Spirit of service in the IDF: Examining the DNA of the Bnei David ‘mechina’ in Eli

Bnei David in Eli, in the Binyamin region, is now in its 37th year, and its wartime popularity is growing. 

By MARION FISCHEL NOVEMBER 24, 2024 21:13

NEW ASHKENAZI Chief Rabbi Kalman Ber visits the Bnei David study hall, where Jewish philosophy is also taught. (photo credit: Courtesy Bnei David)

November 2024. Twenty-six members and alumni of the Bnei David Institutions have been killed in action since Oct. 7, 2023.

“Ninety percent of Bnei David alumni serve in combat units – and approximately 40 to 50% of our alumni are officers,” explains Lior Shtul, CEO of the Bnei David Institutions. “We now have 6,000 alumni and 3,000 commanding officers” from Bnei David’s pre-army program, yeshiva, and post-army programs. Many become career officers.

“This year, there has been a sudden spike in enrollment,” Shtul says. 

“We got 600 new students this year. Before that, it had been around 300 to 400 annually; and in the beginning, it was about 70.”

Developed in 1988 in response to the low number of National Religious soldiers in IDF leadership positions. Bnei David in Eli, in the Binyamin region, is now in its 37th year, and its wartime popularity is growing. 

MA’ALEH EPHRAIM students visit an Air Force base. (credit: Courtesy Bnei David)

The DNA of the place

Rabbi Neriya Bolak, a rabbi who teaches in the mechina, pops in to Shtul’s office. He tells the Magazine how “In the first days after Oct. 7, some 2,000 to 3,000 combat soldiers in the reserves were called up [from Bnei David], many of them my age, some older, some younger – suddenly, they were all soldiers. 

“We didn’t plan for it, but we had the ability to make it happen. All that time, we had been preparing for all-out war – it’s in the DNA of this place; but we didn’t think it would happen. Not an all-out war!”

Shtul explains Bnei David’s philosophy, “shittat Elkana [Elkanah’s approach]”. Elkanah, he clarifies, lived at the end of the period of the Judges in the Land of Israel [early 14th century before common era to 1050 BCE]. Elkanah used to make pilgrimages to Jerusalem; it was a dangerous time, and many were afraid to travel. Elkanah persisted, and eventually, people began to follow his example and go up to Jerusalem for the festivals. 

Thus, Shtul sums up what could be called Bnei David’s motto: “Be a good person and set a good example. That,” he says, is “shittat Elkana.” 

Bolak recounts how he often runs into Bnei David alumni, most recently on a tour of Gaza. Shtul adds that he has also encountered alumni overseas. On a trip to Panama, he met the Israeli consul there: “a man full of light,” he says, who turned out to be a graduate of Bnei David. In Sao Paulo, too upon meeting a consul employee, Shtul noticed that the man had “an air of service about him.” He was a Bnei David alumnus.

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Haredim and the IDF

Shtul agrees that “haredim need to become part of the IDF but also that “It’s a process.”

“Thirty-five years ago,” he says, “Fifty to 80% of the dati’im [observant Jews] who went to the IDF came out non-observant,” he says. 

That must be what the haredim [ultra-Orthodox Jews] fear most about being drafted. 

In the meantime, as every year, Bnei David students will be spending this Shabbat, when the Torah portion of Hayei Sarah is read, in the central Israel haredi stronghold of Bnei Brak – “to see what they can learn from them,” Shtul says, and to get to know them, “not through the prism of the media” but “by sitting together at a table.” 

Almost 200 young men will be subsidized for Shabbat meals at the homes of some 70 to 80 host families – and for a chance to understand how haredi “heads” work.

“If you want to build leaders, they need to have a wider perspective,” Shtul says. “If you go to Ponevizh Yeshiva in Bnei Brak at midnight on Friday night, people are sitting and learning Torah. They see that as their shlichut [mission]. Maybe we have something to learn from the ultra-Orthodox.”

