c. 2006 Religion News Service

BEACHWOOD, Ohio _ Yoni Geller told his parents in January of his decision. Over time, they came to accept it. But Israel was at peace.

The plane carrying their 19-year-old son toward his goal was in flight July 13 when Eddie Geller and Esti Gumpertz watched the first explosions of war flash across the television in their home here.

Their son called two days later from Haifa, a city in panic. Air-raid sirens had shut down the recruiting office before he could sign up, he said. That’s when his mom pitched her plea.

Come home, Gumpertz said. Don’t do it. This is a war.

Her voice begins to break as she recalls the response of her oldest son.

“No, I’ll be fine, Mommy,” she heard. “If I don’t do it now, I’ll always regret it.”

Yoni (pronounced YO-nee) Geller caught a ride to Jerusalem, found an open recruiting station and enlisted in the Israeli army. He started basic training Aug. 1.

In Israel, he is known in Hebrew as “chayal boded,” a “lone soldier,” one without immediate family nearby. But he’ll have hometown comrades.

As Jews around the world cautiously watch as a fragile cease-fire sets in between Israel and Hezbollah, Yoni Geller and his family are not the only ones making extraordinary sacrifices.

Geller followed a boyhood friend, David Stark, into the Israeli Defense Forces, or IDF. They will serve with David Engelhart, 20, a high school classmate whose younger brother, 18-year-old Rafi, plans to enlist next year.

With its strong ties to Israel, the Jewish community in and around Cleveland has always sent a handful of young men and women each year into Israel’s armed forces. But most enlisted when the Jewish state was at peace _ or at least not in the throes of war.

The latest volunteers, young men such as Geller, seem to be setting an unprecedented example.

“They could have backed out. And they didn’t,” said Zev Kessler, an administrator at Fuchs Mizrachi School, which counts Geller, Stark and Engelhart as graduates. “It makes you incredibly proud as Jews.”

The 425-student Jewish day school counts 14 graduates serving in Israel as active-duty or reserve soldiers. They hold a place of honor at a school that supports the ideals of Zionism, the global Jewish movement to reclaim the biblical homeland of Israel.

These days, the volunteers are also heartening an anxious Jewish community, which sees the recent conflict as the latest front in Israel’s ongoing fight for survival, and unnerving parents who raised them to do just such a thing.

Bicycles crowd the garage attached to the Engelhart home, nearly across the street from the Gellers’. The family of seven Orthodox Jews prays together and bikes together, religiously. But these days, one is missing from the family routine.

David Engelhart, the eldest, is completing basic training in Israel’s Negev desert. He enlisted in March and did not waver from his commitment with the outbreak of war.

When Miriam Engelhart’s firstborn announced a year ago that he intended to enlist, she hugged him, proud and scared. Her mother is a Holocaust survivor. She and her husband, Gerry, raised their five children to believe the Jewish state is their homeland, too.

But she knows that Hezbollah, a Shiite Muslim militia sworn to Israel’s destruction, is armed with the best weapons Iran and Syria can provide. “I’m very nervous now. I am,” she said, and she sighed.

Her boy is a lone soldier. “That’s what really worries me,” she said. “I’m not there to take care of him.”

Jewish civic leaders say enlisting in the IDF has grown more popular then ever among Jewish teens, partly because of Israeli programs designed to encourage “overseas volunteers.”

Some enlist simply by moving to Israel, where military service is compulsory for both men and women.

But Engelhart’s path is increasingly common. He enlisted through a program designed for non-Israeli Orthodox Jews that begins with a year of religious study in a yeshiva. The classmates stay together through military duty, ensuring some kinship.

Yoni Geller started kindergarten with David Stark and the boys were co-captains of their school’s undefeated soccer team their senior years. Now they sleep in tents across from each other in the Negev desert.

Eddie Geller, Yoni’s father, marvels at the symmetry. But like his wife, he often wishes his son were anywhere else.

“There’s a certain guilt when someone else does something we feel we should be doing ourselves,” he said.

Gumpertz, a soft-spoken dermatologist, understands why her son went.

His grandparents are Holocaust survivors. One of his grandfathers fought in Israel’s 1948 war of independence. A bit ruefully, she says she raised him to know when to stand and fight.

“Also, when you’re 19, you think you’re indestructible,” she said. “And what your parents say will not make a difference.”

Yoni Geller said he listened.

“My parents and my grandmother, especially, would have liked me to back out,” he said via cell phone after a day of running, push-ups and sit-ups.

“Rightly so. It’s a war. Clearly it’s serious. I’ll be an infantryman.”

His platoon belongs to a division that took casualties in Lebanon, he knows. “But just because a war’s going on doesn’t mean you don’t join the army. Now maybe is when I make my contribution.”

(Robert Smith writes for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland)

KRE/PH END SMITH

Editors: To obtain photos of Geller and Engelhart, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.