By Miriam Bell…

Auckland-based Mitch Kora felt compelled to head to Israel and spent a month there volunteering after October 7. Now, she has shared her story with the One Community Chronicle.

The day after Mitch Kora [pictured above] watched the rabid, antisemitic crowd outside the Sydney Opera House, which had been lit up with an Israeli flag to commemorate the October 7 terror attacks by Hamas, she booked a flight to Israel.

She is not Jewish, nor a practising Christian, but she felt deeply that scenes like those seen in Sydney, and the steep rise in antisemitism immediately after a massacre of Jews, were reprehensible and wrong.

“When the world said ‘never again’ back in the 1940s after the Holocaust, it was supposed to mean something,” she says.

“And yet here we are in the 2020s, and that hatred of Jews is happening again. I find it troubling and infuriating.”

Initially, Kora, who lives in Auckland, did not know what to do with how she was feeling. But she soon began to feel she had to go to Israel and help in whatever way she could.

“I didn’t know much about Israel, or about Judaism. In fact, I googled the difference between Christianity and Judaism on the flight over.

“But when my oldest daughter was born we were living in Sydney, and the Jewish community in our area was very kind to me.

“One older woman had a number tattooed on her arm, which led me to learn about the Holocaust, and over the years I learned more. Then October 7 happened, and I couldn’t just stand by.”

[PHOTO: Mitch Kora at the Tisch Family Biblical Zoo in Jerusalem.]

She used to travel a lot as the tour manager for her ex-husband’s band, Kora, but more recently she has stayed put while working for Animals Asia, fundraising to release bears held on bile farms.

Now, she hates leaving home, and that meant her decision to go to Israel was not one she made lightly.

But once it was made, she bought a ticket, made a will, got her oldest daughter to move in to look after her teenager, and was on a plane the next day.

“I didn’t know what I’d do there, and I didn’t know anyone there. But I have experience as a zookeeper and as a volunteer fire-fighter, and I figured some of those skills could be useful,” she says.

“I had reached out to the Jerusalem Zoo [Tisch Family Biblical Zoo] and Sar-El [the National Project for Volunteers for Israel] earlier on to see if they could do with some assistance. It was only at the airport that I got a reply from the zoo saying they would love some help.”

On arriving in Israel, she settled in to Mike’s House, a hotel in Jerusalem, and then started work at the zoo the day after she arrived.

She volunteered for the zoo for two weeks and then for One Family, an organisation that deals with victims of terror including those from October 7, for a further two weeks.

During her stay in Israel, she travelled to a number of places around the country, including Tel Aviv and Safed [near the Lebanese border], attended some special events, hosted a challah bake evening, and was the guest speaker at a shabbat for lone soldiers.

[PHOTO: Mike’s House – Mitch Kora’s hotel in Jerusalem.]

The question she was asked most frequently was “why have you come”, Kora says.

“I would say ‘because I give a shit and just want to help’, and they would often cry in disbelief, especially the displaced families visiting the zoo with their families.”

Her time in Israel was not a holiday and she often worked 12 hours a day, but the experiences and interactions she had during her stay made a huge impact on her, and she feels she learnt a lot.

Since she has been back in New Zealand, she has become increasingly annoyed by the way Israel and the war is being presented, and is viewed by many people.

Most New Zealanders do not have any idea about the reality of the situation, she says.

“They don’t know about the bombs that fall on Israel every day, or about the displaced people within Israel, or what UNRWA is really doing, or how Hamas uses aid.

“They see Qatar acting like it is the world peace maker, but they don’t know about the funding it puts into Al Jazeera, into universities in the West, and how it gives a home to Hamas leaders.”

Kora says she can see the frustration of Jewish people as they try to explain how wrong the reporting on the war, and the history behind it, is, while people keep swallowing lies and inaccuracies.

It is hard to understand why people do not read and find out about the true history of the land, she says.

[PHOTO: The challah bake evening Mitch Kora hosted at Mike’s House.]

“The thing is it shows the Palestinians just don’t want the Jews there, and don’t want a peaceful two state solution. But the West is naive, and doesn’t understand that, and that is not helpful.

“Really, the West is attempting to align its values to the Middle East when it’s not a one size fits all situation.”

While in Israel, she met Jewish and Israeli people from all walks of life every day, and they were friendly, open, welcoming, and full of love, she says.

“There was almost a naivety, a desperate hope for peace, which astounded me that these people had so much strength and hope. Who in the West would act like this under the same circumstances?

“It is not fathomable to me that they are portrayed as liars and bullies, and that makes what we see and read in the media, and on social media, so infuriating.”

Something else that troubles her is the question of how antisemitism on the level being seen around the world can happen in this day and age.

What could possibly be the reason and excuse for it now, she asks. “How can it happen? Especially after the Holocaust. We have seen where antisemitism goes. So how does ‘never again’ happen now?”

Her trip was not a personal journey for her to learn or to enrich her life, although that did happen. It was absolutely, 100%, about “ this is wrong – I can’t sit back here and just watch”, Kora says.

“I was just so incensed by the deafening sound of ‘but’ that infiltrated the media almost the day after this awful, indescribable attack on peaceful Jewish civilians. I couldn’t watch ‘never again’ be again.”

Looking forward, she says she would like to do more for the Jewish community and would love to return to Israel one day.