Shtul says that at the same time, over Shabbat in Bnei Brak, the subject of enlistment will come up. “Just as it is important for us to incorporate the haredim into the army, the Torah is important to all of us,” Shtul says. “Let us sign them up according to what works for them.” 

Now, when there is so much debate about getting the ultra-Orthodox draft right, perhaps the example of the Bnei David mechina students will influence some of the haredim over this Shabbat.

When, in 1988, IDF Central Command head Maj-Gen. Amram Mitzna set in motion the development of a program to encourage more Religious Zionist young men to become IDF officers, he approached Rabbi Eli Sadan and Rabbi Yigal Levinstein, asking them to develop a preparatory program for serving in the IDF. Until the advent of religious pre-army academies – of which Bnei David was the first – there was hesder (a five-year National Religious program combining military service and Torah study), but it did not lead to officers’ training. In 2016, Rabbi Sadan was awarded the Israel Prize for the pre-army program project.

Two years at the mechina in Eli are dedicated to Torah learning, personality building, and physical activity. Later, unlike with hesder, where “everyone goes into the IDF together,” says Shtul, “here, we each go alone,” each taking his own route. “We live within the nation of Israel and lead by the personal example of our values.”

Last week, he was with a Bnei David graduate – a deputy drone squadron commander whose comrades in arms are all secular. There is always a minyan (prayer quorum) on base, though; and two other observant families.

“If you send 1,000 people across the country who behave like mensches [good people], and people see their maturity and their faith” he says, “it will have an impact; it will influence.” 

Shtul points to the fuss around Bnei David graduate Ofer Winter, now a brigadier general, who write a letter to his soldiers in which he said “Shema Israel” before going in to fight in Operation Protective Edge in 2014. “And now, everyone says it now everyone does it, and no one questions it,” Shtul, says.

Living a life of service

 Shtul calls Bnei David “a factory for the spirit of service” that leads graduates into careers in the IDF, education, the Mossad, or diplomacy; the decision to live in the North or South of the country; and more.

It’s not about the “I,” he says, it’s about the “we.” “We lost 27 alumni before the start of 2024; this year, we lost 26. What is special is not their deaths – it’s the lives they led,” he says. “I call it ‘living a life of service.’ Not to die – no one is taught to die. To live for the sake of others; to care for all of the Jewish people, to be concerned about the State of Israel, to give to the state,” he says.

“They live lives of idealism, and in the mechina,” in addition to Talmud and Gemara, “they study the Jewish philosophers – Rambam, the Kuzari, Rav Kook, Rav Aviner, and so on.”

To be Bnei David, Shtul explains, is to learn “why.” “The ‘how’ of laying tefillin and so on. They do it every day – but why? If I don’t know why, if I don’t understand why, then I will abandon the practice of it.”

By November 2024, a total of 15 of the 26 Bnei David alumni had fallen serving their country and the Jewish people. Suddenly, Shtul says, people who had never heard of Bnei David began showing an interest, spurred by a Channel 14 documentary.

“People came to look around here [in Eli] and began to get interested. We had five new secular students at the yeshiva this year.”

Dekel Suisa z”l

One of the Bnei David’s fallen is Dekel Suisa, killed defending Kibbutz Be’eri. “He killed dozens of terrorists. Scores of soldiers were saved because of him. [His father served as a high-ranking officer.] Three weeks before he died, Dekel advertised on the moshav WhatsApp group that he would be happy to blow the shofar at the home of whoever wanted or needed it. His father told me that he went to 40 homes. That’s 30 tekiot each,” Shtul recalls. 

Dekel spent ages 14 to 18 at a ”hardcore secular school” in Haifa. At 18, in Atlanta, Georgia, he met a Bnei David graduate. Though Dekel was not observant, they decided to become Torah study partners. At 19, Dekel returned to Israel and said he wanted to join Bnei David.

