Three years ago when her eldest son was 20 and serving a five-month winter term in Hermon in Israel’s snowy northwestern tip as an Israel Defence Forces paratrooper, Channah Koppel decided she had to help.
Channah Koppel
“He said all the boys in his unit were cold. I wanted to do something to say thank you for being out there in the cold and looking out for us,” says Koppel, 44, who, in 1986, moved to Israel from Montreal, where her father had served as Rabbi of Congregation Tifereth Beth David Jerusalem in Cote St-Luc.
Koppel mobilized her Chicks with Sticks knitting/crocheting group in Gush Etzion, and that winter, she sent the first shipment of 10 tuques to her son’s unit. Thus, Hats for IDF Soldiers was born.
“Soon, other soldiers saw the hats and wanted to have them too,” Koppel says, explaining that the winter nights in the Negev desert in the south can also be bitingly cold. “All of a sudden, I thought we’re going to need a lot more hats.”
Koppel posted ads on Internet sites to solicit knitters and crocheters. “I can’t explain how quickly it exploded,” she says. “In no time, people started sending my postings out to synagogue and school lists and to people who knit, and it just mushroomed.”
What started with a few knitters and crocheters in Gush Etzion quickly expanded into a global network of hundreds of knitters and crocheters from Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Israel. To date, this network of well over 700 have knitted and crocheted more than 12,000 tuques for IDF soldiers in combat units.
“It has grown into this incredible network of kind and giving people,” Koppel says, “and it really started from nothing. It just happened.”
Koppel suggests that “a lot of people seem to really connect with [the project] because it’s immediate and personal and not complicated. You make a hat with your own hands and it goes on a soldier’s head,” she says. “It’s very different from writing a big check. It’s a small, personal gesture and people seem to enjoy doing it. The soldiers are also very touched to receive them. It warms both their body and soul.”
Each hat arrives with a label that reads: “Knit for you with warmth and love” (in Hebrew), and a personal note. The labels are produced as a charitable donation by a graphic artist and printer from Efrat.
The hats follow a strict pattern to meet IDF specifications. For instance, they must be made of black machine-washable wool, according to certain measurements.
Although the IDF supplies soldiers with a hat in their kit bag, it is made of synthetic fibres such as fleece, is not adjustable for different head sizes and doesn’t fit easily under helmets. “I hear
from soldiers all the time that the hats we make are the ones they actually wear,” Koppel says.
Two winters ago, Koppel partnered with A Package from Home, a non-profit organization that sends packages to IDF soldiers with no family in Israel, to distribute the hats to lone combat soldiers. “I wanted to reach more soldiers,” says Koppel, who now sends some of the hats to A Package from Home for direct distribution.
This winter, Koppel hopes to distribute at least 5,000 hats. “We live [in Israel] and here [the army] is something we all have to do. It’s not like in Canada. We don’t have the same kind of relations with our neighbours here,” she says. “These [combat soldiers] are really putting themselves out there on the line for us. These are the people who really deserve an extra thank you.”
For more about Hats for IDF Soldiers, visit http://hatsforisraelisoldiers.blogspot.com
