By Simon M., OSRUI Alum and NFTY-CAR participant

Last week, our group spent four days on a program called Gadna. (It should have been five days but it snowed…..go figure.) Gadna is an army orientation program led by soldiers. We spent our time there being treated as if we were actual soldiers in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Everything was the same as the Army: the clothes, food, hikes, and guns. I left with one complaint: it was too easy.

We arrived at the army base Monday morning, greeted by our commanders. We heard a talk from our groups’ sargent before breaking up into our units with our commanders. They tried speaking in only Hebrew, but with our limited grasp of the language, we all knew they spoke some English. Although we wore army uniforms, they were hand-me-downs from 2003. The food was better than expected, but it was still army food.

The best part of Gadna was the hard discipline. Commanders would shout an order and give us a time to complete it. If we failed to do the task or continued moving after the time was up, we would be punished accordingly. If our beds were not properly made in the morning we would go back and fix our beds until they were perfect. However, my expectations were too high. I was expecting sprints and push-ups nonstop for stupid little errors. Instead, we got extra time to fix things. Yes, I did a lot of push-ups (exactly 146) although only 21 were for punishment, and the sprints were too brief.

Read the rest of Simon’s blog post here.