On October 6, 2023, Adi Vaxman’s life changed forever. She watched in horror as footage showed Hamas terrorists invading Israel. She spent 26 hours barely breathing while she worried about her family and friends in her home country.
“My friend hid in her safe room in Kfar Aza with her children stuffed inside closets while terrorists were shooting inside her house,” she said. “My stepdaughter, who served in an IDF Search and Rescue unit, called at 2 a.m. with a breaking voice she said, ‘Aba, all of my friends are dead. She had switched weekends with another girl who was murdered at her post. My brother, a reserve tank commander, headed south to fight – and I haven’t breathed normally for over two years since, because he is still fighting.”
Upon learning that her friends’ children were serving as lone soldiers without the proper equipment, she started looking into where she could buy IDF approved ceramic vests. She then called Israeli suppliers and purchased their entire inventory, charging $162,000 to her personal and company credit cards and not knowing how she would pay them off. That’s when her non-profit, Operation Israel, was born.
Operation Israel focuses exclusively on providing humanitarian aid as well as defensive and life-saving equipment that protects those who risk everything to keep Israel secure. Vaxman, who is based in New Jersey, supplies non-offensive, life-saving protective, medical, tactical, defensive, and surveillance gear.
“Rather than the ceramic vests and helmets that defined the early days of the war, we now respond to a much wider and more complex set of frontline realities,” she said.
The organization is 100% volunteer-run, and every dollar goes directly to equipment, support programs, and innovation. So far, they’ve raised nearly $11 million, delivered more than 100,000 items, and supported around 90,000 soldiers.
“Our mission has grown from emergency response into shaping the long-term security and resilience of Israel’s defenders,” Vaxman said.
“Our mission has grown from emergency response into shaping the long-term security and resilience of Israel’s defenders.”
Recently, the organization’s tank-integrated drone system helped a crew scan a corridor in Gaza they were scheduled to travel through the next morning.
“The drone spotted four terrorists planting IEDs under the road,” Vaxman said. “Without that system, an entire armored crew might not be alive today.”
Operation Israel also ran a mental-health workshop for 200 soldiers from the 7th Armored Brigade.
“To date, sixty-four soldiers who fought in this war have taken their own lives,” Vaxman said. “The army system cannot get to them fast enough. We are stepping into that gap too with mental health group workshops and trauma intervention to try to prevent the nest one.”
Growing up in Israel, Vaxman spent many holidays and summers in Kibbutz HaMa’apil with her grandparents, who survived the Holocaust. Her grandfather survived a year and a half in Auschwitz.
“When I was 16, he told me how he stole potato peels from Nazi trash to celebrate Passover,” she said. “When I asked why he would risk death, he said, ‘If I am not Jewish, I do not want to be.’ Those words live in everything I do and are the core of my identity.”
Vaxman volunteered as a paramedic in Israel for several years, tending to terror attack victims. She moved to the U.S. in 1998, and on 9/11, she missed her train into the World Trade Center.
“I spent the day tending to injured people in the streets of New York,” she said.
Just because there is a ceasefire, it doesn’t mean that Vaxman’s work is done.
“We will keep saving lives, with or without the spotlight, because Jewish survival has never depended on headlines but has and still does depend on people like me who just act,” she said. “Operation Israel was born from heartbreak, but it has become a force of protection, innovation, and love. We create light where others try to extinguish it, and save the lives of the very people who risk their souls to protect us all.”
