The Mechina whose 33 graduates fell in the war opens the year: "We are busy with life, not death"

At five in the morning, when the Beit Midrash in Eli is still empty, an eighteen-year-old boy from Netanya sat there alone for half an hour. Until two months ago, he was a judo athlete, from the age of four to eighteen, a bronze medalist at the European Championships. He was also, in his own words, "completely secular."

"It's like yesterday was the first day I opened a Gemara," says Yishai Nakash. "I don't understand anything about it." He was studying Mishnah in the tractate Bava Kamma, the four main types of damages. "Believe me, it's very interesting. A world has been lit up for me anew."

The decision to leave judo and the status of an outstanding athlete had been brewing for half a year. "I had a conversation with my coach. He asked me, 'You are at a crossroads. Where do you want to go? Stay in judo or go to the army?' I told him, 'Coach, I've been with you since I was four.'" And then, according to him, something changed. "If I could go back, I would give him a different answer." He didn't lose his love for the sport, he emphasizes, but his passion. What he took from there, he takes here: "All-in or nothing, one hundred percent. If I do something, I do it one hundred percent. And that's the mentality I got from judo."

The head of the Mechina, Rabbi Yair Glustein, defines this moment in terms that are not administrative: "In the end, you get two hundred and seventy souls arriving here. An exciting event, really. Each one is a new world. How will the Torah settle in him? What personal process will he go through? And how will I help him develop?" He says that last Saturday night he went to sleep at three, tossed and turned in bed until six, and got up at nine. "I don't have sleep problems. Never. Not on the battlefield, not on the night before I enter a maneuver."

"This is my home now"

They arrive here through at least three different paths. Eitan Mandel, also a first-year student, is second generation. "Dad studied at the Mechina, class of 'H, thirty-one years ago," he says, adding that his father is "insanely jealous of me." What won him over, he phrases as a paradox: "Even though it's a huge place, they manage to put the emphasis on every student and no one gets lost." Yehuda Greenwald, on the other hand, arrived alone from New York and Miami, finished high school early, and made Aliyah. "I wanted to enlist my whole life," he says in stuttering but determined Hebrew.

And the third might not be able to go home. He arrived from South Africa, asked not to be photographed and not to have his name mentioned, for fear that if it became known that he served in the IDF, he would be arrested upon landing in his country. His mother is Israeli, his father South African, and his sister remained there. "Enlisting was a given for me," he says. "I come from a very Zionist home, and I told my father from a young age that I wanted to go to the army." We asked him if it was hard to leave. "It's hard, but if you make such a decision, you just have to do it. You do something you believe in. I don't think you need to focus so much on the fact that it's hard. You just do it. You just go for it." Does he intend to return home after his service? "No, this is my home now."

The three entered this week along with 613 new male and female students at the Bnei David institutions, where 1,318 will study this year. In the Mechina in Eli, there are 265 students, 146 of them in their first year. Alongside it operate a high yeshiva in Eli, an army graduate track, Mechinot in Ma'ale Ephraim, Bnei Re'em, and Zerachia, the Daniely Midrasha, Be'er Sarah Miriam, and high yeshivas in Chiran, Tel Aviv, and Ganim, a branch that has just opened. Since its establishment, the institution has produced more than 6,000 graduates. Thirty-three of them fell in the Iron Swords War, and sixty since the establishment of the Mechina.

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How do you educate a boy for combat service when that is the number?

"The word sacrifice is not a word that is present here so much," says Rabbi Ofir Shukron, a teacher here for the fourth year. "We talk about what the Torah itself commanded us, what the Holy One, Blessed be He, demands of us at this time. Like everything in life, there is no insurance policy for anything. But you won't avoid driving to where you need to get to because of the dangers of driving on the road. We are busy with life, busy with how to build life personally, generally, and nationally. Part of this is also dealing with the reality of death, which is very difficult, but our focus is not there. We are busy with life."

Rabbi Shukron also refuses to frame what is happening here as an institutional achievement: "First of all, people don't come out of the Mechina. People come out of the Torah. The Torah is not ours. We didn't invent it," he says. "The special innovation of the Mechina in Eli is to take responsibility from the Torah, responsibility in every sense."

And sometimes responsibility is a towel. On the first evening of his first year, he told the students that they could call him at any hour. The next day, at eleven-thirty at night, the phone rang. "I said to myself, something acute, unusual must have happened. He calls me: 'Rabbi, I'm sorry for the hour, I forgot to bring a towel.'" Rabbi Shukron sent him to his house to get a towel. "The moment he got the towel, you could see on his face that he is with us. Here we bought him."

With Rabbi Glustein, the answer comes from somewhere else. On October 7th, he went out and didn't return home for fifty-something days. "During this whole period, it was clear to me that I had students who were killed, friends, neighbors who were killed. And on the other hand, it was also very clear to me that it doesn't matter. I told myself that if it's not my student, then it's someone else's student. If it's not my brother, then it's someone else's brother." He adds: "I think mainly about what needs to be built and not about what can be destroyed along the way."

Fear, he emphasizes, is not suppressed: "I talk to them all the time, also about fears, also about PTSD, also about difficulty and dealing with difficulty." He does reserve duty in a regular battalion and meets his graduates not only in the Beit Midrash. "We have a completely common language, even common experiences, places we were literally together, in battle. I don't think there are many places where the Rabbi fights alongside the student." Among those sitting today in the Beit Midrash are bereaved brothers, whose older brothers were graduates of the place and fell. "It's a subject, but the subject is not pain and bereavement," he says. "The subject is building."

Yair Golan threatens

Over all this, a new, political question hovers this year. Last June, in response to an AI video published by Minister Bezalel Smotrich in which a scenario was presented where Yair Golan closes the Mechina, the chairman of the Democrats confirmed the direction.

"Thank you, Bezalel," he wrote on the X network. "Educational institutions that promote racism, hatred of LGBT people, and act against the service of women in the IDF will stop receiving our tax money."

Golan justified his position with statements made at the Mechina regarding feminism and women's service, and argued that an institution funded by public money cannot continue to receive funding under such circumstances. In Religious Zionism, they responded that this is "harm to institutions that raise the best fighters and commanders of the IDF precisely at a time when the State of Israel needs them most."

At the Mechina, they chose not to address Golan's words. What Rabbi Glustein did say is actually the opposite of digging in.

An institution whose budget is threatened to be cut is at the peak of expansion, with a new branch that has just opened, and he refuses to declare the Mechina as the most important in the country. "I am a big believer in the fact that there are many types of yeshivas, also yeshivas that are not Bnei David," he says. "It's a sign that the people of Israel in general are looking for a way, and it's good and it's healthy and I'm for it." Sometimes, he says, he tells a boy that another place would suit him better. "As long as people are looking for the truth, it's a good thing. And together with this, I think I have something to offer. I am confident enough in my way to hear different opinions."

The scale of what has come out of here, he illustrates with a story. In the middle of a maneuver in Khan Yunis, he met a Jew from Los Angeles, a drone business owner, who arrived after October 7th and flew drones for units in the Commando, Golani, and Givati. "Are you above me?" the man asked him, and when Rabbi Glustein confirmed, he said: "From Eli, it seems to me the size of Los Angeles. There is no place in the army where I have been and haven't met someone from Eli."

And when asked what is special here after all, he quotes Rabbi Eli Sadan, who was once asked how they make people so successful in this place. "He said: 'We don't make them. Successful people come to us.'"