Arutz Sheva-Israel National News spoke with Yehudah Honickman, founder of the new website IsraelForPesach.com, about a simple but powerful initiative born out of urgent requests from families in America whose children found themselves in Israel for Passover without a place to go.
Honickman explained how the project started: “I was getting a whole bunch of messages from people in America, friends, family, friends of family, that their children were ‘stuck’… children who were going to be in Israel or family that was going to be in Israel unexpectedly this year for Pesach and they didn't know where to go. I said, ‘To be honest I don’t have an easy solution for you,’ but then I had this idea to quickly put together a website, IsraelforPesach.com, that is basically a really really simple tool that allows people to say ‘I’m interested in hosting’, people to say they need a meal and make a connection between the two of them."
Within hours of going live, the site took off. “Immediately people like yourselves reached out and they wanted to help put the word out there. People started signing up on both sides, from all the way up north to all the way down south… people signed up to host and people signed up and started finding meals," he told Arutz Sheva-Israel National News.
Dozens of families have already reached out with thanks. “So far dozens of people have reached out to me and said, ‘Yehudah, I just wanted to say thank you, we found the meal for Pesach, we found the meal for [the Seventh Day of Pesach]. Thank you so much for this initiative,’" Honickman recounted.
One particularly heartwarming story involved a mother and daughter unknowingly using the site in opposite roles. The daughter, a student who had to stay in school for the second day of Passover, signed up to be hosted near her campus. Meanwhile, her mother signed up to host guests for the first day. Both found perfect matches in different parts of the country. “Both the mother and the child, in their respective needs, their needs were met," Honickman said. “It’s working really, really, really well."
He stressed that the project has no formal organization behind it. When yeshivas and seminaries called asking which group was running it, he gave a clear answer: “There’s no organization behind this. Am Yisrael is behind this. This is the resource that was put together for one part of Am Yisrael who was in a need to connect with another part of Am Yisrael who has the solution… This is Am Yisrael in the purest, realest way connecting one to the other, supporting one another."
Turning to the broader picture of Jewish unity during wartime, Honickman addressed the bond between Jews in Israel and those in the Diaspora. He acknowledged the difficulty of conveying Israel’s reality from afar: “It’s very difficult, and I don’t think that anyone in Israel could actually explain to anyone in America and anyone in the Diaspora what we are feeling and what we are going through… you can’t understand it until you live it."
After noting the constant pressures Israel has faced - from COVID lockdowns to protests to the October 7 war and Iranian attacks - he delivered a direct message: “We appreciate the support that our brothers and sisters in America from all over the world are giving us but, honestly, from my perspective, for me to all of them - the best support you can give us is come home. We need more people here, we need more people in Eretz Israel, we need more people living in the land that God promised us and that to me is the most important message that I can send back to people around the world."