“All of Israel is represented at Bnei David,” Shtul says. “Our graduates also go on to work in the public sector and in government. It’s about all of Am Israel and about basic values.” 

Overview of Bnei David options

• Ma’aleh Ephraim, another branch of the pre-army program in the town of the same name, has been up and running for 10 years and receives approximately 300 annual applications (six aspiring students for each available place). The students learn to live a life of service to the community, of self-improvement, and of basic values. At this point in the war, all the original rabbis have enlisted, and the program is working with substitute rabbis.
• Midreshet Danielle – The Danielle Sonnenfeld Foundation, also established 10 years ago, prepares Religious Zionist girls for National Service.
• Oz Ve’emuna yeshiva in Neveh Sha’anan, Tel Aviv, is also a branch of Bnei David, a legacy from Rabbi Achiad Etinger (killed by a Palestinian terrorist in 2019), at his widow’s request. In addition to learning, the yeshiva assists the entire neighborhood; students provide first aid to the injured and deliver food to those who are afraid to leave their homes. They also donate food to the homeless.
• Derech Avot in Bnei Re’em focuses on mainstreaming Ethiopian youth at risk into the IDF. Previously, very few of them had been drafted into the army. Now, Derech Avot has 90 graduates serving in the IDF.
• Eli Yeshiva has 300 single students and 150 married students.
• Post-army program Chai Roi named for Maj. Roi Klein, an alumnus of Bnei David who, during the Second Lebanon War, in 2006, who saved his comrades by jumping on a grenade while shouting “Shema Yisrael!”

 “After serving in the army, what is the next step?” Shtul asks, and then he answers: “Two, three, four, or five years after someone joins the army, he needs to recharge and figure it out, which could entail a four-year degree as a doorway to teaching, management, and working in the public sector.” Weekly, the Chai Roi program provides 20 hours of Torah study, encompassing Talmud, spirituality, idealism, and cooperation, and seven hours are spent at university, studying for a degree. It is also known as “the study hall for IDF graduates.” 

Reminding ourselves: Rabbi Brechya

Elad Brechya, a rabbi at Bnei David, drops by the mechina on his way home after greeting his newborn baby at the hospital upon returning from Gaza. 

He tells the Magazine about his service as the rabbi of a mechina during wartime. “It’s been a complicated year at the mechina.” He has been offered various positions as an officer but has chosen to stay at the pre-army academy in Eli. “I told them I am a ‘civilian officer.’ There are various ways to give to the State of Israel.” Every two years, he changes “battalions” within Bnei David, he says. He is responsible for his 25 to 27 “soldiers” 24 hours a day.

On Oct. 7, 2023, at 8 a.m., he was at the mechina with everyone. His phone began to ring and ring. He didn’t understand what was going on. It was out of the ordinary for a Shabbat, so he went to see who was calling; it was a student. “I answered because I thought it must be urgent. Immediately, we understood that this was something serious in the South. I got on the road right away.” 

He says that, as a rabbi at Bnei David, when he is out in the field his attention is divided between concentrating on the activity in which he is participating and concern for his students. 

He feels a sense of pride in having taken part in the rounding up and arresting of Palestinian prisoners on the first night of Hanukkah, last year. “You can barely see me in the photo, but my friends say they recognize me!”

BRECHYA NOTES that we are sitting in the very room where he sat with Dekel Suisa 14 months earlier. “Sadly, I lost two students. I was very close to both of them. It was very hard. You spend so much time with your students,” he says. He then pulls out a photo of him and Dekel. “We took it there, in that corner.”

Dekel called him a couple of weeks before his death, to discuss how to keep up the ruach [spirit] despite everything that was going on.

“Sometimes in life, you forget,” Brechya says, “because of the ‘volume.’ Sometimes it’s about returning to the simplest things that you learned here, things you know, sometimes you have to remind yourself. Since then, I have returned with another team to Gaza – a zehut atzuma [immense honor].

