Gilad Shalit and Our Impact

Posted in Press, Section 1, Section 2, Section 3 on 13. Apr, 2011

As you read a few days ago, Young Judaea and FZY held a “freeze-out” last Friday, completely freezing in place on Ben-Yehudah Street to remind people that Gilad Shalit is not alone and that is all of our collective responsibility not to let him leave our consciousness.  While it would be wrong to say the intention behind this project was to gain PR, we would be remiss in not being proud of the amount of attention the chanichims’ grass-root effort has attracted.  Not for Year Course, but for Gilad Shalit.

Here is an excerpt from an editorial written in the Jerusalem Post by Gil Troy:

In that spirit, last Thursday 250 Young Judaeans and Federation of Zionist Youth activists quite literally stopped everything to broadcast their message to Gilad: you are not alone. On the 1747th day of his round-the-clock nightmare, these participants on Young Judaea’s Year Course gathered in downtown Jerusalem. Suddenly, at noon, they all shouted “HaTzilu” – Help! – and froze for five minutes, one minute for each year Schalit’s life has been frozen in hell. They will soon post the “Freeze-Out” video on the Internet – to fight what Michele Freed from Michigan called the “compassion fatigue” people abroad seem to be experiencing, as the same story has dragged on for five years….

….When I congratulated Year Course’s director Adam Jenshil on this initiative – I was privileged to address the group before the “Freeze Out” – Jenshil insisted, “It was all the participants’ doing.” He smiled, “this gives me hope!”

The event also made the New Jersey Jewish Standard, a paper which surely lots of Jewish readers whose attention can be raised, in addition to this popular website about Israeli culture.  While we are certainly hoping for more, we recognize that if even one person learns about Gilad from our efforts, it will have made a difference.

See here for pictures of last Thursday’s event.

Freeze for Gilad Shalit