Dana Hirshfeld has become one of Jerusalem’s protest leaders, but you could say she is something of an accidental activist.
It all started with the elderly.
It was 2023, and the governing coalition – then newly elected, and the most right-wing and religious government in Israel’s history – had launched its judicial overhaul. Protests erupted nationwide, and Dana began attending Jerusalem’s demonstrations. “I didn’t even know what Shomrim Al Habayit Hameshutaf (Guardians of the Shared Home) was then,” she said, referring to the organization that began organizing Jerusalem’s protests. “I would stand on the side and be annoyed by how they did stuff!” she laughed.
But then one day she heard that many elderly wanted to attend the demonstrations, but couldn’t manage standing for hours, or the logistics of getting there. “I asked a friend who was involved if anybody was doing something to make it easier for them. She said there wasn’t – maybe I could help?”
Thus it began. Dana started a WhatsApp group for elderly protestors. Then another. And another. She listened carefully and began problem-solving – arranging carpools and chairs, organizing demonstrations especially for groups of elderly “to put a light on that specific honorable voice.”
“They loved it!” Dana declared, grinning. “A whole population had found it hard to come to the demonstrations – and now they could join us! People would hold signs: ‘Ani Savta Ge’a! I’m a proud grandmother!’ and they became more and more involved. It’s a big voice. It allowed the whole thing to truly be more shared, more inclusive. I loved enabling that. I felt like I was opening a whole new world.”
The Power of Inclusion
Inclusion is one of Dana’s core values. As the judicial overhaul process became increasingly polarizing and exclusionary, she became increasingly involved in the Shomrim protest organization, eventually becoming one of its leaders.
It’s not that the past situation was perfect, she cautions, “there was discrimination against a lot of different groups.” Rather she wants “the demonstrations and the protest movement to represent the kind of society we want,” she said. “We might invite religious left-wingers, or a Rabbi from Efrat, or someone from Standing Together to speak. That is not a given to have all these different people on the same stage. But that’s the kind of spirit we want to characterize the Jerusalem protests,” she explained.
As she sees it, identity, inclusion and a deeply rooted sense of belonging are key to the broader changes needed. “There needs to be a change in how we define our group, and in our view of what it means to be ‘together’ and who is included in that togetherness. I think that is the root of so many of the problems.”
Learning from the Classroom
Dana has honed her instincts about what it takes to help people feel a sense of belonging from her day job as a teacher in one of Jerusalem’s schools. “As a teacher you learn that to be in a group is an art. It’s its own language and process,” she said, her eyes lighting up. “We need a corpus of who we are – what does it mean to be us, and who is included in the ‘we.’”
Her classroom insights translate directly to the protest stage. “You need a language that is more inclusive. It’s true in my classroom, and it’s true at the protests – how can I say something so that the greatest number of people can feel comfortable under that umbrella, and not feel alienated.”
And they translate to political leadership: “I want this to be the kind of state that when someone says something discriminatory and awful against others, they will say this is not what we accept – just like in a classroom.”
Rooted in Complexity
But Dana understood these issues well before she became a teacher – from her own family history and growing up in Jerusalem. Her father is Sephardic; her mother Ashkenazi. And her family tree spans the breadth of Jewish experience and trauma.
Her paternal grandmother’s family lived in Jerusalem’s Old City for 12 generations, until they were forced out in 1948. She spoke Ladino, Arabic, English, French and Hebrew. Her grandfather was from Turkey. They were a proud Sephardic family.
Her maternal grandmother was her family’s sole survivor of the Holocaust. Growing up in a little town in Poland, everything changed when the Germans came and shut all the Jews into a ghetto. “They had to do forced labor. They were very hungry. My grandmother watched her school friends pass by every day on the other side of the fence and act as though everything is fine… There were people who would voluntarily hurt Jews.” This betrayal is what Dana found hardest: “the fact that it was people in your community, whom you knew and knew you.”
Her maternal grandfather fled Nuremberg in 1933 as the Nazis rose to power, abandoning property and much of his family to start over in Mandate Palestine. He got out in time, but it was a struggle.
This family complexity shaped her own identity as she grew up. At school, Dana found that she didn’t fully belong to any one group. “I came from a better off neighborhood, but I also had curls and a similar style to the kids in Katamon, though I didn’t grow up with the same struggles they did. I found I didn’t fully belong to either this group, or the other one.” The communal divides felt false: “we are all in this together.”
“When I look at my own family’s past,” Dana reflected, “I see that so much of the Jewish past has involved suffering. Arguing about who had it worse is bound to lead to more hatred and anger. We should share our stories, learn about them and learn from them – and not use our stories, our past, our pain and suffering, to gain political power.”
Before… and After October 7…
In the period just before October 7, as Dana became more active in Shomrim al Habayit Hameshutaf, she felt that their hard work was starting to pay off. For Sukkot Shomrim had organized that people open up their sukkah to host others, especially with different views. “The idea was to talk about the political situation and look for ways to overcome the terrible polarization and social rifts that the judicial overhaul process had created. We did this throughout the country. It really felt like we were starting something new – a new language and way of being together… We had this tremendous sense of hope,” she said, her eyes lighting up at that recollection.
But October 7 shattered everything.
Her husband Eyal was called up immediately for reserve duty – what would become 300 days of service, posted at first on the Northern border and later in the territories, though never in Gaza.
Dana threw herself into volunteering, spending hundreds of hours helping farmers pick their produce, since most of the foreign laborers fled when the war began. “At some point I said to my kids, ‘I’m abandoning you!’ But they said, ‘no, Abba is doing his reserve duty, and you are doing yours!’”
In the meantime, week after week, Dana and her stalwart colleagues at Shomrim have continued organizing the demonstrations, supporting the hostages and their families, and giving voice to a broad range of the country’s citizens and concerns: of the bereaved, soldiers and their families, evacuees, Arab citizens, and all the war’s victims.
Between stints of reserve duty, Eyal too joined the protests, looking sunburnt and grim; he and their son often helped staff Shomrim’s information booth. “The kids used to come to a lot more of the protests,” Dana said, “but it’s scarier now,” as the police have gotten more violent in their responses since Ben Gvir became the Minister of Internal Security.
Now, as the country prepares for Sukkot exactly two years after the start of the war, and with political divides gaining ground, Shomrim is again organizing for people to open up their homes, hearts and sukkot to host others and talk about what “together” truly means.
As Dana explains in a call to join the event: “We are expanding the idea of together… Together is all human beings, men and women… The Arab bus driver. The left-wing teacher. The family from the North. The Haredi neighbors. The man who sleeps with his basket at the bus stop. And even the boy who tattles to the teacher…. The goal is not to sweep away the differences. Nor to ignore the divides. But to try to understand how we can make a state that is a shared home for all but truly for all.”
To which, I can only say amen.