You can sense the momentum of Suzie Frankel’s perpetual motion even on a Zoom call. Suzie is theoretically retired after a successful career in business in New York, having made Aliyah 20 years ago. For most of us watching her work, though, we are thinking, “If that’s retirement, I better enjoy the rest of the relaxation of my current job. I don’t think I have the energy for retirement.”

In between hosting platoons of IDF soldiers at her beachfront apartment in Netanya and treating them to therapy, massage, and more, she organizes a respected intellectual “salon” that has featured such speakers as Daniel Chertoff, Shai Davidai, and Fleur Hassan-Nahoum.

Like others I have profiled here, Suzie’s motivation for leaping into action was the October 7 war. She’d been in New York at the time, spending the weeks after the attack glued to the news. “I felt an uncomfortable and strange dislocation from watching my country under attack from thousands of miles away. By the time I got back, the war was raging, and I’d reached a breaking point.”

“One morning I woke up, and I said to myself, it’s ridiculous, I’ve got to do something,” she recalled.

“One morning I woke up, and I said to myself, it’s ridiculous, I’ve got to do something,” she recalled.

“One morning I woke up, and I said to myself, it’s ridiculous, I’ve got to do something,” she recalled.

Suzie reached out to a friend connected to One Family, the organization founded by Marc and Chantal Belzberg that has supported victims of terror in Israel for two decades. “I said, Mark, put me to work. Let me do something. I have to help.” That call led her to Nava Formansky, who runs One Family’s office in Ra’anana, and within days, to a house full of young widows.

“I come to this house, and I see about ten young girls, their twenties, early thirties, with baby carriages by the pool,” Suzie said. “I’m going, oh my God, these girls have just lost their husbands in Gaza. It was horrible for me. And for them, it was wonderful to be together, to meet each other, to understand that everybody else there understood what they were going through.”

That morning became the template for what followed. Suzie invited the........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)