Elul’s Shnat Sherut 50 Plus volunteers, individuals and couples, begin their year by leaving their homes and committing to live and work in a new community. This move brings both opportunity and challenge. Volunteers must adjust to unfamiliar surroundings, navigate the transition from home life to communal living, integrate into new professional teams, and meet complex community needs.
From the outset, each volunteer joins a group of 15 to 20 peers, representing a rich diversity of identities, beliefs, cultural backgrounds, and professional experience. This group quickly becomes a vital foundation of support and encouragement. It offers new friendships, fresh perspectives, and a social network that helps each volunteer meet the demands of the year with resilience and enthusiasm.
Building Connection and Trust
A core element of the programme is the structured group process. Every Sunday, after a weekend at home, the group gathers for a session led by a professional facilitator. These meetings foster a spirit of openness, trust, and mutual respect. Volunteers share their personal and professional experiences and challenges, reflect on the meaning of their work, and engage with questions of identity, society, and belonging.
Central to this process is the incorporation of content and methodology developed by Elul, an organisation with 35 years of experience in promoting dialogue and learning based on Jewish and Zionist sources. Through this approach, volunteers explore diverse viewpoints, engage with differing perspectives, and learn to see difference not as a threat but as a source of enrichment and growth.
Over time, the group develops a shared language and culture of attentiveness, support, and collaboration, transforming a collection of individuals into a cohesive and empowered collective.
A Platform for Community Action
The group experience is not only about personal growth. It also provides a dynamic platform for community action.
During the week, volunteers contribute professionally in areas such as education, therapy, social welfare, and community development. In addition, they come together as a group to initiate projects that respond to the needs of the communities where they live and serve. These initiatives span a wide range of areas, from enrichment programs for adults and youth to cultural and environmental projects and special community events.
By working together, volunteers multiply their impact, creating a visible and positive presence within the community and forging deeper ties with local residents.
Friendship, Joy, and Lifelong Connection
The group is also a source of joy, renewal, and friendship. Throughout the year, volunteers share meals, meet for coffee or a drink, attend performances and films, explore new places, and embark on adventures together.
These shared experiences create a deep sense of belonging that lasts well beyond the year of service. Many of the friendships forged through Shnat Sherut 50 Plus become lifelong connections, sustaining and enriching the lives of volunteers long after the programme ends.
Meet Bracha Toval, One of the Group Facilitators
And so, I came here, to Elul’s Shnat Sherut 50 Plus, because of that same yearning that has accompanied me for as long as I can remember – from my childhood to this day as a grandmother.
Professionally, I am a social worker with many years of experience, an art therapist, and a group facilitator. I am also involved in creativity and learning and am active in the community where I live. Over the years, I have worked primarily with families living in poverty and exclusion, developing solidarity, fostering faith in change, and instilling hope.
On Simchat Torah, just as the new year began with its dreams and prayers, the difficult days arrived, shaking us all to our core and leaving us breathless. Once again, I encountered that familiar yearning.
Then, as if by no coincidence, I came across a small picture in the back of the newspaper with intriguing news about a new project being launched. And the rest is history.
In my role as a facilitator, I strive to help the group progress step by step, evolving into a cohesive community of volunteers committed to achieving the goals of this year. This is accomplished through partnership and reciprocity among the group members, both with each other and with the local community.
I must say, with great excitement, that I encounter energetic people with admirable initiatives – full of energy, goodwill, life experience, joy for life, and a positive perspective on the new environment they have arrived in. They are eager to get to know it and to begin feeling at home.
Now, we are all looking forward. And in the spirit of the Book of Exodus, which we will begin reading this week, it is worth remembering that it is not just a history book. It describes processes of liberation from bondage, of redemption, and of the journey to freedom – processes we all must go through even today, both as individuals and as a people. Each person has their own bondage, their own “Egypt,” their own journey to freedom.
On this, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks offers a message for us as well:
“The future is the domain of human freedom, for I cannot change yesterday, but I can change tomorrow through my actions today. Judaism is a future-oriented faith, and Israel is a future-oriented state, an oasis of freedom amid the oppressive wilderness of the Middle East. Faith is a revolutionary force. God calls us, as He once called Moses, and asks us to believe in the future and then, with His help, to build that future.”
We will do this, and we will succeed!
