Aviva Tessler
Aiding Israel’s Terror Victims
By Pauline Dubkin Yearwood

It all started on Purim 2001, when a friend asked Aviva Tessler to help deliver some mishloach manot baskets to hospitalized terror survivors.

Tessler and her husband, Rabbi Joel Tessler, and their two children were in Israel on a sabbatical, and Aviva, an educator and therapist, was hoping to start work on a book she wanted to write. But she agreed to deliver the Purim boxes, expecting that she would walk into a hospital room, exchange a few pleasantries with the patient and leave. Only it didn’t work out that way.

“We found people saying, ‘Please stay. Sit down and have a piece of cake. Please don’t leave us.’ It was so compelling,” she says. “They felt forgotten. I left my heart in each of those rooms.”

That was the humble beginning of Operation Embrace (www.operationembrace.org), an organization that Tessler, along with her friends Anne Clemons, Jocelyn Krifcher and Avivah Litan, started when the family returned to the States, where Joel Tessler is the rabbi of Beth Sholom Congregation, a modern Orthodox synagogue in Potomac, Md.

Tessler already had a busy life. She teaches monthly Rosh Chodesh classes, weekly Torah portion classes, writes a weekly email Torah column and lectures on topics such as “Putting the magic back into your marriage” and “A Torah look at the responsibility of being a friend.” She and her husband and children have created a CD, “Shabbat With the Tesslers,” that teaches Shabbat songs. She gives frequent scholar-in-residence lectures on topics related to Judaism, spirituality and psychology.

As if that isn’t enough, she is also a marriage and family therapist who works with clients in innovative ways, including making house calls to facilitate better communication between all the members of a family.

But working with terror victims touched her heart in a special way. One of her first projects was buying a laptop computer for a young woman who had lost both legs in an attack. The computer became her connection to the outside world, Tessler says. For a young boy whose legs were shattered, the organization purchased a special bed after Tessler discovered that he had been sleeping on the living room couch and falling off it regularly.

And so it went as she began to connect with key social workers and volunteers at three leading Israeli hospitals and Bituach Leumi, the Israeli National Insurance Agency. Tessler emphasizes the importance of working within the system in Israel and partners with Israeli professionals to fill in the gaps. These professionals helped Operation Embrace participants figure out the best way to aid terror survivors, with anything from a simple birthday celebration to highly specialized treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Now Tessler is spending virtually all her time as a volunteer with Operation Embrace. The message she hopes to send to American Jews, she says, is that thousands of Israelis are suffering from the effects of terror attacks and desperately need ongoing help.

“It’s like when there’s a shiva,” she says. “People rush to bring and to do, but a month later it’s hard to pick up the phone because everybody’s back on their own treadmill.” For Israeli terror victims, Operation Embrace is there to make that proverbial phone call.