC in Cherry Hill, where the Jewish Federation of Southern New Jersey is based, is going to have her speak on Tu B’Shevat. Goldberg and Sideman are already discussing how the assistant director can use her experience to educate campers and staff in 2024.
“She’s going to inspire not only our campers but our young adult staff,” Sideman said. “She’s going to inspire a lot of young Jewish teens and college students.”
