Days after a brutal surprise attack on Israel by Hamas, dozens of members of Los Angeles’ Jewish community – many still chest-deep in mourning and outrage – sprung to action to protect their own.

The result Monday night overwhelmed a small street — and then a synagogue parking lot — in a neighborhood that’s been called the beating heart of Jewish L.A.

“Once you realize what’s happening, you want to be involved, and it’s been very, very heartwarming, because you feel helpless on this side of the world, and everything’s happening over there,” Liat Solomon, a nurse and nearby resident who joined in the organizing effort, told Spectrum News. “This is no bureaucracy, there’s no red tape. It’s just regular people that want to protect each other.”

Late Monday night, an entire block — and, eventually, the parking lot of a nearby Jewish temple — was overwhelmed by people heeding the call for help after after a request for empty suitcases and luggage went viral, leading Jewish Angelenos from across the city and the county to empty carfuls of bags onto a sidewalk in front of organizers. 

According to Ari, an organizer who asked that his last name be withheld, the drive began with a message to 70 friends in a WhatsApp group. The call then spread across the Los Angeles Jewish community, and people from across the region snarled the neighborhood to drop off a bag and ask how else they could help. 

Ari and his friends quickly became overwhelmed. What was expected to be maybe 70 bags ballooned into scores and scores more — well more than 200 arrived almost literally on his doorstep. The bags were then hauled — by car and on foot — to nearby Temple Beth Am, a Conservative synagogue with more than 1,000 congregants in its community. 

The idea, as explained by Ari and echoed by donor after donor, is for the bags to be packed with goods to be sent to Israelis seeking to strike back at the attacks instigating the current Israel-Hamas War. 

Many of the bags were to be packed with body armor, intended to protect reservists who have been drafted back into duty with the Israeli Defense Forces — ceramic and composite body armor plates, rated to withstand common small-arms munitions, and the vests to carry those plates. They were also to be filled with other more mundane goods: blankets, underwear, tampons and pads, chewing gum and snacks.

It’s a contradiction, of sorts — a community coming together to collect protection in defense of their own amid horrendous violence, though that protection will be used in the service of further violence in return. More than 2,800 people are dead on both sides of the war as of Oct. 12, with the death toll expected to rise.

“It makes sense [to be] distraught, whether or not you’re Jewish, because you’re human and not a monster,” Rabbi Adam Kligfeld, the senior rabbi at Temple Beth Am, told Spectrum News. 

Kligfeld recognizes the complexity of the moment — particularly the Gordian Knot that is at the heart of the decadeslong Israel-Palestine conflict, which was set off when British officials in 1917 promised the establishment of a Jewish country in Palestine, setting up decades of occupation and war.

“There is enormous complexity to the politics, to say the least. But to look into the face of evil and understand what it is should not take a lot of imagination,” Kligfeld said.

The late night collection of bags — and the pivot to storing them in the temple’s parking lot — pulled a restless Kligfeld out of bed Monday night,  around 10:30 p.m.

“That night was its own miniature, beautiful thing — a microcosm of what’s happening in Israel itself,” Kligfeld said. “I’ve been on the phone all morning with my cousins and friends in Israel, who spoke about how the terrible disunity that had plagued Israel the last few months, over judicial reforms and the government, has turned into a remarkable —extraordinary, painful, tragic because of its circumstances — unity, with networks that we can't possibly imagine just getting things where they need to be. Instant, selfless stretching of resources, and bodies, and persons.”

On some level, it’s not surprising that the Jewish community came through with such a rapid, saturated response to Ari’s call for help. Pico-Robertson is a community so steeped in Jewish culture that it practically shuts down entirely each week for Shabbat — even the local Los Angeles Public Library branch closes on Saturday and opens on Sunday, (the only one to do so in the system’s 73 locations) to better serve the community.

Ari was quick to pass credit for the drive to Doron Wipranik, an entrepreneur, whom he said was the catalyst of the drive. When briefly reached by text and voice message, Wipranik was onboard a flight to Israel from Los Angeles International Airport — all of the bags, he said, were onboard with him.

But the heart of it was the people who came through — the recently retired 25-year-old IDF soldier who was collecting bags for the trip, and might be accompanying them to join in the war effort in Israel as soon as this weekend; the synagogue board member who helped open up the gates to store the bags; the older men and women who donated, then got on the phones with as many people as possible, no matter the hour, to ensure that the armor and dry goods would be up to snuff for the trip; and people like Aaliyah Botach, who was at a pro-Israel rally in Beverly Hills when she heard about the luggage drive. 

Botach sped home to collect bags, then offered to come back to Beth Am mere hours later, at 3 a.m., to help pack for the planned flight out of LAX.

“Everyone’s grieving. I have parents over there [in Israel], and my aunts and my grandmother. They’re all right now at the bomb shelter, and they’re all trying to stay safe,” Botach said. “Jewish people don’t cower in fear. We have such pride in our state and for our people and instead of staying quiet and in fear, we want to shout from the rooftops and help each other.”

But everyone there was wearing some mixture of despair and defiance on their faces, Liat Solomon included. She’s furious about the conversations on social media, posts insisting that Israel deserved the attack, deserved the hundreds dead, deserved the atrocities that have been seen on social media. “There is no excuse for raping, kidnapping, murdering, ever. It’s just inexcusable. And I think that we’re so cautious, to be like we must judge each side fairly…these are war crimes,” Solomon said.

Israel is a second home for many of the people who offered their help Monday night, Kligfeld said, Israeli expatriates and Jewish Americans alike.

“Each one of us has not only our friends and family there, but we might know the streets of Jerusalem better than we know the streets of Los Angeles,” he said. “We felt powerless in the early days, and have anything to do that even might have a chance of bringing some needed relief to our nation? That is a beautiful thing. wrapped inside a terribly tragic thing.”