Israeli family in Denver works to bridge volunteers and families in need, despite being far from home
Chagit and Aryeh Gibor say it has been gut-wrenching watching the war unfold in their home back in Israel.
Now Aryeh, who served in the Israeli military, is taking up a mission to connect people in need back in Israel with resources.
"I was in shock, we've never experienced anything like this," said Chagit Gibor.
"Terrible. First of all, it's so hard to understand what happened over there," said Aryeh Gibor.
The couple and their three children moved from Jerusalem to Denver a year and a half ago.
"Israel has a lot of waves of violence, different waves of violence," said Chagit.
It is those waves of violence amid the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that increasingly became too much for the family, especially when Aryeh was drafted in 2008 during the Gaza War.
"I was alone with a little baby and had just lost my brother that year in a terror attack," said Chagit. "There was a massacre in a Jerusalem high school, [and] he was 16. So, going through that, losing him, having the stress of Aryeh in this special unit in Gaza and I having a small child was very stressful."
She added, "even my two other kids got to experience a round of fighting and going into the safe room."
However, for people like Aryeh, serving in the Israel Defense Force was never a question, but a duty.
"If we don't have a strong army, we won't have a place to live," said Aryeh. "When it was my time to draft in, I tried to get to the most elite unit that I could."
Now, as the Gibors safely watch the chaos unfold from their home in Denver, a sense of helplessness sinks in, while their family, friends and loved ones continue to hunker down in shelters.
"It's a blessing and a curse to be here," said Chagit.
For Aryeh, it has been difficult not being there to help fight against Hamas.
"If I did not have my family here right now, I would've gone," he said. "If I was single and needed to care only for myself, yes, I would've been there already."
"Aryeh was looking for his passport everywhere, and I got stressed out and I said, 'Are you really going to go'. And he said, 'no but I need my passport handy,'" said Chagit. "He didn't say 'no,' he just said, 'If I make that decision, it will be a joint decision.'"
While the family pushes that kind of difficult decision to the side for now, they are still left with the urge to help.
"I remembered how it was to be a young mom, married to a soldier," said Chagit.
Back in 2014, during another conflict in Israel, Chagit created a type of Google form asking family members in the region to identify friends and families in Israel that needed help and received tons of responses. Then, she used that information to help connect local volunteers to help provide food, medical, cleaning, babysitting, transportation and other services to families who had loved ones fighting in the war.
"And to this day, I have women who message me and say they remember how much of a help that was," she said.
This time, Chagit enlisted the help of a nonprofit organization in Jerusalem that teaches youth to code to create an app to do the same thing: connect volunteers in the Israeli region to families in need.
"This organization takes young, smart, high school graduates and teaches them how to code and they sit and they code apps for society. So, they put together an app that will now allow me from here to oversee this," she said.
Upon filling out a list of questions on the app, which includes name, contact information, their location in Israel and the kind of services they can help assist with, Chagit on the back end will then connect these volunteers to the list of families she has that need it.
The app officially launched on Tuesday.
"So when we put in the data of which families have loved ones that are either kidnapped, missing, in battle and need help, we can connect them and have them help each other," said Chagit. "Hopefully by tomorrow, we can already have a list of volunteers."
Chagit says they hope this can bring families back home some relief amidst the atrocities of the ongoing war.
"This is terror. This is ISIS-like terror," she said.
Chagit also wants people to understand that the death and destruction of innocent civilians in Israel is not the solution to addressing the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "I think the Gaza story is a sad story. It's horrible. The life there is horrible. It needs a solution, but that can't be any way to reason for what just happened. Because if people support Hamas right now, they support this. They support the killing of whole families and babies, and the burning and the kidnapping and the raping. It's just terrible."
