Boaz Israeli is a community psychologist and co-founder of the Negev Teaching Kitchen Network and the Negev FoodLab. This was written before the ceasefire. Here are his reflections:
Seven in the morning in Tel Aviv, and we are loading a car with baskets of vegetables, spices, and handwritten recipes. There is something almost ordinary about the scene — except for where we are headed.
We are driving south to Kibbutz Alumim, just a few miles from the Gaza border, to spend the morning cooking with elderly residents.
These are people who have lived under rocket fire for decades. People who were evacuated after Oct. 7. People for whom the phrase “security situation” is not an abstraction, but a rhythm of life.
We thought we were the ones coming to give something.
We were wrong.
Halfway down, my phone rings. It is Hadar, who leads social services in the Sdot Negev region. She is calling to check on us after hearing about a strike in Tel Aviv that morning — making sure we are safe — while, at the same time, coordinating food distribution for others.
There is no announcement. No recognition. Just a steady presence.
It is easy to speak about resilience in broad terms. Here, it is something quieter. More consistent. It looks like people showing up for one another, again and again, without pause.
A few years ago, we visited Dr. Jonathan Deutsch at the Drexel University Food Lab. Watching people cook side by side — students, neighbors, professionals — it was clear that something more was happening than a class.
It was connection. It was shared purpose. It was community, built in real time.
We left with a question: what would this look like in the Negev?
Not in theory, but in communities that have lived in the shadow of Gaza for a generation. For older adults who have heard every version of a resilience workshop, and who simply want to sit together and cook.
That question became the Negev FoodLab — a network of pop-up teaching kitchens that come to people where they are.
By the time we arrive in Alumim, the room begins to fill.
There is no formal start. No clear boundary between instruction and conversation. Hands move instinctively — rolling, chopping, stirring. A discussion about turmeric turns into a memory of a kitchen in Morocco. Someone laughs as a pot boils over.
And then there is Yoske.
He moves slowly, deliberately, the way someone does after many years of learning what matters and what does not. At one point, he pulls out his phone and sends me a video — a bird feeding her chicks, born during the hardest months of the war.
“Thought you could use some inspiration,” he writes.
There is something disarming in that moment. A man who has spent years living next to a bomb shelter is thinking about how to lift someone else’s spirits.
It shifts your understanding of what strength looks like.
Not something loud or performative. Something sustained. Chosen.
This work — these kitchens, these gatherings — is part of a broader effort to support communities still living with the ongoing impact of Oct. 7. It is made possible, in part, through partnerships that span continents, including support from the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia.
There is a quiet but meaningful connection there.
An idea that took shape in a kitchen in Philadelphia found its way to southern Israel and adapted to a very different reality. What began as inspiration became something rooted — something that now belongs to the communities it serves.
Later that night, back in Tel Aviv, the sirens sound again.
We move into a shelter, waiting together in the now-familiar stillness that follows.
And I find myself thinking about the question that comes up each year ahead of Israel’s Independence Day: who is chosen to light the ceremonial torches?
There are always worthy honorees. There should be.
But there is another group — less visible — whose work rarely reaches a stage.
The ones who keep small, steady fires burning.
Hadar.
Yoske.
Social workers and neighbors whose days are filled with quiet acts of care, without expectation of recognition.
What they are building is not temporary relief. It is something more enduring.
A weekly cooking session may seem simple. But it creates continuity. It creates connection. It creates a reason to gather again next week, even when circumstances have not changed.
It does not remove people from their reality. It helps them remain within it — together.
This is not only a response to crisis.
It is infrastructure for community.
And infrastructure is what holds when everything else feels uncertain.
The ceremonial torches lit each year are visible, powerful symbols.
But there are other flames — smaller, quieter — that burn just as steadily, carried by people who will never stand on a stage.
Those are the ones that sustain us.
Those are the ones we must protect.
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