Restoring Hope for Youth in Northern Israel

How are Israeli teens healing from war? Just ask Mika Mazor, who works with Israeli youth in the country’s battered North. Mazor, 22, felt called to join JDC’s robust humanitarian efforts after the October 7 Hamas attacks. In this reflection, she describes how one JDC program is fostering joy and resilience for young Israelis. 

If you remember what it’s like to be a teen, you’ll recall that life often felt like a roller coaster — each emotion you experienced was more intense than it would ever be again. This is doubly so for Israeli teens who’ve endured war, including those here in Kibbutz Bar’am. 

I grew up in Haifa and didn’t know the world of informal education in the kibbutzim — it just wasn’t something I’d ever thought about. But I was involved in our youth movement, so once I discovered this line of work, it became my passion.

I’d served in the Israeli Air Force and wrapped up my service a month after October 7. I thought, “If I’m not doing reserve duty, then what now? I have to help.” This sense of duty weighed heavily on my shoulders. 

I decided to head north. I joined a group of volunteers in the Golan Heights and the Upper Galilee and helped farmers who were at risk of losing their crops. There was a labor shortage and they didn’t have enough manpower. 

These efforts were all I cared about, and when I returned to Haifa, I thought, “How can I make an even greater impact?”

I entered search terms into Google, like, “work in the Gaza envelope” and “work in the Galilee.” A program called Meshivim kept popping up in my Facebook feed. I felt like the ads were speaking directly to me, a young woman who wanted to do meaningful work.  

I learned that Meshivim operates both in the Gaza envelope and in the country’s North. A joint program developed and run by JDC and BaseCamp organization, Meshivim (Hebrew for “Restoring”) aims to provide emotional and social support, strengthen local communities, and build stable frameworks for the long term.

This initiative currently operates in more than 30 communities in the North and trains dozens of counselors and professionals to create an educational and therapeutic environment for approximately 2,000 teens. I wanted to be a part of such a robust, expansive operation. 

I joined Meshivim’s training program. For two weeks, I was out in the field — in the Gaza envelope and the Galilee — and met with youth counselors, coordinators, and informal educators. I learned what it means to be an effective counselor. Much more than someone who leads activities and excursions, my role was to be a consistent figure in teens’ lives — someone who’d be there for them no matter what. 

At the end of the training period, I got to choose where I’d be placed. One of their options was Bar’am, a kibbutz in the Galilee. I had fond memories of picking crops in Israel’s North, and I quickly fell in love with the mountain landscape, thinking, “I want to be here.”

I arrived in February 2025, and the moment I got there, I knew I had my work cut out for me. 

At the time, the kibbutz looked like a ghost town. All of the residents had evacuated. The roads were empty. No one ate in the dining hall. The youth center had been closed since the start of the Israel-Hamas War. Instead, it was used as the soldiers’ mess hall. A place soldiers eat in for months never looks good. My most pressing question was, “How do I turn this into an inviting place for teens?”

It turns out that a month can be transformative in the life of a kibbutz. By March, I was sitting in the dining hall with all my teens. I looked around and saw a room full of kids running around and adults chatting with each other. From empty to full, sad to joyous, Kibbutz Bar’am had returned full force over the previous 30 days. 

A community is only as vibrant as its young people, and my work with teens played a significant part in revitalizing the kibbutz. Young Israelis, particularly those in the battered North, face unique and significant challenges. For more than two years, their lives have been destabilized. Not only did they have to evacuate, but the war disrupted their schooling and uprooted them from their social circles. Some of them had to separate from a mother or father who had to go on reserve duty. 

When they arrived back home, they were incredibly wary and confused. Many who’d left as middle-schoolers had now returned, a year and a half later, as completely different people. They were asking themselves, “Is life back to normal?” But it wasn’t, of course. So much had changed. 

Today, I work with about 60 teens, from middle school through 12th grade. The youth club is open Sunday through Friday. At 1 p.m., they get off the bus and go to the dining hall, and we counselors all go with them to eat lunch. We sit at the place reserved for teens, a gloriously long, noisy table. From there we all go to the kolbo (kibbutz store) to buy an ice cream and then open the youth club. 

Here at the center, we have a kitchen, a lounge, and various other rooms where we sit and hang out. In the first few months, I was focused on getting the teens to open up and feel safe, asking them where they’d been and what they’d done that day. We usually have activities for the older and younger age groups. On Fridays, the teens are supposed to work in the kibbutz, and when they finish, they come here and we bake challah together for Shabbat.

This place has become the center of their lives — it’s where they come to chat, have impassioned debates, play Xbox, or simply make themselves food. It’s basically their living room and second home. Without the youth center, many of the teens I know would just sit at home all day alone. 

The fact that their teens are at the clubhouse all day, and beg us not to close, and call early each morning asking us to open once again — it just shows me how much they love and need this place.

One of the teens recently told me, “Mika, you’re the youth club’s psychologist.” I felt moved, because I realized that our efforts here aren’t in vain. We aren’t just giving these teens a place to distract themselves from the present, but a roadmap for building the future they deserve.

Mika Mazor, 22, is a youth instructor in Kibbutz Bar’am, Israel.

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