Sometimes words are not enough. Sometimes you have to put yourself out there. On Thursday, April 7, 2011, 300 students on Hadassah’s Young Judaea Year Course stood in solidarity for Gilad Shalit in Zion Square (Kikar Zion) on Ben Yehuda in Jerusalem.
The students, young Jews from different countries, spend ten months in Israel studying and volunteering through Young Judaea. For the past month they have participated in a series of lectures and activities organized in recognition of Gilad Shalit’s plight, but Thursday’s action was initiated by the students themselves. At 12:00 the students, holding placards in support of Shalit, received a simultaneous sms, yelled “Hazilu” (Hebrew: save/help) and froze for five minutes. These young people, close in age to Gilad Shalit who is now in his fifth year of captivity, evoke the intolerable pain of a young person separated from family, friends and home, a young person who should be out discovering the world and his place in it and is, instead, “frozen,” caught in the midst of this intolerable political situation.
Benji Lovitt interviewed Ayal Pierce from New Jersey, U.S. and Gilad Amvaleg from Glasgow, Scotland, two of 250 Young Judaean/FZY Year Course participants, about their involvement in the solidarity freeze for Gilat Shalit in Jerusalem:
