Originally appeared at jns.org on July 17, 2026.
At a Tel Aviv gathering, volunteers hear the story of an Ethiopian immigrant’s journey to Israel as the organization seeks to strengthen its growing community beyond IDF bases.
The Israel Defense Forces needs Sar-El volunteers more urgently now than at any point since the Hamas massacre on Oct. 7, 2023, according to the organization’s CEO, who says logistical support from civilians allows soldiers to focus on combat and other critical missions.
“The IDF needs us more than ever,” Keren Dahan, CEO of Sar-El, told JNS. “The IDF needs people even more than after Oct. 7.”
Dahan said volunteers perform a wide range of essential noncombat tasks on six army bases across Israel, helping prepare equipment returning from Gaza and Lebanon for future use, maintaining medical supplies and assembling military rations for troops in the field.
“Materials are coming back from Gaza and the North,” she said. “They come back to the warehouse and need to be made ready for the next time.”
Sar-El volunteers prepare some 35,000 military meals each day for IDF soldiers.
Although between 60 and 100 volunteers arrive each week for assignments lasting from one to several weeks, Dahan said demand far exceeds supply.
“It is not enough,” she said, attributing the decline in volunteer numbers largely to reduced international air service and concerns among prospective participants that they could become stranded in Israel.
Building a global community
Founded in 1983 during the First Lebanon War, Sar-El was created to help fill manpower shortages after large numbers of reservists were called up, leaving farms in the Golan Heights without sufficient workers. Over the past four decades, it has evolved into one of Israel’s largest volunteer organizations supporting the military.
Since its founding, nearly 292,000 volunteers between the ages of 17 and 80 from some 60 countries have performed essential logistical work on IDF bases.
More than 125,000 participants—about 43% of the total—have returned five or more times.
Volunteers wear IDF uniforms, participate in the daily flag-raising ceremony and sing Hatikvah each morning before beginning work.
In addition to expanding its volunteer base, Sar-El is working to strengthen connections among participants after they leave the military bases.
“People want to be connected on and off base,” Dahan said. “We are working to build a community.”
To that end, the organization recently launched Academy by Sar-El, an educational lecture series designed to give volunteers greater insight into Israeli society and current events while strengthening their ties to one another.
“We want to give people knowledge about what is happening in Israel,” Dahan said.
Beyond volunteer service, Sar-El now offers educational tours, Hebrew immersion weeks at Kibbutz Mashabei Sadeh, Krav Maga training in partnership with the Wingate Institute, an intensive first-aid program with Magen David Adom and volunteer missions with KKL-JNF to help rehabilitate forests damaged by recent fires.
A remarkable journey
About 50 Sar-El volunteers gathered in the lobby of Tel Aviv’s Maxim Hotel on Thursday evening to hear Moshe Yeshayahu recount his family’s remarkable journey from Ethiopia to Israel.
Yeshayahu, who spent his childhood as a shepherd in Ethiopia, described trekking with his family through Sudan before being rescued in a covert Mossad operation that ultimately brought them to Israel.
The audience—made up of volunteers from the United States, France, Hungary, Australia and several other countries—had either recently completed a Sar-El assignment or were preparing to begin one.
They peppered Yeshayahu with questions about his family’s journey, his adjustment to life in Israel, his career in education and the changing attitudes of younger Ethiopian Israelis toward their parents’ generation.
Audience members were particularly moved by Yeshayahu’s account of the Mossad’s covert efforts to rescue Ethiopian Jews through Sudan during the early 1980s.
One elderly attendee remarked that he had never imagined meeting someone who had passed through the Red Sea Diving Resort—the fake luxury diving village established by Mossad operatives on Sudan’s Red Sea coast to help smuggle thousands of Ethiopian Jews to Israel.
The lecture was the second of three Academy by Sar-El events scheduled this summer. The series concludes on Aug. 6 with a presentation by former Mossad operative Avner Avraham titled “Spies from the Movies: James Bond and the Reality of Intelligence War.”
The loudest applause of the evening came when Yeshayahu showed a photograph of himself proudly serving in the IDF after completing his master’s degree.
The audience applauded again when he shared that his 18-year-old son will soon begin his own military service.
For many in the room—people who had traveled from around the world specifically to support the IDF—the moment captured the spirit of Sar-El: volunteers and Israelis, each serving the country in their own way, united by a shared commitment to Israel.