“Everything we discuss here, everything we plan here, it’s not only talk; in the end, we also do. When my wife was pregnant with this baby,” he says, pointing to the hospital wristband he was wearing, having come straight from the maternity ward: “I was in Gaza in July and August.” 

“This is the moment to remind ourselves that our wives are no less heroic.”

EARLIER, IN his office, CEO Lior Shtul explained to the Magazine that a small community of young families had sprung up around the yeshiva in Eli. “It is very important to support them; they pay a very high price – with their husbands on the front line.”

He plans pizza nights, surprises, outings, and even concerts for the families. Bnei David CFO Yair Shimel teased, “Lior couldn’t fight right now, so he said: ‘Let me look after the civilians!’”

Shtul describes “Abba lo babayit” (Father is not at home) as a serious situation, dealing with which is as heroic as – if not more so than – for the soldiers at the front,” he says. “Families – they pay a very high price. Soldiers who were on regular reserves before are now doing over 100 days a month. The wives pay; the widows pay.

“Caring for the families is just as important as caring for our fighters,” Shtul concludes. 

Since Oct. 7: Bnei David CFO juggles reserves

‘He’s Superman, never off duty.” Lior Shtul introduces Yair Shimel, CFO and deputy director of the Bnei David Institutions and commander of the Reserve Artillery Battalion, as an ish miluim – reserves man. 

Shimel, who has spent 300 out of the last 400 days on army duty, has managed to staple together a system of remotely running the mechina with Shtul from his position in the IDF. It was unexpected, they say, but it works because “you are not alone,” says Shimel, and “we know each other. And there’s the cellphone!” 

About Oct. 7, he recalls: “At 8 a.m. I was already in the car. The entire institution was called up. There were no students, but the teachers had to teach.” At the same time, eight rabbis were called up from the Ma’aleh Ephraim branch of the mechina. Midreshet Danielle, for girls, was also affected.

There had been 300 mechina students, 300 yeshiva students, and 100 married students in Eli. “My experience had been 120 staff, 150 paychecks; 70 to 100 days on duty per year. (Now another 200 days have been added.) Suddenly, we were without students and without rabbis. We were stuck without teachers. We took teachers from this to that and from that to this. Four mosdot (institutions) came to learn.”

The rabbi is replaced, not an easy feat; then, the other rabbi returns; which one to follow? Keep the other one on staff too, as he will be needed again. The war has affected everything.

Shimel says about a teacher, “He got back today; yesterday he was a unit commander on the border with Lebanon.”

On another note, Shimel says that he encounters dozens of Bnei David graduates and alumni wherever he goes. “And I remember names and faces; it’s true in Gaza; it’s true everywhere; from soldier to commander. i can even sit down with the commander for a meal!” he laughs, referring to Brig.-Gen. Yehuda Wach, another Bnei David graduate.  

18-year-old spiritual seekers prepare to serve their people and their land

The Magazine meets five young men who are in their first or second years at the Bnei David pre-army program in Eli. Some have lost brothers in this war.

Neriya Stern, from Oranit, studied at Elkana yeshiva high school for six years and came to Bnei David “because of the quality of people and to give to Am Yisrael [the nation of Israel] in my service to the army. This is my place. I have never seen such a large concentration of people who want to learn Torah and to do good.” He started two months ago and already sees a “big difference” in himself. “The learning here is not just learning. What is special here is that the learning goes together with actions. I have changed, I see the world differently. I see my people differently. Torah you can learn in other places, but not how to live the Torah, to feel eternity, to feel love. It’s all about giving.”

Nachshon Toaff is from Moreshet. “My brother Daniel fell two months ago in Gaza.” Both his older brothers are Bnei David alumni. Before Daniel Toaff went into Gaza for the first time, Nachshon says, he wrote a letter to his soldiers and to the family. It is up on the Internet, he says proudly (https://bitly.cx/LgHWUj). Nachshon quotes from his brother Daniel’s letter: “Always hold your heads high and chests out.” It is the only thing that keeps him going, he says.

Ilai David Amar comes from a traditional family in Tel Aviv that has become more observant over time. His father is now fully observant. Ilai began to keep Shabbat in fourth grade, and after experiencing both religious and secular schools, he continued to see a life of Torah as the “truth” and has stuck to it ever since. “I knew after 12th grade that I would not go out in the street without a kippah or tzitzit,” he says. “I heard from a friend about the mechina; then I heard more.” He got into Bnei David at the very last moment. “I came here, and I saw amazing people, out of the ordinary. 

“I think we all came to ask questions, to find meaning, to see how we want our lives to look, maybe also to understand more things. I believe that everyone wants to go into the army with a very strong basis. Here, instead of bringing in fighting and becoming influenced by inappropriate behavior that exists in certain environments where we live and interact, there are so many people who only want to help. This is what is so special here. It gives you a new appreciation for the nation of Israel, the people of Israel; you need to see [the brotherhood] what happens on the field. It is not what the media has you believe. This is what we are fighting for.”

His goal is also to “improve and strengthen” his character traits. He says he has found the people at Bnei David to be “extraordinary.” Also, “I notice that people don’t look for trouble here, they look to solve problems fairly and correctly.”

Dan Rafael Ohana is in his first year. “I came from yeshiva tichonit in Haifa. The learning wasn’t enough for me. Here, they help you to advance. I lost my brother, Eliyahu Meor, 11 months ago yesterday. He left behind two children and a widow. They lived in Afula. He learned at a place similar to Bnei David. He was the driver of a tank in Gaza that exploded in action.”

About dealing with the loss of his brother, Dan says, “Everyone is different in such a case, but it’s the first thing you remember in the morning. Daily, it’s the first thing you think of. You open a book; it’s uppermost in your mind. Am I going to let it interfere with my studying? On the other hand, he is my brother, and I also know that he wanted me to become better, so I know I am doing what he would have wanted for me and what I also want for myself – to improve,” he says.

“All the friends here, all 200 of us just in our first year, We all want to serve the state as best we can, and sometimes in the army, everything that is going on in war is so intense, you can forget who you are – and then you can recall the closeness with your friends, the things you studied, the rabbis that you have in common, and this provides strength during the war and follows you throughout your service and afterward.

“I agree with what Neriya said. The learning here is not just learning. We learn books and Torah, which you learn in many places, but here, the learning is connected to doing. I have changed, I see the people in a different way. We have the desire to live a life of Torah; giving is the point.

Eitan Moreno, from Aderet, is in his second year and is about to enlist. He is the brother of Itai Moreno, who fell over a year ago, and he says that he came to Bnei David because previous generations in his family had attended. “It is a place of value, of faith, where you learn.”

About his experience at Bnei David until now: “I have learned friendship, caring about the environment, helping others, others helping you, and understanding what the nation of Israel is. We don’t need to change each other, I have heard stories in the army about people interacting with those from different political backgrounds. In the end, they fight together; they all care about their families; they all want to return in peace, defend the honor of our country, and so many things that are shared. The media does not show us what is really going on.”

Eitan lost his brother on October 11, at the start of the war, in the Zikim battle. “Itai was in an elite unit,” Eitan says, adding that the only way to deal with his brother’s death is “not to let the thought of ‘It’s not worth it’ take hold in your mind. Rather, flow with it, hand in hand. Climb the ladders, and keep your head above water, or else you couldn’t exist; you couldn’t leave your room. It is really hard. Your brother isn’t coming back.

“I know that he knew what he was doing. He knew what it meant. He chose to go to fight, and he knew he would be on the front lines. He knew what he wanted, and he undertook it with a full heart. We grew up with those values at home. He didn’t just die. His weapon was in his hand – he defended the kibbutz; he saved his friends. I am proud of him.”