Volume 8, Issue 2 / Shevat 5765 / February 2005
The Ultimate Volunteer
When Tsvi Gouet was 18, he came to Israel as a volunteer for three weeks. It turned out to be a turning point in his life. "I understood then that this was the place for me to live," he recalls. But when he told his parents that he wanted to leave Paris and make aliyah, they were in shock.
Tsvi was hard put to understand their reaction. His family was very Zionist, very traditionally Jewish. His parents were community activists - he remembers staying with his nanny or grandmother almost every week when he was four or five while his parents would go to demonstrations on behalf of Soviet Jewry. Both his father, a professor of physics, and his mother, a doctor, were born in pre-State Palestine. His mother's parents were refugees from Poland. His maternal grandfather, an agricultural engineer who had served with the Fighting Free French under de Gaulle, came to Palestine after the war to help the Jewish defense organizations. He converted to Judaism and married a refugee from Romania. Both couples moved to France during the War of Independence.
"Our home in Paris was focused on Israel," Tsvi notes. "Whatever came from Israel, we would buy - oranges, cucumbers, pickles, etc. But I guess it's one thing to support Israel, and something else when one of your kids wants to make aliyah. My parents couldn't understand how I could make such a life-impacting decision after only three weeks."
Tsvi was prevailed upon to wait until he completed his higher education before immigrating to Israel. But he returned to Israel every summer. "I couldn't live in France otherwise," he recalls. In 1999 he came and spent a month in the Galilee with a group of friends; the following year he came with his parents on an extensive tour of nature preserve sites. In 2001 he came as a volunteer. "Every year I was more certain I wanted to make aliyah," he says.
When he met a colleague of his mother, a physician who works in a blood bank who had come to a conference in France, he inquired about the possibility of volunteering in Magen David Adom (MDA). "Every time there's an attack in Israel, I feel the need to provide concrete help," he told her. She referred him to Yochai Porat, the director of the Magen David Adom Oversees Volunteer Program, which is supported by the Jewish Agency. "Yochai would respond immediately to all my his emails," he recalls. "Then, in March 2002, he stopped answering me." Tsvi discovered that Yochai had been felled by the terror he was trying to combat.
That summer, Tsvi arrived in Israel for MDA's "first responders" training course, bringing two friends with him. He was assigned to a station in Bat Yam, a town that is off the beaten track for most Western tourists. The experience helped him acculturate to Israel. "MDA really exposes you to a slice of Israeli life," he attests. "My visit corroborated my feeling that I must live here," he continues.
Back in France he began publicizing the program and returned the following summer - this time with 25 young French Jews. These included 15 medical students as well as 10 regular volunteers.
In July 2004, armed with a fresh MA degree in electronics, Tsvi made aliyah. Six months at the Jewish Agency's Ulpan Etzion in Jerusalem polished his Hebrew language skills. "I really enjoyed it," he attests. "It's a great place to be absorbed. They helped me and all the other olim a lot."
He now lives with roommates in the Har Homa neighborhood on the outskirts of Jerusalem. While waiting to be inducted into the army, he's doing what's natural for him: serving as a medic on an ambulance.
Written by: Shifra Paikin
Photos by: Shimmi NachtailerTo download this file as a word document, click here.
